I recently had a feedback session with my Air Force Reserves supervisor that wasn’t entirely rosy.

By and large, he was happy.  But then he turned serious and asked me, “Can you handle some honest feedback?”

I took a deep breath.

He’d noticed that I had the habit of panicking when I felt I had too much work on my plate, and then rashly canceled on my commitments.

I didn’t necessarily disagree.  I knew I had the habit of signing up for too many activities and projects, mainly because I’m easily excited by opportunities to problem solve.  When my to-do list got to be more than I could handle, I re-prioritized and either wrapped up or backed out of the work that no longer suited me.

What was wrong with that?

He pointed out that not only was I clearly suffering emotionally when I felt overwhelmed, but I was hurting my professional credibility as well.

He told me I had a time management problem.  I argued I had an over-commitment problem.

Over time, I realized he was right.  And the problem was far worse than I realized.

Fortunately, I discovered a process that, with just one day of concentrated effort, allowed me to take control of my calendar, break my enthusiastic tendencies to over-commit, and finally (finally!) let me feel in control.

Today I’ll show you step-by-step how I did it.

Do you know what really bugs me, the thing that eats away at my self-confidence?

The fact that my most successful blog post was written over a year ago.

I used to think jealousy was one of the worst emotions you could experience.  I hated myself for wasting time analyzing other’s news clippings or subscriber numbers.  It flew in the face of my own teachings about defining success for yourself.

Then I realized one emotion was worse: inadequacy.

Inadequacy is ruthless about detail.  It notices how no one talks to you at the PTA meeting or how irritable you’re being with the family you love after a bad night’s sleep.  It makes fun of your clumsy bump over the curb (again) while driving in a foreign country.  If you’re blogger, Google Analytics becomes the yardstick of your self-esteem.

On the other hand, inadequacy is blind to your wins, big or small.  It discounts, minimizes, and forgets.

You can remember saying to yourself, “If only I could…” and then when you did, it was overshadowed by what you didn’t.

Editor’s note: Guest post by Stephen Martin

The summer when I was 23 did not begin well.

For one thing, I was pretty lost. My longtime girlfriend was moving cross-country for law school, and I didn’t have a clue what my next move would be, except that I wasn’t going with her. For another, I was bordering on broke. My contract work at the nearby university had just ended, and I had not a single job prospect. And yet, 16 years later I look back on that summer as one of the best of my life.

Perhaps the biggest reason why: I gave up the news.

It was a grand summer for news, too. Clinton and Dole duking it out for the presidency, mad cow hysteria in Europe, the Olympics in Atlanta. I knew next to nothing about any of it. With no income, I needed to economize. That meant no cable TV, no Internet, not even a newspaper. I barely knew what was happening across the street, much less around the world. And it didn’t bother me because, after years of faithfully reading papers and magazines, I was just tired of it.

Even back in those pre-Twitter, pre-blog, pre-historic days, you could spend enormous amounts of time consuming news or fretting all day about it, and I’d done a lot of both. But now, accidentally adrift from the headlines, I suddenly had time for other things.

I started hanging out in the university library, wandering the stacks and picking up whatever books caught my eye. I’d meet a buddy for a (very cheap) lunch or play cards or listen to music. I went for long walks. Since I never got a weather forecast, what the heavens might bring was always a surprise too.

Free of the usual distractions, I slowly became more centered. I’d spent the previous year exploring and rejecting a half-dozen potential careers.

In the silence of that summer, though, I finally began to feel a faint sense of purpose – a pull toward writing.

I didn’t know what I wanted to write or for whom. But sitting down and writing, longhand, an essay about a monastery I’d once visited created more satisfaction than I’d felt in months, if not years.

The summer crawled on in slow motion, and I began to feel part of it. I hadn’t really noticed the seasons since I was a kid. But now, I started paying attention to the relative cool of a July morning, the building humidity as noon approached, the sticky air and soothing insect chatter of an August evening. For the first time in a long time, I felt aware.

And as the summer burned toward its conclusion, I became aware of something else as well: I was running out of money.