With A Little More Help From My Friend

As I’ve said before, planning my day is a two-part process.   (See Harnessing Time with a Little Help from My Friend.)  Once I’ve come up with my plan, I call my friend – my regular 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 successes I had and problems 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.  

I absolutely love doing this.  It helps me feel good about myself because it forces me to pay attention to all the stuff I’m getting done (instead of just ignoring that while I focus on what I didn’t get done), and it helps me let go of what I didn’t get done.  My favorite part of the whole thing is saying what was on my list that I didn’t do yesterday (I did not do yoga, I did not pay the water bill, etc.).  Somehow saying those things out loud, like someone listing sins in a confessional, and then being absolved of them by my friend, and then hearing what my friend didn’t do that was on her list, makes me see how insignificant my not-doing on any given day really is.  It also gives me a realistic sense of how much I can reasonably expect to do on any given day, and it brings certain facts to my attention that I might otherwise miss (such as the fact that I’m not exercising many days in a row and I need to find some better way to fit exercise in).  The whole check-in process also makes me more mindful while I’m doing whatever I’m doing (because I know I’m going to be telling someone else about it so I’m more likely to pay attention myself), and adds an element of companionability to all my days, so I never have to feel alone with whatever happens, no matter how hard or strange, frustrating or funny it is.   Plus, checking in with my friend is fun.

This check-in process grew out of another time-harnessing exercise one of my friends came up with on a Sunday afternoon about four years ago.  She suggested during a phone call that we tell each other what we’d like to do during the next two hours.  Then, she said, maybe we could call each other back after the two hours were over and report to each other what we’d actually done. 

            We both had stuff to do around the house, the kind of stuff that feels great when you get it done but that you find yourself putting off for weeks or months or even years – cleaning out closets, weeding through drawers and taking what you don’t wear any more to Goodwill, catching up on filing.  So we told each other our goals for the next two hours and decided who was going to call whom when the appointed time came.  When the time did come one of us called the other and we made our reports and then we praised each other for what we’d done and waved away each other’s guilt at what we hadn’t gotten done.

The whole exercise worked great.  It broke the day down into manageable chunks and helped my friend and me get a lot more done than we probably would have without it.  It gave us the impetus to tackle chores we wouldn’t have otherwise and made doing those things feel fun instead of tedious and endless.  Not that filing and cleaning out closets were any more enjoyable than they usually are, but somehow knowing you were going to tell somebody exactly what you did made it fun.  And it was enjoyable precisely because it wasn’t endless; it was knowing you were only going to be doing those things for a brief, limited time -- putting boundaries around the time you’d be spending on them – that made it pleasurable, or at least easier and a lot more tolerable.  (I remember saying to someone once years ago, when I was applying for entry-level jobs I didn’t particularly want, I can do anything for four hours a day.)  The Sunday check-in process also made my friend and me feel like we weren’t alone even though we were in our separate houses. Afterwards, my day felt well spent.  I’d accomplished a lot and even socialized in the process. 

My friend and I still do the Sunday check-in thing every chance we get, and, like I said, those check-ins also led to a somewhat different, daily check-in routine for me.  I strongly encourage anyone who feels chronically rushed, out of control of time, or bad about what she gets done on any given day to try either or both of these check-in processes.  They only take a few minutes and will increase your productivity, improve your ability to manage time, and contribute immeasurably to the quality of your daily life – I know they have mine.   They’re also a fun easy way to socialize, to reach out and connect intimately, regularly, with another human being, without even leaving your house.  And they draw on two great resources we all have available, for free, but often don’t take advantage of:  time and each other.

                                                -- Mary Allen

How Long Does It Take to Clean a Cat Box?

So, as I’ve said before here, I’ve been working on slowing down.  Mostly I’ve been noticing what’s going on when I feel rushed and harried, tense about how busy I am, et cetera, and thinking about what I can do about it.  I’ve discovered a couple of things that are helping me. Both of them have to do with being realistic about the amount of time I have and the amount of time whatever I need to do is going to take.

As I keep saying in this blog, I plan my days first thing in the morning, figuring out what I’m going to do when.   Doing this in itself has helped me enormously; I no longer feel rushed, harried, too busy, worried about getting things done, etc., most of the time.  But sometimes, inevitably, I get behind in the plan, and those are the moments, I’ve noticed, when I start losing my harnessing time serenity.  My natural impulse when I get behind is to rush to catch up.  I think that I still need to to get everything done in the time I have, the time I put aside myself when I was making my plan – to try to cram everything I planned to do into the now-shrinking time/space I have for it.    Usually it’s not a rational thought – I don’t have to get everything done right then, I just think I do, because I decided earlier I would and now I sort of feel like I’ll be failing if I don’t.  So I speed up to try to get everything done.  To slow down, all I have to do is stop, look at my plan for the day, and make a couple of small decisions:  I can cross off some or all of the things I no longer have time for, and/or I can plan to do those things at some point later in the day or tomorrow or whenever.   Of course, you have to have a plan to do that.  If you don’t plan your day, you may be in a constant state of feeling like you have to cram more things than you can do into not enough time to do them.  Sometimes I think that’s why we all feel so crazy busy these days – at least one of the reasons.  Or maybe it’s not the reason we feel busy but an easy way to get rid of at least cut down on the feeling.  An easy way to slow down.

