It seems to me that a big part of daily life is a matter of managing the stacks.  Because things pile up.¹  Lots of things pile up, which requires a lot of sorting.  But the sorting, however meticulous it is, still isn’t actually working your way through the stacks.  And so you have to choose what you allow to pile up (assuming that you have some agency there) and how long you allow the pile to grow.  And so maybe the “home” stack grows and grows while you attend the work pile (or vice versa).  Maybe it’s about the books you read instead of the movies you want to watch.  For a student it might be the games you play while the homework pile grows larger and larger.

And so part of the management of daily life that you likely have to learn on your own (and from experience, no doubt) is about working through the stacks as best you can when you can, knowing that the lower the stacks, the better and healthier you likely feel.  It’s difficult work, on some level, but it’s also the better way.

¹  This is not the same as bundling/unbundling, which I talked about here.  That’s more about tying tasks together, which looks good in the short term but can be harmful and almost irreversible in the long run.

(image from latimes.com)