tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36069149974379395442024-02-08T08:21:58.055-08:00Harnessing TimeTime is like the wind. It's freely available, an endless source of power and energy. We can use its power to accomplish whatever we want or need. All we have to do is change how we relate to it so we have it at our backs instead of walking into it. All we have to do is harness it so we can put it to our own uses instead of letting it blow us around.Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-24482762574491939432014-09-04T10:07:00.002-07:002014-09-04T10:07:57.696-07:00Relaxing Into the New School Year<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
It’s the beginning of
September.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>School is starting, summer is
over, there are hectic vibes in the air.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even if your life isn’t ramping up right now – even if you and/or your
kids aren’t starting a new semester or you’re not picking up where you left off
before your summer vacation -- it’s hard to ignore those hectic vibes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What could be a better time to start
harnessing time?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
do I mean by harnessing time?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a long
time I knew that I wanted to slow down and stop feeling so rushed and busy all the
time. But I also knew that I had to continue doing everything I was doing and
maybe even become more productive, and that I probably had too much to fit into
the time I had. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then, at some point
a few years ago, I figured out how to stop rushing, slow down, and still get
done everything I needed to do and then some.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I figured out that time is a resource, sort of like the wind, and I
could harness it and use it – I could get it at my back and let it propel me
along instead of walking into it, fighting with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> </span>of feeling like there wasn’t
enough time and therefore I had to rush to get everything done, I figured out that
I did have enough time:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just had to
consider how much time I actually had – during any given day, morning, hour –
and decide how I was going to use that time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Because, it turns out, the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough time
for everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feeling</i> that there isn’t enough time --
it’s the anxiety, the rushing, the frustration and irritability that comes with
the rushing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s the wind you’re
walking into, the wind that’s blowing in your face, making everything harder.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
way I harness time is very simple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Every day I sit down at the beginning of the day and write down on a
piece of paper in the notebook I keep for that purpose, what I’m going to do
today and when, roughly, I’m going to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">when</i> that’s most
important, because that’s what gives you a sense of how much time you actually
have and whether what you have to do can fit into it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If your to-dos fit into the time you have for
them, you can relax and go about your day, feeling peaceful and confident that
there’s enough time for everything and you don’t have rush or twist yourself
into a pretzel, as my former Czech boyfriend used to say, to get it all done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If everything you have to do doesn’t fit it
into the time you have, you can just make a few quick decisions – to postpone
something or things till tomorrow or whenever, to cut out something that’s not
absolutely necessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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You’ll know you
have the right plan for the day when you feel calm, peaceful, and satisfied –
and then you can go about your day feeling relaxed and confident that you’re getting
what you need to do done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if at any
point you start to feel rushed and anxious, you can just look at the time you
have (say, one to three) and think about whether you can realistically fit what
you planned for this part of the day into that amount of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you can you can relax (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">will</i> relax, automatically) and if you
can’t you can make a few decisions about what to postpone to when, et cetera,
and then you’ll relax.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
There’s a lot more
to how I harness time than just that – for example, I have a partner I share my
plan with every day, and I work on staying present in the moment, making time for relaxing and having fun, not getting too hung up on what I should have done but
didn’t, and a lot more -- but the above are the basic essentials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
One of my favorite
quotes comes from the Roman philosopher Seneca: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“As long as you live, keep learning how to
live.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Harnessing time is helping me
learn how to live -- how to get the most out of my days, how live -- <i>really</i> live -- in the time I've got instead of rushing through it, feeling anxious about what I'm not doing, hurrying to get to the next thing.</div>
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Mary Allen </span>Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-72201823980638524012014-08-06T09:30:00.001-07:002014-08-07T11:44:27.348-07:00Relaxing Instead of Hurrying In Today's ADD World<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
morning I was talking to my friend Heidi about harnessing time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were actually doing a check-in, where we
said what happened to us yesterday – what we did and didn’t do that was on the
plans we made yesterday – and told each other our plans for today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This check-in process is something I do every
day.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I really love checking
in with my time partner every day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
become part of my daily routine and it helps me in many, many ways. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a simple easy thing you can do to change
your life and your relationship to time enormously – to stop hurrying and start
relaxing, no matter how busy you are -- and I recommend it to anyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(For more about how I do check-ins, see <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/03/with-even-more-help-from-my-friend.html">http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/03/with-even-more-help-from-my-friend.html</a>)
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
My regular
check-in partner, Kathy, is on vacation right now, the kind of vacation where
she doesn’t need to think about harnessing time. Heidi, on the other hand, is
having the kind of vacation where harnessing time is practically an urgent
necessity– i.e., she’s taken a week off work and is mostly at home trying to
get stuff accomplished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So
I’ve been coaching Heidi to plan her days a la harnessing time and she and I
have been checking in with each other this week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This morning she told me that she’s been learning
a lot from doing that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mostly what she’s
learned is how hard it was to figure out what she wanted and needed to do when
it came time to make a plan for the day -- there was just so much to do around
her house and she felt overwhelmed when she even thought about where to start,
which made her want to just forget about it all and sit on the couch and watch
TV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, once she did make a plan, she
said, she couldn’t stick to it, because of all the other things that were
constantly coming along needing to be taken care of.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has three kids, a dog, and a husband, and
she also has ADD and ADHD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She feels
like she spends her days putting out little fires all the time – stopping what
she’s doing and dealing with some little mess or crisis or urgent need related
to one of the kids or the dog or her husband, and never getting anything done
on her plan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said she feels like a
failure at harnessing time, like she just can’t do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I said
I didn’t think so at all. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
went first during the check-in and I started off, like I always do, saying what
I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">didn’t</i> get done that was on my plan
