After following The Daily Headache for some time now I continue to be amazed by Kerrie Smyres' attention to detail and difficulty with headaches. She's helping many of us who get headaches.
I was diagnosed with migraines when I was six or seven years old. I used to get tunnel vision so my mother tracked things in a diary and then on one dramatic day they hooked me up to a bunch of electrodes and watched my brainwaves. Conclusion was that I get migraines and that I should avoid hot dogs, cheddar cheese and chocolate. Which made childhood birthday parties a living hell. Nachos for the kids... and hot dogs for lunch... and chocolate ice cream... yay! Shoot me.
Today I thought I'd add one of my long-running theories to the mix: that having scatterbrain leads to headaches and that todo lists can help.
About ten years ago during the dot com boom I was suddenly handed more responsibility and budget than a 22 year old should have. I started noticing more headaches. I found that if I had more than about three deliverables I'd get a headache.
In other words, if I owed three clients three different things I'd quickly get a headache. And I often owed something to many more than three clients.
My internal dialog on such days bounced back and forth between the deliverables. I'd work with Team A for client A and then Team B for client B. I forced my thinking to bounce back and forth like a good little Type A so that I wouldn't let anything drop between the cracks.
As my theory goes, each deliverable in life revolves around a separate part of the brain. Some are emotional deliverables to a loved one. Others are monetary deliverables to make ends meet. Others are high-urgency fear-based deliverables to stave off a pissed client.
When I switched my thought between deliverables I was actually exciting separate areas of the brain. Which is to say that I was moving blood from one area to another very quickly. Over the course of the day I believe that this led to a migraine. A good bit of research shows that migraines have to do with blood flow.
Ok, so that's my theory... having multiple deliverables cause you to flip thinking back and forth between them which causes a headache.
Here's what I did to stop the headaches... or at least reduce them: I started a daily todo list. Very simple. One todo per line. A check box to the left of each todo.
If you've ever worked with me you've seen my todo lists. Each morning I'd start a new list based on the previous day's not completed items and anything that I knew was coming up.
But having a list alone doesn't help the headaches. I had to do two other things with this list.
1) I had to update it meticulously. I became an expert listener for deliverables in my life. No matter how big or small, if I owed something to somebody I'd add it to my list. Even something simple like "hey, can you email me that picture from the weekend?" I'd add it to the list. I often had more than a college-ruled page of deliverables that I was tracking.
2) More difficult, I had to trust the list. In the end the main reason for the list was to stop me from having to switch back and forth between deliverables to prevent myself from letting anything drop between the cracks. So I had to train myself to work on one deliverable and focus on it until it was done... to trust that the list was a good enough crutch to prevent things from slipping through the cracks. Once I learned this I could get interrupted by something (a phone call, an email, a person stopping by the office), add an item to the list without thinking too much about it and then get back to working on my items linearly.
I preferred to get some small tasks out of the way early in the day so that I felt like I was making progress checking things off the list and then have two to three bigger items per day that I put a star next to in order to complete them by the end of the day.
This methodology dramatically reduced the number of headaches that I got as I took on more responsibility than I should have had at my age. I credit this methodology for allowing me to actually learn from that period in my life instead of being buried in details and worry over the responsibility. I still use it today with all of my current ventures. I can show you years worth of todo lists. Sometimes I have months in a row where the lists are nothing but programming issues. Currently they're a mix of programming and business development stuff.
I wanted to share this with the headache community for two reasons. Primarily, I would be very happy if this technique helped even one other person... headaches are misery. Secondarily, I'd like to see if anybody else can validate my theory or add some scientific rigor to it. As it stands now my theory is very preliminary and not at all proven.
Sunday, September 9, 2007