Meditation #75: The burning house

Today I was having a hard time dealing with some mental baggage I was carrying around. Despite trying to go about my day, listen to a podcast, clean the apartment, I was feeling bummed out. Feeling heavy. Feeling unmotivated. Distracted.

And of course I was feeling distracted: I was distracting myself. The phrase came to my mind, “I just have to get into my head.” That’s the opposite of what we’re typically led to believe is important, right? When you’re feeling upset or obsessing over something, your friends will say, “You just need to, like, get outta your head, man!” (I assume your friends are all hippies, like mine.)

But this is akin to discovering a problem in your house, like a broken pipe or even a fire, and leaving. “Oh no, the stove caught fire. That’s stressful. I gotta just get out of my house so I can let it go.” A few minutes later you look back in through the window. “Whoops, now the kitchen table is also on fire. Better take another walk around the block.” Pretty soon the whole house is up in flames, and what are you going to do about it now?

Instead of trying to get out of our heads to deal with issues, we should avoid distractions and let ourselves exist within our own minds for a while. Even if you don’t consciously do anything about the fire–er, the issue–your mind does the work for you as long as you hang around in there and let it. And you might even find that before too long, you feel comfortable sitting down and actively thinking about the issue. Maybe resolving it, maybe not. But observing it at the very least. And sometimes that’s enough.

Do it Tomorrow! The Unexpected Wisdom of Micro-Procrastinating

I’ve stumbled upon a great secret. You ready for this?

Sometimes it is better to put off for tomorrow what you could do today.

I hinted at this theory a bit, without realising it, when I wrote about not starting new projects at night. Today is partly over already, right? Unless you’re reading this blog post first thing in the morning, in which case I’m wrong!

The idea is simple, and it all comes down to recognizing your own limitations and working with them. The biggest limitation I’m talking about is Time, and the second biggest limitation is Attention.

Time and Attention are always at odds with each other. You almost always have way more of one than the other. You have four hours of work ahead of you, but you just don’t have the attention span to make it through the afternoon.

Or, you have all the interest and attention in the world to pay to this book about Napoleon…but it’s late at night and you really need to go to bed.

So here’s how you balance them out:

Allot your time and your attention together. Let me just start by giving an example, because I like examples.

It’s 1 p.m. and you’re reading a book about nature. It’s a really fascinating book, and in particular one passage jumps out at you. It’s a passage about how quickly grass grows, and it jumps out at you because it reminds you that the grass needs to be mowed.

Ugh. What a bummer.

You’re really enjoying this book, though. The inner-voice inside your head, the one that sounds kind of like the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live, tells you that responsibilities are more important than leisure. She’s wagging that finger at you and cocking an eyebrow.

Now you’re stuck, aren’t you? Or rather, your emotions are stuck. You can’t just sit back and relax and enjoy the book, knowing that the yard needs to be mowed. But you also can’t get up and mow the yard, knowing that it’s a chore that is taking you away from enjoying your book. You’re sort of locked in a kind of emotional deadlock, unable to do either of things because they are both vying for the two precious commodities you have: time and attention.

The book is demanding your attention, but the overgrown yard is demanding your time. You have the time to give to the yard, and the attention to give to the book, but you can’t give both of them simultaneously. What do you do?

Some of you may already have a solution: Do the chore. It has to be done. Get it over with and come back to the book when you’re done. It’ll feel better to have it over with and then you can enjoy the book more.

Let me just tell you, you’re a saint. You’re basically a Spartan warrior of the mind, battling forces with willpower stronger than a thousand oxen. I applaud you.

For the rest of us, it’s more of a struggle than that. We don’t have that kind of willpower, and simply saying “do it now” isn’t going to always work.

So, again, what do you do?

Well, you micro-procrastinate. (I bet you didn’t think it would take so long to get to the title of this blog post, did you?)

Here’s how it works: You tell the book, “You can have my attention right now,” and you tell the yard, “You can have my time tomorrow.” Suddenly both activities are satisfied and they’ll leave you alone. You can enjoy the book in peace.

HERE’S THE IMPORTANT PART. DO NOT SKIP THIS PART OR YOU’RE NOT MICRO-PROCRASTINATING, YOU’RE JUST BEING LAZY:

You must, must, MUST, follow-through with your promise for the next day. If you’ve told that yard that you will mow it tomorrow, then when tomorrow comes you MOW IT.