yesterday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love to do this; for some
reason it gives me pleasure and relief to say what I didn’t do; I even find it
a little bit funny to say, I did not do this, I did not do that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Heidi said hearing that helped her enormously
right off the bat, because it made her realize she wasn’t a failure at
harnessing time just because she didn’t get some of things that she’d plan to do,
done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then she told me what she did and
didn’t do that she had planned to do yesterday, plus all the things she did
that she hadn’t planned, and that made her realize she actually got a lot more
done than she thought she did.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Then
we started talking about the issues she mentioned before we did our check-in,
starting with the putting-out-little-fires-all-the-time problem – i.e., never
making any headway with the things on her plan because she was always having to
take care of some immediate issue, problem, or need related to her kids, her
dog, or her husband.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right away we
figured out that at least part of the solution there was getting the kids to
clean up their own messes instead of jumping in and doing it for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, figuring out how to tolerate messes, at
least for a while, until the kids cleaned them up or, in the absence of that,
until time could be harnessed by Heidi to clean them up herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Harnessing time to clean them up herself
might also mean finding another spot in the day or the week to do whatever got
tossed aside when she had to deal with the mess. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Plus, working on
boundaries:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Boundaries around messes, so
who made it gets to clean it up, even if Heidi has to harness some time to
meditate, breathe deeply, go to a shrink, or do whatever needs to be done so
she can tolerate waiting for them to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Boundaries around time, so when one of the kids/the dog/the husband
needs/wants something, Heidi can look at her plan and say, Not now, but … three
o’clock, or tonight before you go to bed, or … some other time later. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Or
never – there’s always that option too.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
The important
thing is remembering there are options, remembering that we/she get to make our
own decisions about what we do and how we use our time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can always change our mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But things really get out of control when
we’re just reacting instead of deciding what we
want to do and finding time to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/08/boundaries.html#http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/08/boundaries.html">http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/08/boundaries.html</a>)
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
solution to the feeling-too-overwhelmed-to-know-where-to start-and- giving-up
problem was easy:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were engaging in it
right now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I reminded Heidi that things
can only be done one day, one step, one action at a time, and all we have to do
– all we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i> do -- is start
somewhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can do that by picking <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">something</i> – at least one thing – and
looking at where we can fit it into the time we have today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can write that thing down on our plan and
then do the best we can to carry out our plan – i.e., do the thing, plus the
other things on our plan -- to the best of our ability today, remembering that
being flexible about our plan is almost as important as having a plan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-power-of-flexibility.html#http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-power-of-flexibility.html">http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-power-of-flexibility.html</a>
on the power of being flexible.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
That works for the
ADD thing too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Heidi told me that when
she starts doing one thing, she sees something else she should do instead,
drops the first thing and starts the second thing, then sees a third thing… and
so forth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I told her that I used to do
that too and that as far as I know I don’t have ADD – but maybe we all have a
little bit of ADD in today's world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I said that now that I’m harnessing time I
don’t do that any more, and Heidi said she’s looking forward to harnessing time
so she doesn’t do it either. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>-- Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-81791957408309639292014-06-20T08:38:00.001-07:002014-06-20T08:40:02.070-07:00Time: There Really Is Enough of It<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
A
few months ago I made a decision to temporarily harness time to write about
things other than harnessing time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But a
few days ago I had such a wonderful harnessing time moment – a moment when I
went from feeling hurried, crabby, cramped for time, to feeling calm, spacious,
and peaceful, with just a simple little application of my own harnessing time
principles – that I knew I had to write about it. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
was standing in my kitchen, dithering, worrying about how I was going to get
everything I needed to do done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rushed</i>, which is a feeling<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>I hate and which I basically created
harnessing time to avoid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had to eat
breakfast, take my little dog to doggie day care, meditate for ten minutes, and
do a little yoga, and I didn’t think I was going to have enough time to do all
of that before my first coaching date.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I
make my living as a writing coach, mostly coaching on the phone in hour and a
half increments.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I had already
written out my harnessing time plan for the day, which was how I knew what I
wanted to do during this particular time slot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But then, standing in my kitchen, I started getting the feeling that I
wouldn’t be able to do what I needed to do and about what would happen if I
didn’t – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if I don’t do the yoga my back
will start hurting and then I’ll have a back spasm and then I won’t be able to
work</i>, et cetera – and then I started trying to do things fast, faster than
I could, and practically shaking with the effort (wasted effort, of course,
because that’s what you get when you’re trying to do things faster than you can).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then my cat started meowing at me in a loud,
irritating, food-demanding voice and I actually had the urge, which I suppressed,
of course -- I would never, ever do something like that -- to smack her on the
head. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
This is the moment,
I realized, when you might yell at your kid if you had one or start a fight
with your husband or do some other minor interpersonal or self-inflicted
damage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it was at this moment,
motivated by that thought and the realization that I was hurrying and it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unpleasant</i>, that I remembered one of my
basic harnessing time rules:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i>If you feel like you don’t have enough time
to get everything you need to do done, stop and figure out whether you actually
do have enough time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(You’ll probably
have to look at a clock and see what time it is; think about when your next
appointment or whatever is; and think about how long, realistically, each thing
you have to do, between now and then, is going to take.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then you’ll have to decide if everything you
have to do will realistically fit into the window you have to do it.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you do have enough time, relax.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you don’t, figure out where to move
something you think you need to do now, to some later time in the day or week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or decide to skip it all together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
It takes a little
time to stop and think all that through, maybe twenty or thirty seconds, and it
