The
other day one of my coaching clients and I were talking about the problem of
minutia. He said dealing with the
minutia of daily life was pulling him off course, interrupting the big stuff he
wanted to do such as writing his book, and making him feel too busy all the
time. He also said the minutia itself was
suffering too: paying bills, emailing,
keeping track of appointments, passwords, and all the other little things that
have to be kept track of in today’s world.
Juggling it all was confusing, irritating, and overwhelming, and he was finding
himself making little mistakes, and sometimes those little mistakes were
turning into bigger problems.
He’s
not alone, of course. As far as I can
tell, this is pretty much a universal problem these days. Unless you’re a monk living in a monastery
you’re probably struggling with minutia to one degree or another, and even if
you are a monk you could be struggling with it too. About once a year I go to a monastery an hour
and a half away from my house; the monastery has a website and some monk has to
keep it updated and answer emails generated by it, and another monk has to keep
track of visitors calling day and night arranging times to stay in the guest
house, and there’s the running of their enormous farm and their casket-making
business and their huge old stone abbey. So not even monks get out of dealing with minutia.
Was
there always this much minutia to be dealt with? Maybe so.
After all, that monastery has been around since the 1800s, and we’ve all
been paying bills and going places and working for livings pretty much since
the beginning of civilization as we know it.
But still, the minutia, the overall busy-ness, seem a lot more
accelerated, almost to the point of being out of control, these days. I’m not sure why that’s the case. Maybe it’s the Internet and emailing and texting
and all the other forms of instant communication available to us. Now we have to juggle all those passwords and
pin numbers and read and write emails, and we can get sucked into surfing the
Internet and posting and tagging and downloading on Facebook, et cetera. On the other hand, as much as our lives have
been complicated by all that, they’ve also been simplified by all that: You can shop, communicate with customers and
friends, search for jobs, sometimes even do your work at home just by pushing
buttons. Surely the time saved and convenience
offered by all that make up for the time wasted and energy used by dealing with
the details that make it possible.
Still, it’s those details that create the problems -- all those slippery
little picayune minutia, scattered and spread all over our lives and our days.
In fact, those
details are the bedrock of our lives, though we may not realize it until
something goes wrong, as I learned recently when I tried to put my
telephone/Internet account into my own name and my email and phone service got screwed
up to the point where I could barely carry on my coaching business. We need
to be able to sign into our accounts on our computers with those stupid passwords,
we need to be able to call and be called on reliable telephone numbers.
So
what is there to be done about the minutia?
I think we have to slow down, plan our days and make space in our days
for dealing with all the little things that need to be dealt with – all the
little things that can so easily get out of control if we don’t deal with them.
We can also develop systems that help us keep track of the minutia in simple
reliable ways.
I keep my daily
appointments, my addresses and telephone numbers, and a page with all my passwords
in a leather four-by-six-inch six-ring planner binder made by a company called Day-Timer. (You can order the binder and all the various
inserts – blank pages, appointment calendar pages, pages for addresses, etc., by calling
800-225-5005 or by looking on-line; I realize this isn’t the only system available and there are
plenty of others, some electronic, that may seem more up-to-date, but this one
works for me and probably will for you too if you don’t already have your own
system.)
Every day, one of
the very first things I do is look in my planner to see what appointments I’ve
got that day, and then I plan the day accordingly, considering and writing
down, on a blank page in my planning notebook, what I want to do and roughly
when I want to do it; I start with my appointments and fill in the rest. And if I’ve got a lot of minutia to handle on
any given day – a bunch of appointments to make or emails to send – I pick a spot
to do them, all at the same time, during the day – from one to two o’clock, say. I combine my errands and appointments out of
the house too, so I only have to leave the house once instead of over and over,
at some time and on some day when the errands/appointments fit with everything
else I’m doing. (So, for example, I
decided to go to the grocery store and the bank tomorrow, after I have a
doctor’s appointment.) I think about
what’s going to be convenient for me before I make appointments too, if I have
any leeway at all or if there’s any on the other end; usually there’s more
leeway than it seems like there would be, if you stop to ask the receptionist
or ask yourself (instead of, for instance, accepting the first appointment you’re
offered). Doing this makes it so I don’t
end up having too many appointments in any given week to get anything else
done. And before I sign up for anything
like a class, or agree to a trip or a lengthy visit from friends or relatives,
I take some time to think about how whatever it is is going to fit with
everything else I’ve got going on, and I consider all the alternatives. (So, for example, when I signed up recently
for a yoga class, I thought long and hard about whether I really wanted to take
it – I decided I did – and debated which class time would work the best for
me. I made myself consider how I would feel at nine in the morning versus
six o’clock at night, and when I did that I knew that even though I’d be
fresher in the mornings, I would hate having to worry about being up and
dressed on time every Thursday morning.
Now that the yoga class is going, I know I made the right decision.)
Doing all that is
the easy part, especially now that I’ve got a system where everything – all my
appointments and telephone numbers and other minutia -- are together in one place, close at hand
at all times – i.e., in that daily planner.
Slowing
down is the hard part. Slowing down is a
beautiful, noble goal – in fact it’s the most important goal I’ve got as we move into
this new year – and I’ve got a lot to say about how I’m working on it, but I’m
going to save that for another blog post.
What I want say here is that, no matter how well we plan or how good our
planning system is, there’s a pretty good chance that something somewhere is going
to fall through the cracks. And when
that happens, what we’ve got left to work with is our attitude.
We can kick ourselves for screwing up or get
enraged at the company, the password, the whatever. We can tell ourselves that we’re too old or
scattered or forgetful, or we can blame our husbands for messing up the papers
on the table or our kids for not giving us the phone message or the dog for
chewing up the appointment book. In the
long run and even in the short fun, none of those things probably help very
much, and some of them may actually harm us.
Maybe rage at the company is a reasonable response, maybe it really is
someone’s fault, maybe we can’t help blaming ourselves. I’m not saying we should start trying to control
our reactions. But I have learned that
if I can tell myself it’s not my fault, if I can let life off the hook instead
of blaming someone or something, if I can just keep calmly looking for
solutions, it all goes just a little bit easier.
-- Mary Allen
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