The other helpful little thing I’ve noticed lately since I’ve been slowing down even more – slowing down while still doing everything I have to do, slowing down by changing my thoughts – is that sometimes all I have to do is figure out how long things I have to do, actually do take.  

One of my biggest S.O.L. challenges is dealing with the cat boxes.  S.O.L. stands for shit of life, a name my friend and I came up with for all the annoying, time-consuming stuff you have to do to keep your life running smoothly: paying bills, going to the bank, unloading the dishwasher, getting your oil changed; none of those things is fun but dealing with the cat boxes is the only one I can think of that literally involves shit.  I have two cats and four cat boxes; I keep the cat boxes in the basement of my house.  I scoop them out every few days and every couple of weeks I empty them, wash them, and refill them, usually on Monday or Tuesday, because the city picks up my trash on Wednesday morning.  I don’t mind the scooping but I hate, hate, hate the emptying, washing, etcetera.  But it has to be done (for obvious reasons too nasty to be mentionable here).  It’s the price you pay when you have cats, especially indoor cats; having indoor cats is the price you pay when you live on a sort of busy street like I do and you’re so attached to your cats you can’t handle the risk of them getting run over.

I dread dealing with the cat boxes and I usually put it off.  Sometimes I put it off for days or even weeks.  During all that time, I feel guilty -- not non-stop, flat-out guilty the way you’d feel if you were, say, binging on cookies all day long, but a little bit guilty nevertheless; guilty enough to take up energy, guilty enough to be a kind of psychic work in itself.   Guilty on behalf of the cats as well myself, guilty for not doing anything about that shit sitting down there in my basement.  By not cleaning out the cat boxes, I realized the other day, I’m actually expanding, prolonging, the amount of time I spend on doing it.  Because all the time I’m not doing it I’m thinking about doing it, draining my energy a little bit by feeling guilty about not doing it.  (See Decision Fatigue and Many Other Fatigues.)

So I decided, just for the heck of it, to see how long it actually takes me to deal with the cat boxes.  And when I did I saw that the entire task, from carrying the trash can down to the basement to taking the trash can outside and emptying it into the larger outside trashcan – takes about 25 minutes.  Twenty-five minutes isn’t very long; it’s not long enough to be worth days of minor suffering, guilt, and avoidance.  And did I mention that during all that avoidance, I tell myself over and over – when the time comes once again to clean the cat boxes -- that it’s going to take a long time and a huge amount of energy to do it, and I have to put it off because I’m too tired for it now -- ?

So it helps me to know, now, that it only takes 25 minutes to deal with the cat boxes.  I can find a 25-minute spot in my day – a time when I’m likely to be fresh and full of energy and up for the task – and when the time comes I can tell myself it’s just going to take 25 minutes, and then I can just go down to the basement and do it.  And then I can close the basement door behind me, feeling like I’ve done my job, feeling like my cats are happy, feeling happy myself, and maybe I can even lie down on my daybed and take a little nap to reward myself.

                                                      -- Mary Allen

Relaxing, Renewing, and Refreshing the Mind

Now we have another good reason to take breaks, to make time to rest and relax.  A number of recent studies show that people who sleep seven plus hours a night, take daytime naps, and go on regular vacations perform significantly better than people who don’t.   It makes sense and shouldn’t surprise us:  Who does well at anything when they’re burned out and exhausted?  Still, as Tony Schwartz points out in a recent New York Times article, “Relax!  You’ll Be Productive”, “When we’re under pressure, most of us experience the impulse to push harder rather than rest.”  Nevertheless, what Schwartz calls “strategic renewal” turns out to be crucial.   It reminds me of how someone I know once spent an entire Saturday sitting on her couch watching TV – she couldn’t make herself do anything else, not even change out of her pajamas – then the next day she had the most productive day of her life. (See Grappling with Procrastination, Or Letting the Monkey Off Its Chain.)

            Like I said, none of that is particularly surprising, though it might be hard to put into action.  What’s more interesting in the article is news of another discovery:  the brain follows a pattern of roughly 90-minute cycles, both when you’re asleep and when you’re awake.  When you’re asleep you move from light to deep sleep and back out again every 90 minutes, and when you’re awake you move from “a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes.”  So your body wants you to take a break every hour and a half, and, according to one study, “the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.”