might be tempting to think you don’t have time to take the time to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But believe me, you do, and it’s worth it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I had an hour and
a half yesterday to fit in everything in my morning routine:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the trip to doggie day care, the yoga, the
meditation, the breakfast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I thought
about it, I decided that I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">didn’t</i>
have enough time for everything and that I needed to make a harnessing time
decision about what could be let go of or postponed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did a quick mental scan of all my
options.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I couldn’t put off taking the
puppy to day care and I probably shouldn’t put off eating breakfast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally
I decided that nothing would happen to my back if I postponed the yoga for a
few hours, whereas something would definitely happen to my mood – it had
actually started happening already, when I felt rushed in my kitchen -- if I
postponed the meditation. (Interestingly enough, since I started doing ten
minutes of meditation a day a few years ago, meditating has steadily moved up
my list of priorities – I’ve come to see it as even more important than eating
breakfast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The same thing has happened
with planning my day a la harnessing time – I hate how I feel on days when I somehow
end up skipping it and I’ve come to enjoy it, rely on it, look forward to it as
one of my favorite parts of the day.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I got my plan back
out and moved the yoga to follow my hour-and-a-half-long coaching date, when I
had plenty of time to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then I
collected my little dog Alice, put her on the leash, and drove her over to the
doggy day care place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the car I felt my
mood getting better by the minute, and it came to me in a happy rush that in
the few years since I’ve been harnessing time, time really has come to feel
like something I can use, like a tool or a magic wand, to do whatever I need
to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That I don’t have to feel hurried or
harried, I don’t have to exist in a time-poverty-stricken condition, any
more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because there really is time
enough for everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 2.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 2.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-13343699868054467602013-12-09T13:28:00.001-08:002013-12-09T13:28:26.927-08:00Making Space for (Fill in the Blank) in a Crowded Life<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Today is my day off -- one of my
two days off a week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
make a living as a writing coach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
coach in hour-and-a-half-long appointments and for the first few years of
coaching I did two of those a day, five days a week, and fit writing in around
the edges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I kept sort of hoping that
something would come along so I could work less and have more time to write –
i.e., that I’d sell a book or find some other magical way of making money and
not have to work as much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then about
four months ago it came to me that I didn’t have to wait for a version of
retirement to do what I wanted (i.e., have more time to write): <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could just look at my life as it is now and
try to figure out a way to make time, harness time, change some things around, so I could fit in writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">now </i>instead
of thinking I’d do it some time in the distant future. So that’s what I
did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I looked at my schedule and decided
I could consolidate my coaching appointments into three days a week, and I now
I have two days off in the middle of my week to focus on writing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
(I sort of hate the
idea of out-and-out giving advice; I prefer to share my own experience about
what did and didn’t work for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
it’s come to my attention that most bloggers do seem to cut to the chase/advice
and I’ve heard that people like to read lists, or at least that the people who
let you post your blog on their websites like lists, so here’s the beginning of
mine):<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Harnessing time bullet point number one</b>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you think you have to wait till retirement
or conditions improve to start doing something you want to do, think
again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sit down, take a detailed look at
how you’re spending your time now, and play with ways to change stuff around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do this until you find a painless way to fit
in at least some of that thing, now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Consider:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s expendable or
flexible in what you’re doing now?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At
first you might think the answer to that is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing</i>,
there’s no leeway at all in your current life/schedule, but ignore that
thought/feeling.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
#<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Now that I have
two days off to write in the middle of the week, I’m getting a lot more writing
done, I’m a lot happier, and I’m even enjoying my coaching more because on the
days when I’m doing it I feel less pressure to focus on writing too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now the main problem I have is the special
problem of the day off, something I’ve wrestled with before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-special-challenge-of-day-off_7.html">The
Special Challenge of the Day Off</a> and <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/05/another-special-challenge-of-day-off.html">Another
Special Challenge of the Day Off</a>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
There are two main
challenges on the days I’ve set aside for writing:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Using them for writing instead of filling them up with other stuff I
can’t get to on the days when I’m coaching, then squeezing in a little writing
around the edges, and<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Feeling like I should be writing more than I
am (because after all I took the day off for it) and then feeling crabby,
rushed, pressured, etc., because of that original <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should</i> feeling.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Bullet point number two</b>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After you’ve figure out a way to make time (harness time) to do what you
want to do, don’t give that time away if you can possibly help it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember, there’s always time for everything,
so there will be time to do what’s threatening to get in the way of your
________ (fill in the blank, for me it’s writing), some other time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All you have to do is look at your calendar
and find another time to ________ (fill in the blank, e.g., catch up with
emailing, return some phone calls, take out the garbage and wash the kitchen
floor because company is coming, make an appointment with the dog groomer
and/or take the dog to the groomer because company is coming), and
perhaps write those things down on your daily planner and communicate them to
someone else. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Bullet point number three</b>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Try to feel good about doing any amount of __________ that you do during
the time you’ve set aside for it. Feel good about the very fact that you’ve
found space in your life for (harnessed time you can use for)_______, and
if for whatever reason you just couldn't use that time today, you can always use it another
day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try to let go of all guilt,
including guilt about not doing enough or any __________, guilt about not doing
whatever you could or should be doing instead of ___________, and guilt about
feeling guilty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-48377589655820052612013-10-02T15:08:00.002-07:002013-10-02T15:08:45.480-07:00Harnessing Time with a Puppy
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Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time
with a blind guy. He’s been blind since
he was five so he’s really good at navigating the world; he can do almost
everything a sighted person can, he just has different ways of doing it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One thing I’ve
noticed about him is how organized he is.
