Obsessing

Probably the biggest failure in my lifehacking effort to be more focused and disciplined is my predilection for obsessing over everything and anything. Worse yet, throw me into a period of emotional (or other) turmoil, and I go full-on into the obsession monster. Everything could just fall away in the world for those hours/days/weeks/months. Any measure of my list-making and dish-doing is only triage in the face of the all-consuming need to obsess.

The funny part is this obsession can happen in a variety of ways. On the positive side, it can involve diving intensively into new preparations of food. Watch me preparing for the paella, for instance, and you'll find me digging up every recipe I can find to figure out how I want to improve what I've done. Watch me preparing for new creative project, and you'll see me obsessively digging up everything I can find and often talking about nothing else. These are the positive moments. The negative moments are worse. give me an emotional ball of string to play with, and I'll bat it around like a crazy kitten until everyone is sick of hearing about it and I'm sick of playing with it. And yet I must continue to until I know what I'm trying to learn/feel/grok/accept.

Looking at the whole picture of life now from parenting to working to moving forward with plans for the future to maintaining a level life to cooking to you-name-it(!), I realize that this is in fact one of my biggest stumbling blocks in the lifehacking I'm trying to do.

So what to do about it? That's a really good question. It may even be the area where I need the most input or advice. I know how to make lists and focus. I know how to complete tasks. I know how to focus on what is right. But when I reach obsession-land, all of that might as well fall by the wayside. So, the trick question is how to do this — how to take what I know and find the middle way to control the negative obsessions and channel the positive obsessions.

Game on. Suggestions welcome.