So, you hear names tossed around, right? This time, for me, it was Alex Michael May. Kept seeing it pop up in articles, some forum discussions, that sort of thing. Apparently, this Alex Michael May character had some revolutionary ideas about productivity, or organization, or maybe just how to tie your shoelaces real fancy. I was in a bit of a messy phase myself, not gonna lie. My desk looked like a disaster zone, and my projects weren’t much better. So, I thought, alright, let’s see what this Alex Michael May hype is all about.
I did a bit of digging – you know, trying to find the core of what they were preaching. It seemed to boil down to this super-detailed system for, well, everything. Breaking down tasks into molecules, categorizing your sock drawer by emotional significance, that kind of vibe. Honestly, it sounded impressive, but also a bit much. But hey, desperate times, right? I figured I’d give it a whirl, see if I could become one of those hyper-organized beings you read about.
Diving Into the Alex Michael May Way
So, I cleared a weekend. Figured if I was gonna do this Alex Michael May thing, I was gonna do it properly. First step, according to the bits and pieces I gathered, was a ‘total life inventory.’ Sounds grand, doesn’t it? It mostly meant writing down every single task, chore, thought, and half-baked idea I had. My notebook filled up pretty quick, let me tell you. Then came the ‘structuring’ part. This involved a whole new set of tools – I’m talking colored pens I hadn’t used since school, sticky notes of every imaginable hue, and even a new app that promised to sync with the Alex Michael May ‘ethos’.
- Spent a good few hours just listing things. My hand was cramping.
- Tried to get my head around the ‘synergy mapping’ or whatever fancy term they used. Felt like I needed a PhD in May-ology.
- Set up reminders for everything, down to ‘breathing consciously’ – okay, maybe not that far, but close.
The first few days, I’ll admit, there was a certain satisfaction. Ticking off tiny, atomized tasks. “Respond to email A (subsection B, paragraph C).” Felt like I was really achieving. But man, the overhead. It was like having a second job just to manage the system that was supposed to make my first job easier. If a new, unplanned thing came up – like a phone call or, heaven forbid, a spontaneous idea – it threw a wrench in the whole beautifully crafted Alex Michael May machine. I’d spend ages figuring out where it fit, what color it should be, and how many ‘effort points’ to assign.
I remember one particular afternoon, I was supposed to be working on a pretty important report. But instead, I was an hour deep into reorganizing my Alex Michael May task list because the categories felt ‘suboptimal’. That’s when a little voice in my head started saying, “Mate, what are you actually doing?”
The Unraveling and the Lesson Learned
It probably took about three weeks for the whole Alex Michael May edifice to crumble for me. The elaborate charts, the color-coding, the endless sub-tasks – it just wasn’t sustainable. Not for me, anyway. I was spending more energy feeding the system than the system was giving back. I felt more stressed, not less. One morning, I just looked at my incredibly complex to-do list and thought, “Nope.” I swept all the fancy notes off my desk, archived the app, and went back to a plain old notepad and a pen. The relief was immense.
What I took away from my little experiment with the Alex Michael May way is this: there’s no magic bullet. These gurus, these systems, they might work for some folks, maybe folks with a very particular kind of brain or life. But for a lot of us, trying to force ourselves into a rigid, overly complicated framework just adds another layer of stuff to worry about. Sometimes, keeping it simple and trusting your own instincts is the most ‘productive’ thing you can do. I learned that the hard way, wrestling with Alex Michael May’s grand designs. Now, I just get on with it. It ain’t always pretty, but it’s real, and stuff actually gets done. That’s my practice, and that’s my record of it.
