A lot of the times you will find yourself contemplating between different choices which, although very different, would both offer their own benefits to you and it will be very hard to select only one option as that would also mean giving up on the perks of the second one. Sometimes, you can just be struggling to make a schedule for your daily routine because you want to allocate your time to an upcoming exam or interview but, even when you overcome the first challenge and make the schedule, the next major challenge is to actually make yourself follow it through so that the intended benefits can be obtained. What i suggest you try to do is that whenever you feel stuck or whenever you feel overwhelmed to make a decision, aim to simplify the situation as much as possible. It does not matter if you think the question is already very simple for you, just break it down and simplify it further until your 5 year old version could also understand it. If you have a lot of choices, you need to simplify the metrics upon which you deem those choices a necessary part of your life. Similarly, if you have a lot of activities in your time schedule, you need to drop some of them based on what is needed for your goal and what is needed just for relaxation and how much time you are actually allocating to both of these types in your own schedule.
Simplification can basically work in all different situations and it is not just related to the few scenarios mentioned here. Just consider it as a handy tool in your arsenal that you can use whenever you have any kind of a problem, and I mean any kind. A good analogy of this would be that simplification leads you down only one path and requires that you use all of your resources to illuminate that path alone, so that you reach the farthest possible out of possibly hundreds of paths which are all dark and scary. You can either be scared of them and never make progress or use your resources to try to illuminate all of them to make the best choice but like everything else in life, your resources are limited and you will not be able to make much progress either way. Often times, what appears to be very difficult at the beginning offers much more significant rewards than something that seems easier at the beginning but only leads to more hardships. So, rather than thinking about traversing down the path based on how difficult it is, I would encourage you to not even consider it. Simplify as to what you wish to achieve as your end-goal and which path appears to be the best possible one to reach that destination for you. Do not be afraid of its difficulty as this is the ideal path for you to reach your own goal which you opted for by focusing on the things that truly mattered for you. For example, imagine if you are studying for an exam right now but you are not able to focus n your studies at all. Time is continuously passing you by and although you know that studying is better for you, you just keep spending time of other things and whenever you do study, you feel tired very fast and give up. In such instances, you cannot make yourself study forcefully or scavenge the internet to look for that one quote on motivation that would change your habits. If it was that easy then everyone would be able to do it, right? Even though that mysterious motivation doesn’t exist, there is something else instead which is found in abundance near you. It is simplification which is used by more or less everyone in different things in life but no one consciously pays it any attention. You should actively use it to narrow down your other activities that are not contributing to your studying until you are left with only one(preferable) or two such activities. You should always have something other than studying which you can do when you get exhausted and I do not mean an activity like sleeping or eating. It can be something like talking to your friends or playing a game etc but you cannot have multiple activities dedicated for relaxation as they will become a distraction instead. Once you have simplified to one or more of such activities in mind, your first goal is to try to stick to only them and leave all the other ones. You have to be strict with yourself and only stay within the scope of these activities that were selected based on your simplification. Once you have done that, you second goal is to allocate time to all of these activities such that your studying gets more time allocated at the end. Do not attempt to write a schedule where you put unreasonable amount of hours for studying because it will be difficult at first. You have to start very small and continuously bring it up to that stage where you are spending more time on your primary goal i.e. studying than other activities that are only meant for your relaxation.
In conclusion, simplification is a go-to tool for you to use whenever you are in doubt about things. The more you use it, the more you become adept at it. Its aim is to help you break things down to the most basic structure possible so that you can get a better grasp of the overall situation and make the best possible decision. This decision would be about the things that you deem truly important to you and will therefore, only yield results that are more beneficial to you as well. You should try to use simplification whenever possible or whenever you are having difficulty with literally anything and I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised at the results. Keep working hard and I am sure you will achieve your goal at the end very soon, Good Luck!