Understand? If you don’t do this part then the whole thing doesn’t work and you’re going to just get sad and lonely and have a terrible looking yard and no friends.

For me, it’s not a problem because tomorrow I will be happy to mow the lawn. It’s what I want to do. It’s what I planned to do. See, it’s all about managing your expectations.

If you’re reading a book, you expect to keep reading it (because you’re a flawed human being). So when the lawn starts asking to be mowed, it’s interrupting your expectations. You were expecting to read a book, not mow the lawn…

But if you say you’ll mow the lawn tomorrow, then when tomorrow comes it’s what you were expecting to do, so you’re much more amenable to doing it. It’s no longer a chore, it’s simply an activity.

And if something else comes up before you get around to mowing the lawn? If it’s 9 a.m. the next morning and your friend Stewart calls and asks if you want to go to breakfast? Well, then, you have another choice to make: You can tell Stewart it will have to be lunch, because you’re going to mow the lawn first, or you can tell the lawn you will mow it after breakfast.

Either way, you have to get that lawn mowed. If you break your promise to the lawn (really it’s a promise to yourself, but mental tricks are a great way to motivate yourself), then not only will the lawn not take you at your word anymore, but nothing will. Those TV shows you said you’ll get around to watching someday will start to doubt your commitment. The Taekwando class you were planning to start taking will question whether or not you are serious. Pretty soon, none of your promises will mean anything and the world and all your interests will lose faith in your abilities.

You don’t want that, do you?

Then take this advice for what it is: a compromise that you can leverage between yourself and the outside world that is designed to keep everyone happy and balanced. The world will know where it stands with you, and you with it. And, most importantly, your time and attention will still be yours to spend as you wish.

 

P.S. I know I have advocated the philosophy of “do it now” on this blog quite a bit. I still think that is the best advice for getting tasks done, but it can only do so much heavy lifting. If you need to wash the dishes in the sink, “do it now” can usually get you motivated enough. But if you have to mow the lawn, paint the house, study geometry, run a 5k, call your grandmother, write an essay, pull weeds, start a workout routine, etc…then micro-procrastinating is probably the only way to make that a realistic goal. 

Meditation #32: Don’t be too opportunistic.

Don’t be overly-opportunistic. That is, don’t worry too much about using every opportunity you have to do something. That’s the problem I often run into. If I have a few extra minutes I wasn’t expecting, I start to go into high-alert, trying to think of what I can do to use that time.

Don’t be like me.

If you find yourself in a store you didn’t  expect to be in, don’t start thinking about all the things you could buy. Just don’t buy anything.

Generally, speaking, if you find yourself with extra time, money, or resources than you were anticipating, and if no good use of that time, money, or resources is readily available, don’t use it. Don’t feel obligated to use what you didn’t expect to have.

Travel Frog vs. Me

Today at work I came across an unexpected ad for a mobile game called Travel Frog. It looks cute from the artwork I saw, and from the description it sounds intriguing. (It was called “Buddha-like,” whatever that means. I want to know!)

What is he doing? I really, really want to know.

So I made a mental note to check it out as soon as I got a chance.

And then, a while later, when I thought about it again, I remembered the 5T. You’d think it would be easy to remember, being as it’s such a huge part of my life right now. And yet my negative habits are so ingrained from a lifetime of seeking instant gratification.

“Oh, an interesting thing. I love interesting things! I’ll check it out!”

It’s like a knee-jerk reaction, totally unconscious. It’s only because I wasn’t able to download Travel Frog the moment I saw the ad, and because I was working on this blog the next time I thought of it, that I was able to get some perspective on my feelings about it.

I want it. I’m interested in it.

But that doesn’t make it valuable to me.

Interest is not currency in my mental world. A thing may be shiny, but that doesn’t mean it has to go in my boat. (See my post about The River for an explanation.)

So, as much as it pains me to say it, I will not be checking out Travel Frog. I’ll just have to accept that it’s probably cool, and I probably would enjoy it, but that it’s not going to be a part of my life anytime soon.

And even though it’s just an app this time, maybe next time it will be something bigger, something even more enticing. Every time I say no, I’m making myself stronger, and making my 5T more meaningful, and finding more inner peace.

(That said, if any of you have played it let me know how it is thanks bye.)