He keeps every single thing in his apartment in its own designated spot: scissors go in a particular drawer next to
the sink, baggies and pens and pencils are kept in another drawer, plastic
shopping bags (those ubiquitous bags from Target and Best Buy and every other
store in the world) go in a paper bag under the sink, and so forth. He knows exactly where everything is so he
doesn’t have to search around for whatever he needs at any given moment. Searching is a lot more time-consuming and hit-or-miss
for him than it is for most of us because he has to do it with his hands. But ever since I’ve been hanging around with
him I’ve been thinking it would be nice to have all one’s belongings so well
organized even if you weren’t blind. Nice,
pleasing, satisfying, restful, because it would eliminate the guesswork, the stress
and anxiety and confusion, of not knowing where things are.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And
in the same way, I’ve been thinking, it can only make things better in our
lives to eliminate the guesswork about what’s happening with our time. To know how much time we’ve got on any given
day or part of the day and how we’re going to be spending it, to know whether
we’re going to have enough time to do all the things we need to or want to do –
or not. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Everybody
I know seems to be going through something hectic right now. It’s like there are hectic vibes in the
air. One of my friends is in the middle
of moving to a new house while transferring ownership of her old house. Another friend is preparing to give a ninety-minute
talk she’s never given before on top of all her regular work and busy-life
stuff. I myself got a puppy. She’s adorable and I adore her but she, like
every other puppy in the world, is a little peeing, pooping, biting, playing, pandemonium-creating
machine. I’m sharing her with my friend John, the blind guy, and that takes off some of the pressure – just when I get
really overwhelmed she goes to his house -- but there’s a certain amount of
hectocity (if that isn’t a word it should be) that goes with transporting her
back and forth between us – we have to collect all her toys every time,
remember to bring her vitamin paste so she won’t get hypoglycemia, figure out
how to get her kennel in the back seat without breaking the car window, etc. <o:p></o:p></div>
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There
too, John’s blindness-necessitated penchant for organization helps; we keep all
of her toys, food, and accoutrements in one box that we pass back and forth,
for example. On any given day we know
who’s going to have her and when they’re going to hand her over, when she’s
going to exercise or has exercised, what we need to get (such as a small pet
carrier so we don’t have to transport her in her kennel) to make things
easier. Over and over, I’m struck by how
helpful it is to plan, to decide, to know, instead of to leave things to
guesswork and hope for the best (or, more likely, fear the worst). <o:p></o:p></div>
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And that’s also how and why I harness
time. <o:p></o:p></div>
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There’s
one little thing I do every day to harness my time. I’ve been doing it for so long now it’s
become part of my routine, something I look forward to and miss if I don’t do
it. I might not miss it in the moment
when I’m not doing it, but I really, really miss it later when my day is being negatively affected. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s very simple. Here’s what it is: <o:p></o:p></div>
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Every day, not
long after I get up, I sit down and open the little binder- notebook (purchased
from Day-Timer) that I keep track of my days in. My appointment calendar’s in my notebook, and
so are some blank sheets of paper (as well as sections for my addresses, my
log-in IDs and pin numbers, and a list of books I want to read, but they’re not
relevant here). I look at what appointments
I’ve got that day, write them down on today’s blank sheet, then figure out how
I’m going to use the time before, after, and between the appointments. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I don’t just make
a list of what I have to do. I consider
how long everything’s probably going to take and I figure out roughly when I’m
going to do what (knowing that I have to do this in the spirit of flexibility
and positivity instead of rigidity and beating myself up). That way, at any given time of the day, I
know what I’m going to be doing and I know whether I have time to do what I
need to do. I also know that I can and
will make space to rest, read, hang out and surf the Internet, or play with my
puppy; I write these things down on my plan along with everything else, so when
I’m doing them I don’t have to feel guilty, like I’m taking time away from something
else. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Nowadays I feel
mindful, present, and purposeful -- instead of rushed, irritable, pressured,
and hectic -- pretty much all the time, as long as I’ve done my harnessing time
thing that morning. And if I ever do
start to feel hectic I look at my plan and adjust it – maybe I planned too much
for the time I had and I can decide to postpone something, or maybe I just need
to find out how much time I do have before I should go on to the next thing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I told my friend
who has to prepare for a ninety-minute talk to look at the next two weeks (the
talk is two weeks from now) and find some windows of time when she can work on
preparing, to write those times down on her calendar, and if she can’t stick to
them to find other times. I told my
friend who has to move more or less the same thing. (I also told her she probably has to put
pretty much everything else on hold until she gets to the new house.) Both of my friends agree that planning is helping
them eliminate stress, that consciously harnessing time feels a lot different
than leaving everything up to guesswork and feeling terrorized by the enormous
loads on their plates. (Yuck, I hate that
expression, as if tasks are food items you’re forced to eat).<o:p></o:p></div>
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There’s one more
step in my harnessing time morning routine, and that’s sharing my plan with a
friend. Here’s what I’ve said about that already. <a href="http://harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/09/harnessing-time-with-little-help-from.html">Harnessing
Time with a Little Help from My Friend.</a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-64950446519915686042013-08-22T10:53:00.002-07:002013-08-22T10:53:20.039-07:00Is Life Really Speeding Up?
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This
morning when I was lying back in the dentist chair having my teeth cleaned, my
dental hygienist said, “Life is speeding up.
Things are going faster than they used to.” And yesterday one of my coaching clients
remarked, “Nowadays everything is ramped up.” That same client, who does a lot of
international traveling, told me recently that not long ago, the guy in front
of her in the check-in line in the Amsterdam airport completely lost it because
of some minor traveling delay, and the clerk told my client that that’s been
happening more and more lately; people <i>really</i>
losing it when they get delayed is a notable trend. (See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-i-stopped-hurrying-into-future.html">How
I Stopped Hurrying into the Future</a>.)
People are more impatient than they used to be, we’ve all got too much
on our plates, and everyone is in a <i>hurry</i>.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
It’s
kind of fun to speculate about whether time really is going faster in some physical
or metaphysical way. I’ve found stuff on
the Internet that says it is – it’s got something to do with the Schumann
resonances and the earth’s electrical field.
These theories hold a kind of intuitive appeal for me – it really does
feel like some basic something having to do with how much time we’ve got to
work with has changed, and it’s not just a matter of being older making us
perceive it that way (as some other websites say). On the other hand, some of
the websites that claim time is physically speeding up also say this was
predicted in the Bible and have a slight aura of crackpot-dom. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
The
important question isn’t why things are going faster – why <i>we’re</i> going faster -- anyway, but what we can do about it. We
need to slow down, enjoy life more, take more time out for ourselves, as my
dental hygienist also said this morning.
