They were really
onto something when they made you team up with a buddy at camp. A number of recent studies have shown that
doing things with friends reduces stress and helps people exercise, lose
weight, live longer, survive cancer, recover more easily from negative
experiences, and even see steep hills as less steep. I’d like to add something to that list: Teaming up with a friend helps you use your
time better, and it makes you happier, less self-critical, and more present and
mindful as you go about your day.
For
me, planning the day is a two-part process. Once I’ve come up with my plan, I
call my friend – my time partner – and tell her what my plan is. I tell her how my day went yesterday too –
what I did and didn’t do, what kind of successes I had and glitches I ran into as
I carried out yesterday’s plan. Then she
tells me the same about her day yesterday and her plan for today. We give ourselves stars too, as in,
“Yesterday I had a four-star day.” The
starred items are things we picked on any given day to give ourselves extra
credit for if we did them.
This little
exercise, which we call checking-in, has completely changed my life.
Checking in with
my friend every morning motivates me to figure out what my plan actually
is. If it weren’t for the daily
check-in, I might be tempted to let my planning slide. The check-in also helps me think out loud
about what I’m going to do. And there
are lots of other good things I get from doing it too.
There’s a kind of
intimacy that comes with telling someone about my day and hearing about theirs
that adds a sense of companionability to my life and deepens my friendship with
my check-in partner. And it makes me
more mindful of what I’m doing because I know I’m going to be telling someone
else about it; it activates what Eckhart Tolle calls the ‘observer’ part of me
and gives me just a little bit of detachment from everything that goes on. Even when hard things happen, I think about
how I’m going to tell my friend about them and somehow that makes them not
quite so hard.
I read somewhere about the power of “bearing
witness to your own life and to someone else’s life.” When I use the checking-in process, my whole
day becomes about bearing witness to my own life and to someone else’s life. It becomes a kind of dialogue, with my friend,
with myself, with life. And because now I
have a kind of witness, and in a way have become my own witness as well, I have
a stronger, clearer, more definite sense of accomplishment. When I tell my friend
everything I did, I pay attention to it myself – I give myself credit instead
of just focusing vaguely on what I perceive as the day’s failures.
Somehow telling my
friend what I didn’t do on my previous day’s list is even more satisfying than
telling her what I did. When I say what
I didn’t do my friend “forgives” me and I forgive myself,
and then I forget about it. And I love
hearing what she didn’t get done, love seeing how someone else’s day can get
out of control, how my friend’s best-laid plans could so easily go awry. I learn from the whole process what’s a
realistic amount of work to expect of myself, and that helps me stop beating
myself up for not accomplishing goals that weren’t realistic to begin with. And hearing how my friend decided to give herself
a break and rest or do something fun instead of something “productive” that she’d
planned, helps me see – truly see, instead of just giving it lip service – that
resting and having fun are just as real as anything else and we deserve to
spend as much time as we can engaging in them. My friend and I laugh and joke about what went
wrong or about being “bad girls,” congratulate each other on taking care of
ourselves instead of working. Not
getting things done starts to feel like something fun and interesting instead
of something to feel guilty and bad about.
Anyone can have a
time partner – all you have to do is find a friend who feels chronically rushed,
anxious, or bad about what she gets done on any given day, and ask her if she wants to try making things better by checking in every day with you. There are a few things that
can make your check-ins go more smoothly.
I’ll talk about those in another post.
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