Often I end up closing the list and immediately turning to self-soothing. And because there’s no way to know in advance if a task on the list will give me anxiety, this often results in my list being not just unusable but unreadable, preventing me from doing or even remembering the non-anxiety tasks on the same list.
I find having the full list in front of me does the same so I break the list down into bite size bits
I don’t need my full week plan in front of me all the time, but today’s list is pretty important and usually only has a couple things on it
And the tasks on the list aren’t monolithic big things but the small things that make the big things
Like I have to rebuild and redeploy my server with a new build, then rebuild my network around it. That’s not one item on the list but a huge amount of items. “Install Linux Mint on Laptop, get new backup drive for NAS data, copy data to new drive, build system in new case, move drives and install TrueNAS, etc, etc” all spread onto different days when possible.
Manageable bites will help a lot