She said the people in her mother’s Florida retirement home do that –
they read, sit around and talk, relax. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I grunted and
blinked my assent. But if I hadn’t been
lying there with a pick and a little mirror on a handle in my mouth, I might
have said this: That sounds great, but
how do we do it if we’re not retired? And what if you’re retired and you’re still
too busy to take it easy, like some people I know?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
And
then I might have said: The one-word conclusion
I’ve come to, the surprising short answer, is this: boundaries. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
When
my dentist came in to check my teeth after the dental hygienist was finished,
he told me he needs to start writing and publishing some articles so he can get
tenure but he’s not doing that because he just can’t find the time. His wife works on the weekend and he takes
care of their two kids then, and the rest of the time he’s at work himself,
seeing patients and doing other stuff. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I love my dentist;
his practice is part of the research division of our university’s dental
college, and I really, really want him to get tenure so he can keep his job and
I can keep having him for my dentist. So
I asked him if he wanted me to help him figure out when he could find time to
work on those articles. He said, “Sure,”
and then he told me that he does have some time during the week at work, about
a day and a half, for study and research, but he’s been using it to complete
crucial administrative tasks, plus there are too many interruptions for it to
work as writing time. He and I and Pat,
the dental hygienist, talked a bit about how easy it is to get overwhelmed by
all the little things while the big, important things go by the wayside -- Pat
used the phrase “the tyranny of the insignificant” – and then I brought up the
boundaries thing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I said that what I
would do if I was him is: Every week,
pick two or possibly three hours during the full day he has for research and
study – say, from two to four or ten to one – and – here’s where the boundaries
come in – close his office door and put a friendly note on it asking people to
come back after the designated time, and/or do whatever else there is to do –
maybe notify the receptionist to hold his calls, or send out a group email telling
everybody who might be an interrupter that he won’t be available then -- to
keep those two or three hours open for research and writing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I’ve found that
the trick to creating boundaries is to do it in a friendly, non-aggressive, and
even apologetic way so people won’t get offended. In my experience, the biggest reason we don’t
set boundaries is that we’re worried about hurting people’s feelings, and the
way around that is to establish boundaries – i.e., say no to some things, or
yes to them only at certain times or under certain conditions -- as nicely and
neutrally as possible. Another reason we
don’t create boundaries is that we don’t quite feel like our own needs ought to
take precedence over others’; sometimes that feeling makes us defensive – i.e.,
sound angry and abrupt when we say what we need – which tends to offend people
and reinforces our feeling that we’re harming others with our boundaries. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
But most often,
feeling like we don’t quite have the right makes us suppress our needs and not
establish boundaries at all. Then things
get out of control, we feel rushed, crowded for time, and anxious about the
stuff we’re not getting done, and life feels messy and chaotic. It feels like there’s not enough time for
anything, let alone everything, and we go faster to try to get everything done. And that’s how life speeds up.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Another way that I’ve
learned to slow down and stop rushing – to harness time and use it instead of
letting it blow me around -- involves putting boundaries around little chunks
of time: Making choices about what I
want to do <i>when</i> instead of letting
life, what I think other people need from me, my own obsessive urge to do the
dishes or surf the Internet, my own procrastination or desire to sit around, make
those choices for me. Putting those
little boundaries around chunks of time – like my dentist deciding to write
from two to four on Thursday -- is at the heart of what I’ve learned about how
to harness time, and it’s another way that slowing down can be achieved through
boundaries. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
If you put aside
time for something you want or need to do, you have a lot better chance of
doing that thing. Even retirees in
Florida might benefit from deciding, say, to start writing the novel
they’ve always wanted to write, from three to five every afternoon.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
-- Mary
Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-36470177846455294892013-07-09T12:20:00.001-07:002013-07-09T12:20:18.432-07:00Cultivating the Monastery Feeling
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A
couple of weeks ago I went to New Melleray Abbey for a few days for a short
unofficial retreat. I went to New
Melleray last summer also, and wrote about what I learned there about
harnessing time when I got home that time too.
(See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/07/power-of-real-rest.html">The
Power of Real Rest</a>)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
New Melleray’s a
real working Trappist abbey, with monks who wear robes and celebrate Matins,
Lauds, Vespers, Compline and so forth, every day. I’m not Catholic and never
have been (when I was a kid I went to the Westhampton Congregational church but
I haven’t gone regularly to church since I was given the choice, which I think
was when I was in the seventh grade). But
I’ve been going to New Melleray, which is eighty miles from my house, for short
retreats in their guesthouse about once a year since the early 1990s. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
I
love going there for the silence and the rest, for the peace and the prayer
that seems to linger in the air – monks have been praying there pretty much
around the clock since the 1850s -- but most of all I love going there for the <i>time</i>.
When you’re at the monastery, even if you’re only there for three days
and nights, it feels like you’re there, like you’re going to be there -- every
time you look inside yourself to see if you have the feeling you do – forever, for
all the time in the world. Time
stretches out before you like a vast snowy field, because you have nothing to,
nothing you have to do, but read, think, sit in the chair and stare out the
window, lie on your back on the single bed and stare at the ceiling. Or
maybe it’s something in you that stretches out and expands, some part that
starts off the stay like a flattened dehydrated sponge, from which every drop
of whatever has been squeezed by all the busy-ness, the things you have to do
and the feeling of having to do them, the appointments and errands, the
emailing and talking, of daily life in the regular world, and then over a few
days and nights in the monastery, the water of whatever is slowly restored to
yourself and that part of you is like a puffed-up sponge, hydrated, refreshed,
restored, feeling fresh and rested and new. <o:p></o:p></div>
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What
I noticed most this last time I went to the monastery was the grief I felt when
it was time to leave. I started getting
the feeling on Wednesday afternoon (we were leaving the monastery on Thursday
morning). Suddenly I didn’t feel like I
had all the time in the world any more.
Now my time to have all the time in the world was limited to part of one
afternoon and one night, and I’d be sleeping for most of the night. I felt like I used to feel on Sunday nights
when I was a kid and I had to go back to school on Monday morning. I still remember watching The Wonderful World
of Walt Disney and having it spoiled by that feeling, some kind of deep
nostalgia for the weekend, a weird loneliness for the freedom to be myself,
away from the requirements and the meanness of school. I felt echoes of that same feeling at the end
of my little stay at the monastery, except that I wasn’t going back to school the
next day but to my <i>life.</i> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
What’s up with
that, I kept wondering. Does my life
really feel to me like being in grade school?
