“To each their own madness,” my mother would say to me once again. She passed away many years ago, but her voice still echoes in my mind in so many different moments of my life. “There’s no accounting for taste!” “To each their own.”
She was always unique in her feedback. Maybe she would understand me better today; after all, one of my “flaws” is that I am overly fond of hats.
Here in the U.S., the expression “wearing many hats” is used to describe an overwhelmed person.
We put on the mother hat, the wife hat, the sister hat, the leader hat at work, the newspaper columnist hat, the wedding planner hat, the homemaker hat, the athlete hat… and we try to walk around balancing an unstable tower of hats on our heads, unable to see even one step ahead because of all that weight!
This analogy fits modern life perfectly: we switch roles constantly, thinking we can succeed at all of them simultaneously. We keep stacking one hat on top of another until our head feels heavy and everything tumbles to the ground!
To continue our series on “How to Master Your Workflow in Five Steps” (GTD) — slowing down the mind so we don’t carry the weight of the world on our shoulders — let’s recap the first two steps:
- Capture (Get it out of your head): Transfer absolutely everything competing for your attention to paper or an app — tasks, pending items, ideas, and worries.
- Clarify (Process): Look at what you captured and decide what it actually means.
Now, the woman of many hats moves on to the third step: Organize.
Organizing simply means giving a “peg” or a “shelf” to each hat:
- Tasks for the “Work” hat belong on the office list.
- Tasks for the “Health/Personal” hat belong on the self-care list.
- Tasks for the “Home” hat belong on the household list.
When you organize by context, you take off one hat before putting on another. If you’re having coffee with friends, your work hat is put away in the closet — safe, sound, and not nagging at your mind. If you are at home and need to schedule a doctor or dentist appointment, or even mail out a package, put on the appropriate hat.
And when getting ready for bed, remember the most important step: take off every single hat. Your sleep is sacred and your peace is non-negotiable. Taking worries to bed makes no sense at all.
At the end of the day, the goal of organizing life’s coat racks isn’t to get more things done, but to ensure we can rest our heads on the pillow without carrying the weight of the world.
How about you? How many hats are you going to insist on taking to bed tonight?