            Without knowing any of that, I decided, when I started working as a writing coach, to meet with my clients for telephone sessions lasting an hour and a half.   And I’ve found that that little formula works great:  It’s hard to get much done in only an hour, but any longer than an hour and a half and the client and I both start feeling our powers of concentration waning. Tony Schwartz, author of the New York Times article I refer to above, says he wrote two books, each one in less than six months, by writing in three uninterrupted 90-minute writing sessions a day.  He also says he learned that “it’s not how long but how well, you renew that matters most.  Even renewal requires practice.” 

            This is the part of the article that most intrigues me.  It would be great if we could all work in 90-minute sessions and take breaks in between, and I, for one, intend to put this advice into practice even more than I already am, whenever I can.  (So, for example, I think I’ll start writing in hour-and-a-half chunks of time instead of two hour ones.)  But what if you can’t take breaks every hour and a half, or your life is so hectic you can’t even remember you’re supposed to take breaks every hour and a half?

            Maybe we need to start simple and just focus on the idea of strategic renewal.  I think that for many of us, the real stumbling block is feeling like it’s okay to stop working for a while.  Work – not just job work but life work too, the work of running errands, paying bills, catching up on whatever there is to do – is like water:  Wherever there’s an opening, there’s more that can rush in and fill in the gap.  I’ve noticed that on my days off from coaching, I find myself thinking that I should be writing, and if I take a day off from both coaching and writing, I think about all the other stuff I could/should do:  catching up with laundry, cleaning the house, doing my filing, and so forth.  And there’s probably even another wave of could/should do’s in my life beyond that (painting the kitchen, building a website, etc).   So to really take a break – i.e., practice strategic renewal – I have to consciously build a dam to hold back all that work:  I have to pick a time when I’m going to rest and make myself stick to it.   I have to build boundaries around that time by not scheduling appointments during it no matter how urgently I might feel they’re needed (after all, I can put those appointments in some other time slot, it’s not like I’m completely ignoring them); by not caving in and doing something other people want or need me to do; by not allowing my anxiety about everything that’s on my plate (yuck, I hate that expression) to keep me from taking that break.  Of course, there are times when real emergencies or even just important contingencies crop up and it only makes sense to turn my attention to them instead of, say, lying on my daybed reading a novel.  But most of the time that’s not really what’s going on; most of the time I’m just caving in for whatever reason -- changing my mind about, giving up on, or even forgetting about my strategic renewal time before it happens. 

It helps to know that we’re actually doing something good instead of something bad by doing nothing for a while, as we now know from Tony Schwartz’s article – we’re helping ourselves and even others, increasing our productivity, boosting our health, improving our job performances.   Still, it may not be that easy to remember that when the time comes to lie down on the daybed and ignore everything else that’s calling out for your attention.  (If it’s a child that wants your attention maybe you can take a break by watching a movie, playing a game, or doing some other restful mindless thing with them.)  

I have found that practice makes perfect; the more I set aside times for breaks the more able I am to stick to them.   And I’ve found that the more I think, talk, and write about how breaks are important and necessary, for me and everyone else, the more I actually begin to believe it.

So what about resting effectively, renewing well, as Tony Schwartz says he has learned over time to do?  One of his ways of “rapidly and deeply” quieting his mind and relaxing his body is going running.  Running doesn’t sound restful to me, but I’m willing to entertain the possibility that it could be for someone else.  A long time ago I learned that I have the ability to take power naps pretty much at will, where I lie down and sleep for exactly one-half hour and wake up feeling completely refreshed, like I’ve erased my mental blackboard and now there’s room to write on it again.  Lying around reading novels is another way I love to rest, so an ideal break for me involves a power nap followed by some reading.   (It has to be novel-reading, the more compulsively readable the novel the better; non-fiction feels like work.) 

Whatever we do to renew, the most important thing, it seems to me, is to not think obsessively or even at all about what else we should be doing, all the things we have to do, while we’re resting.  It’s our minds more than our bodies that really need to rest.  So we should try to avoid guilt, worry, anxiety, we should cut down on decision fatigue and all the other mental fatigues, by erasing our mental blackboards for a while, maybe by meditating, or reading a novel or watching some dumb movie, by going running, or by going to sleep. 