And how can I harness time to get more of the monastery feeling into my
life? The latter was the question I had
the last time I left the monastery too (see <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/07/power-of-real-rest.html">The
Power of Real Rest</a>). And as I was
packing up my stuff to leave this time, and then as I was driving back home
with my friend Nancy, who went with me to the monastery, and ever since, I’ve felt
a renewed determination to get more of that peaceful open feeling – that sense
of spaciousness around time, that feeling that you have all the time in the world
– into my regular life. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Last
time I concluded that the way to get more of the monastery feeling into my
regular life was to create windows of time in some of my days (a couple of
hours here and there) for resting and doing nothing else, and I have been doing
that and loving it when I do. But
obviously I need to find more and better ways to hold onto the monastery
feeling, since I felt such dread going back to my life when I left the
monastery this time. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
My friend Nancy
and I talked about it on the drive back to Iowa City: how each of us could hold onto some of what
we got during the retreat now that we were done retreating. I said that I was going to try to make some monastery
days, where I spent whole days reading, writing, and resting, and not doing
errands, talking on the phone, emailing, texting, or otherwise instant
communicating, et cetera, about once a week (my work life is flexible; I can do
as many or as few writing coaching dates as I have the energy for or can afford
to cut back to, as I want). Nancy, who
has a huge, crazy-busy, full-time job, said she might be able to fit in a
monastery day once a month. And then we
decided that in addition to taking monastery days, there are monastery
attitudes that we can try to adopt, especially the feeling that it’s okay to
take a whole day off, that we have a right to take time for ourselves, that
nothing bad will happen if, say, we don’t respond to someone’s email or
everyone’s emails for a day or two. <o:p></o:p></div>
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So
last week I tried having my first monastery day at home. There was lots of stuff that I could have
done, especially writing-career-related stuff, which is different from actually
writing (writing is just writing, which I love; writing-career-related writing involves
writing stuff like publicity material for an upcoming speaking engagement), and
I have to confess that I did do a little of that, and I emailed and talked on
the phone some too. Nevertheless, I
managed to have a very peaceful day, a day where I had, pretty much solidly all
day long, what I call the monastery feeling.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When I looked
inside myself to see what the biggest factor was, what was really creating the
monastery feeling, I realized it was all about feeling like I had the freedom
to do what I wanted to and to not do what I didn’t want to. I realized that what makes me so happy when
I’m at the monastery is feeling like I own my time, my own self, my own everything,
and there’s nobody and nothing around who can take that away (or that I feel
compelled to give it away to). That the
discomfort I have in my own busy life is akin to the old, sad, weird loneliness
for the freedom to be myself that I used to have on Sunday night when I had to
go back to school on Sunday morning.
That the problem lies not in how busy I am or in what I’m doing but in
the feeling that there are things – more things than I can keep up with – that
I <i>have</i> to do. That getting the monastery feeling is at
least partly about somehow coming to feel like my needs are at least as
important as everyone else’s, like I can and will be in charge of my own
decisions and choices – like I have the freedom to be myself no matter what I’m
doing, and I don’t really <i>have</i> to do
anything. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
If that’s true,
then I can cultivate the monastery feeling no matter where I am or what I’ve
got on my list. And maybe, if I really
work at it, I might even be able to have the monastery feeling all the time, or
at least a lot more often than I do now. And that, as my Czech ex-boyfriend used to
say, is a really good news.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p> -- Mary Allen</o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-80146850890067620092013-06-05T13:41:00.001-07:002013-06-05T13:41:31.495-07:00How I Stopped Hurrying Into the Future
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A friend of mine who travels a lot
told me recently that a couple of weeks ago she was in the check-in line in the
airport in Amsterdam and the guy ahead of her was just <i>losing it </i>over some problem with his ticket or his flight. When my friend got to the counter herself she
said something to the airline clerk about the guy’s behavior and the woman said
that that had been happening a lot lately, way more than it used to – people really
<i>losing it</i> over relatively minor travel
problems. In fact, she said, it was a
noticeable trend; other people who worked in the airport had noticed it too
during the last year.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Why
do you think it’s happening?” my friend asked her. “And what do you think passengers can do to
keep from getting so upset over traveling problems?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The
woman gave my friend a one-word answer:
“Mindfulness.” She went on to say
that most of the people she waits on don’t seem to be in the moment at all; in
their minds they’re already in the next place, the place they’re flying to, and
if anything gets in the way of their going there right now, they get really,
really angry.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I
nodded when my friend said all that: It
makes perfect sense. It also, I thought,
has major implications for harnessing time.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Since I’ve been
planning my days a la my harnessing time system – sitting down first thing in
the morning or at any point during the day and deciding how to use the time
I’ve got – I’ve become a lot more able to be present in the day and in the
moment. I’ve always thought of
mindfulness as the ability to be present in whatever’s going on around or
inside me, instead of, say, being lost in my thoughts, my worries, my
projections about who said what to who yesterday or what I should do tomorrow
or should be doing right now et cetera. I still think of mindfulness that way,
and I’ve always wanted more of it in my life, have always known intuitively
that being present in the moment was the solution to just about all my
problems. What’s changed since I’ve been
harnessing time is what I think about how you can <i>achieve</i> mindfulness. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I used to think of
mindfulness as a state of consciousness that I could and should achieve, more
or less permanently, if I tried – tried more, tried harder – if I would only stop
forgetting all about mindfulness and lapsing back into not-mindfulness. But no matter how hard I tried to remember
to be mindful, I kept forgetting. And
trying to be mindful didn’t work either, because whenever I try to think or
feel anything it automatically slips away from me. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
What I’ve gotten
from harnessing time is a set of tools that I can pick up and use no matter
what my state of mind is. Using the
tools changes my state of mind with no further effort on my part. That way I sidestep the whole
trying-cancels-out-letting-go-and-just-being conundrum. (There’s another tool I use to get to
mindfulness too – a certain writing exercise I’ve stumbled on -- but that’s a
different subject for another day and maybe for a different blog spot.) The mindfulness I get from harnessing time is
the mindfulness of being where I am in time instead of being somewhere else in
the past or the future. I might not
always be aware of everything around me in the present moment – the light in
the room, the sound of birds outside my window, how my body feels as I sit here
in my chair -- but I’m definitely living in the present -- in the day, the
hour, the minute where I am – instead of projecting myself into the future, like
that guy in the airport in Amsterdam.
And there’s a much better chance that I’ll be aware of everything around
me too. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Harnessing time gives
me the ability to do one thing at a time.
