Sometimes just do mission essential - not more

We all know those days where we are close to a mental breakdown. There is a reasons why so many of us get depressed in January as in winter those days where we are overwhelmed with everything seem to be a lot more frequent. Those days where we feel like even getting out of bed is too much to ask. There are a few basic things that can really help in those moments. One is, to go into a mode we call mission essential. It means cut out everything that is not fun, enjoyable or important and only concentrate on things that are absolutely essential for your day to day functioning.

Let’s play a game for a moment. Think about your day to day tasks. Ideally, if you have pen and paper to hand, make a list and write everything down that you feel you do or have to do on a daily basis. What you will find is that already writing all of those things down can pose immense stress on you and make you feel overwhelmed. And now comes the fun part, now go over the lost again and rigorously cross out everything that you don’t think is essential for your very daily existence or happiness. Example, getting up is essential to go to work but you could argue putting laundry on can wait until tomorrow. If so, cross it out from the list as not essential. When you look back on your list, you might find that the 20 things you thought you had to do, only 5 ended up being absolutely essential to do today. That sounds a lot less stressful ? Exactly the idea of mission essential.

Mission essential is really all about postponing everything that is not absolutely crucial to do at a certain point in time when we feel overwhelmed and burnt out. The idea is to go back to the very basics and only do what is absolutely necessary. This can also be extended to doing everything that we actually enjoy doing but crossing out anything non essential we see as stress. Example, do we really have to go to this party or meet these people ? Do we enjoy this or is this just for the sake of it ? If so, cross it out and postpone it for when we have capacity again.

Mission essential can therefore help reduce our to do lists significantly, while at the same time let us focus on things and make time for activities we actually enjoy. Time is precious in everyone’s life and we should not load it with lots of things not worth our while. In really busy times therefore, do a little bit of mission essential.

There is one problem with this, it all sounds great, but to actually do it is incredibly hard, especially for those of us who are secret perfectionist. Mission essential can only work if we get over our desire for constant order and perfectionism. This is really the base for mission essential to work .

So when you sit in your room in cold January and get overwhelmed with the world, train to practice a bit of mission essential and things will feel a lot better already.