                                                            -- Mary Allen

On Slowing Down through Simplifying

I’ve noticed that I – and some of my friends and clients – have an interesting tendency to get stuck in certain decisions we made earlier, as if our own decisions were set in stone and non-negotiable. Whenever the issue arises we keep coming back to our initial decision and thinking, Well, I have to do that because … I said I would, or because I know I need to, or because such and such will happen if I don’t.  I’ve come to see that often when I feel stressed about how much I’ve got “on my plate,” there’s something on my list I think I have to do just because I decided at some point earlier that I should.  So when I start to feel overwhelmed, it helps me to look at my plan for the day and consider:  Do I really have to do this, and if so do I really have to do it today?  What would happen if I postponed it or didn’t do it at all?  Would anything real, bad happen if I didn’t do it, or am I just telling myself that I have to … have a yard sale, make a website, create a vegetable garden, et cetera, just because I decided at some point that it would be a good idea. 

Of course, there’s something to be said for the value of sticking to plans we’ve made, even when we don’t necessarily feel like it.  I’ve been making myself sit down and write for years, often when I didn’t really feel like it, and have always been glad that I did. But when things we started off wanting to do morph into things we have to do but don’t have time for, it’s a good idea to get quiet for a few minutes and reassess.   

Even though I’ve experienced the truth of this over and over, I still find myself forgetting it.  The other day, in the middle of the afternoon, I found myself looking at what I’d planned and feeling confused.  I definitely needed to do everything on my list – write for an hour, and go to the bank and pay a bill, and do about half an hour’s worth of editing for a client.  I’d also made plans to go to my friend’s house at seven and to bring something simple there for us to have for dinner.  I really wanted to go to my friend’s house and I really needed to do all the other stuff, yet no matter how I moved things around to try to fit it all in I just could not figure out how.  And I was tired.  I didn’t want to be tired, I didn’t feel like I should be tired, but I was. 

And then I remembered, once again, that I could use the magical tool of flexibility; I could sit down and really think about what I wanted to do and the bottom line of what I had to do on that day.  When I thought about it, I saw that nothing bad would happen if I postponed the editing and going to the bank for one day although not indefinitely, and that as long as I wrote most days it was okay if I didn’t write today – that it was perfectly fine to not do those things today and it was only some inflexible part of me – some should-saying inner voice I unconsciously use to motivate myself -- that said I had to do them.  I realized that I had been listening to that voice once again and believing what it said.

Just for today, I decided, I’m going to cross everything off my list that I feel like I have to do and do only what I want to do.  I crossed off the writing, the editing, and the going to the bank.   Instead I wrote down “rest,” “go to the Coop and buy something for dinner,” and “go to Bruce’s at seven.”  And then I lay down on the daybed in my study and read my book and rested.  As I was lying there doing that, I had an uncommonly good feeling, a feeling like what you think you’ll get, maybe even do get temporarily, from falling in love or getting a new job or buying a bigger house or going on antidepressants.  It was such a good feeling I made a note of it for future reference. 

Although it’s not usually that dramatic, I have noticed over and over that if I can cut anything out of my plan once I’ve made it, it’s like getting a little money back from the bank.  I love it when I can think of some way to get out of one or more items on my list by simplifying or consolidating or doing something else instead.   I find that if I just pause and take a few minutes to consider alternatives when there’s something I have to do but can’t find time for, I often come up with some perfect solution that’s easier and just as good or even better.  

For example, once, when a friend was visiting from out of town, we decided to hold a little party at my house.  My friend knew a lot of people in Iowa City because she had lived here for a while, and we decided to gather them all together so she wouldn’t feel like she needed to cram in separate dates with everyone during her relatively short visit.   So the party itself was a time-saving measure.  But as her visit got closer I started to feel anxious about the time it would take to get ready for the party:  There were a number of things that would have to get done – cleaning the house, buying food and possibly paper plates and cups to eat and drink it, taking my old blind dog to the groomer to make him presentable, and on and on.  I kept worrying about how to fit all of that into my busy schedule.  But we really did need to have a party, the party was my idea and I had already invited some people and …   And then, once again, I remembered what to do:  I stopped and asked myself whether there were any easy alternatives to what I had already planned.  It came to me that we could have the party at a public gathering place, and then the perfect place to have it came to me.  I called my friend and proposed the idea to her and she said, “Great!”  I called the people I had already invited and told them what we were doing and they all said “perfect!”  And I was able to relax instead of rushing around in the week before and during my friend’s visit; we had a nice little party in Panera, and the whole thing turned out great.

All of which leads me to insight number two about slowing down:  (For insight number one see On the Beauty and Grace of Slowing Down.)  Sometimes slowing down is a matter of simplifying our lives, not necessarily in any permanent way but just for today.  (If we had to do it for all time we’d probably get bogged down in figuring out how to do that.)  And simplifying may mean stopping, considering everything we’ve got on our plate for today (I hate that expression, as if tasks were food you didn’t want to eat), then deciding:  Do we really have to do/consume/expend energy on all these tasks today?  Or can we postpone some or not do them at all?  

                                                                    -- Mary Allen