At any given moment during the day I’m grounded in what I’m doing and I
know when I’m going to stop doing that and start doing something else. I know how much time I actually have to do
what I’m doing, and if I start to feel rushed I look at what time it is and at my
plan and decide whether or not I do actually have enough time to do what I’m
doing. (Usually I do have enough time –
I’m just afraid that I don’t.) And if something
takes longer than I thought it would – if a flight is delayed or something -- I
simply recalibrate. All of that gives
me a much better chance of relaxing, getting peaceful, and being present in the
moment, maybe even looking around me and seeing what’s there. Because rushing and all the feelings that go
with it – anxiety, irritation, anger, even outright rage -- is really just a
matter of trying to get somewhere faster than you can actually go there. And if you know where you’re going to be for
the next twenty minutes or hour or three hours or whatever, then you have a lot
better chance of actually settling down and being where you are. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Lately I’ve been
noticing another advantage of my harnessing-time-induced awareness in the
present moment. I’ve got a lot of stuff
coming up in the next couple of months:
teaching, public speaking, traveling so I can teach and speak in other
places – that kind of stuff, and while I’m grateful that I get to do it all, I
also feel a little overwhelmed by it all, and all of it makes me just a little
bit nervous. I keep catching myself worrying
a little bit about what I’m going to be doing – How am I going to feel when I’m
going through it? Am I going to succeed
with everything or will I somehow screw up or fluff my lines? Will I come down with a cold or have crippling
insomnia or… whatever. I used to be an all-out victim of that kind
of worrying, but now that I’m harnessing time, whenever I notice myself going to
those places in the future, I look at my plan for today, I remember what I’m
doing at this moment, and I settle back into where I am right now. And then I remember that for all the times
I’m going to be teaching and traveling and public speaking in the next couple
of months, there will be just as many times, in fact a lot more times, when
I’ll be hanging out and doing nothing, reading a mystery novel, wearing my
sweat pants. I think of how if I’m
projecting myself into the future – having a virtual imaginary experience of
something unpleasant (because whoever worries that it’s all going to be good?)
– I’m missing out on what I have going on that’s nice and peaceful right now. And I come back to the fact that everything
is always fine, nice, okay, whatever it is in the present, and it’s only in the
imaginary, worried-about future that things look really scary. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p> --- Mary Allen</o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<o:p> </o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-82789651212025565772013-05-15T13:39:00.002-07:002013-05-15T13:39:23.134-07:00Another Special Challenge of the Day Off
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Last Sunday I had another chance to
take a crack at the special challenge of the day off. (See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-special-challenge-of-day-off_7.html">The
Special Challenge of the Day Off</a> for the last time I grappled with this.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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As I’ve said
before, I crave chunks of time when I don’t <i>have</i>
to do anything, and last Sunday I had an entire day like that. I didn’t have to teach or coach; I didn’t
even have any social engagements. All
week long I looked forward to all that open time on Sunday. And all week long, whenever I thought of
something I needed to do that I didn’t have time for, I said to myself, I can
do that on Sunday. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On
Sunday morning I wrote down all the things I’d been looking forward to having
enough time to do on that day, and then some, in the notebook I use for planning
my days. My list was long and varied,
with everything from “work with Twitter” (I have an account but haven’t done
enough with it to get any mileage from it), to “shop for purse” (I really,
really need a new one, not really because I want one but because I’m worried
people will think less of me when they see my current old battered black-leather
one), to “do some soul searching about X,” to “work in the yard.” I’d felt like I desperately wanted to do all
those things when I didn’t have enough time for them during the week (well,
maybe not desperately, but at least fairly strongly), but now that I did have
time for them they didn’t appeal to me at all.
Still, I couldn’t let go of the idea that I should do at least a fair
number of those things. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Once
I’d made my list, I started to feel busy instead of relaxed and spacious. I suddenly felt like I had too much to do and
not enough time to do it, instead of like I had all the time in the world and I
could do whatever I wanted to with it. I
knew I had a choice here -- that I could choose the latter rather than the
former and that if I did my whole day would end up better – but somehow I
couldn’t seem to make the right choice and get to that spacious place. I
couldn’t figure out <i>when</i> I wanted to
do <i>what</i>, either. I was tired too, but I didn’t want to waste
the day lying around resting, partly because it was a beautiful day in May – sort
of. The weather kept changing its
mind: First it would be warm and sunny,
with a glorious blue sky; then the sun would go behind a cloud and the
atmosphere would start to feel gloomy and oppressive; then it would get nice
again. I kept changing my mind about
what I wanted to do according to what the weather was doing and how energetic I
felt at any given moment (somehow when the sun went in I seemed to have less
energy than when it was out.) I got more
and more confused about what to do and my mood rapidly deteriorated, despite
the fact that I kept thinking I should be able to have a great day. In fact, that thought – that I should be able
to use my harnessing time tools to rescue the day and feel better – just made
me feel even worse. And the fact that I’ve
been going around telling everyone that I’ve developed tools to harness time –
to stop feeling like I don’t have enough time and start feeling like I do have
enough, and since one of those tools is planning my day by figuring out what
I’m going to do when and then spending the day happily, peacefully, et cetera –
didn’t help any either. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I
never did manage to settle down and enjoy my day on Sunday. The best I could do was stumble through the
day and tell myself I’d have a better day tomorrow. I did manage to buy a new purse, and although
I felt like I wasn’t very productive, when I looked at the list I had made on
Sunday morning I was able to cross off a number of other things on there
too. But I never managed to enjoy the
moments of the day, never got – or had, or created -- the open spacious relaxed
feeling I wanted and had anticipated. In
fact, if anything I enjoyed the day less than I do those days when I have lots
of things I have to do. I did finally
manage to get peaceful on Sunday evening when the day with its opportunities to
be productive was over and I could settle down and peacefully watch an old
episode of Parenthood that I got from Netflix.
