I find one of the most challenging things to balance in life is the unnecessary, if not wasteful efforts that leave me overextended and total procrastination that stalls all productive work.

A problem I've brought up before is the issue of uncertainty, and how we can never be sure that our strategies and plans will result in expected outcomes, and yet we must still move forward.

So one solution is to do more, to try and test everything for a short time. If payoff isn't well defined and timelines aren't set, these efforts can wind up lasting for a very long time with no positive outcome. In such cases it's common to lose confidence in our efforts and actions if we lack strong conviction, experience, or knowledge.

So a semi-frequent exercise I'll go through, maybe once every few months is to audit my external commitments: How much can I burn down without my entire life collapsing. I Identify the core, the essentials. And then I burn the rest (metaphorically). I delete the stuff that can be, and I embrace the open space that's left in the wake.

We often focus here on the innards of unburdening, but sometimes it helps to burn the whole house down to create space to breathe—to embrace a minimalist lifestyle, if only for a while. For when things that are not so meaningful are given equal weight and prioritization as those things which truly do matter, the mind gets cloudy and life gets pretty confusing. Then, even the essentials stop making sense.

If you've used the phrase "I'm too busy" in the last week, audit yourself.
Isolate the key pillars that hold your world together. Burn the rest of the house down.

Be weightless!