When I had no more expectations of doing anything that was in any way…
better.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So
there it is, I guess: It’s all about
expectations. I’ve always struggled with
expectations: Holidays, birthdays (my
own, of course), Friday and Saturday nights (i.e., date night), even beautiful
days have all been minefields of disappointment and misery at various times,
because of what I think I should be doing, should be feeling, should have that
I don’t have, should … you name it. And
when I look forward to those whole days off, when I imagine everything I’m
going to do and how gloriously free, open, spacious I’m going to feel, that
creates the conditions for expectations, and once there are expectations
there’s bound to be, if not disappointment, at the very least pressure. Pressure as in <i>shoulds</i>. This should be
better than it is, I should be doing more than I’m doing, I should be feeling
better than I am. Which creates the
conditions for rushing and hurrying – for straining, trying, <i>efforting</i>, to use a newly coined word I
heard recently, which seems incredibly apt in this case. And <i>efforting</i>,
as we all know, makes it practically impossible to relax, expand into the
moment, and enjoy whatever there is. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ve
never been able to figure out what to do about expectations. I can’t make myself let go of expectations
because I can’t make myself let go of anything:
The very idea is a contradiction in terms. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But
I can keep creating those days off – those whole day-long open spaces -- and
experimenting with them. Noticing what
works and what doesn’t work. And maybe some day I’ll get it right – I’ll be
able to settle into my time off with an expansive, restful, peaceful feeling --
if not for a whole day, then maybe for an hour or two or even just twenty
minutes. I’m sure it will be well worth
it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-88467577789378817242013-05-02T14:51:00.000-07:002013-05-02T14:51:17.732-07:00On the Loveliness of Open Spaces
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Last weekend a
friend of mine was visiting from out of town.
On Friday we drove to a nearby town to visit our local astrologer, have
lunch, and shop in some antique stores. Around
here, any trip beyond the outskirts of Iowa City involves traveling on a two-lane
highway surrounded by vast open rolling cornfields. I
still can’t get over it, and I moved here from New England, where all you ever
see is trees growing right up to the edge of the road, almost twenty-five years
ago. When I lived in Massachusetts I breathed a sigh of relief every time I got
to the edge of the ocean. And now the
same thing happens – my entire being breathes some metaphysical sigh of relief
-- whenever I drive along those country roads, open fields spreading out as far
as the eye can see in every direction, the fields meeting the edge of the wide
blue sky out on the horizon, cumulous clouds towering overhead. When you look in the rearview mirror you see
the two-lane highway slipping away behind you, it too surrounded by fields and
sky, reflected in the mirror. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I love all the
open space out here. It turns out I
crave open spaces. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I crave open spaces
in my life too – chunks of time when I don’t <i>have</i> to do anything. Time to
think, time to be, time to stop focusing on the busy insistent outside world
and what it wants and needs from me. Time
to connect with some larger smarter wider more expansive part of myself. Open spaces are crucial to writers – we write
during open spaces and writing itself is a kind of opening that requires space
to open into. But I’m absolutely
convinced that everyone needs open spaces in their days, in their lives, that some
deep crucial part of us craves them and needs them. Needs
them the way the body needs essential nutrients, craves them the way I crave the
sight of open fields and sky and water. And
it’s a lot harder to get those open spaces than it seems like it would or
should be.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m busy like everyone
else these days, of course, and it’s not that easy to find time to do nothing. I have to make the time, believe I should and
deserve to make the time, and then I have to hold onto the time once I’ve made
it. And even if I do all that, I’m not
necessarily guaranteed an open space. I’ve
come to believe that the problem – and therefore the solution – to not having
open spaces in our lives isn’t just a matter of how much time we have and don’t
have. I think it’s also – maybe even mostly -- a
matter of how we think. That we can
ruin whatever open spaces we have by filling them up with thoughts: thoughts about how busy we are, what we have
to do later, what we should be doing now instead of what we’re doing, even
thoughts about how well we’re using this open time, worries that we’re wasting
it -- not to mention thoughts about our partners, children, jobs, finances, you
name it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Years ago, when I
had all my time to write, I could sometimes get so uptight about what I had to
do later it would actually interfere with my ability to sit there and
concentrate now. I was only able to write for a few hours on any given day (any
more than four hours at a stretch and you start to ruin it instead of making it
better), but I had to feel like I had <i>all</i>
my time that day to write in order to be able to do it. I also felt tense, to the point where I could
barely write, if I thought someone was going to call me or I was going to have
some other interruption during my writing time.
Now I don’t have all my time to write and I don’t have the luxury of
letting my thoughts ruin whatever open spaces I’ve got for it. I’ve had to learn how and where to fit those open
spaces into my life and how to stick to them after I’ve created them. And I’ve had to learn how to make use of my
open spaces when I get them, to stop thinking about what wants to interrupt me,
forget about whatever I think is trying to crowd out my time. If possible, during my open spaces, I stop
thinking all together.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My
open-space-making isn’t easy and it’s not perfect. But on most days I do make some open space to
write: When I plan my day I schedule in some
writing time and I try to stick to that time.
I wish I had longer writing times -- in fact I’m working on
consolidating the other things I do to make longer writing times; I can feel
the greediness in me for those longer open spaces even as I write this. (It occurs to me that one of the reasons I
chose to be a writer is that it gives me an excuse, even an obligation, to keep
those open spaces in my life.) For now
my writing times are what they are and I do my best to make good use of them,
and I make a concerted effort not to give them away when something else comes
along, even something that feels kind of urgent. I also make open spaces when I’m not writing
– I write them right down on my daily planning calendar: times when I don’t have to do anything but
think, stare out the window, nap, read a book.
The longer I’ve been harnessing time the more I value those rest times,
and new research even shows that rest and renewal times are necessary for
optimal productivity. (See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/02/relaxing-renewing-and-refreshing-mind.html">Relaxing,
Renewing, and Refreshing the Mind</a>.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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And every day, for
ten minutes, I make an open space in which I meditate. I sit in a comfortable chair, close my eyes,
and try to listen to the sounds around me, and when thoughts arise I picture
them falling like ashes to the bottom of my inner picture. When I can stop thinking, even for a few
seconds, something sweet, happy, expansive opens up inside my mind, and
afterwards I feel just a little bit better all day long than I do if I didn’t
take that ten minutes to meditate. (See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-power-of-ten-minutes.html">The
Power of Ten Minutes</a>.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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I sort of believe
that any time you open up some space inside yourself, you make it easier to do
it again (the way any time you work out at the gym it’s easier to do it the
next time you go to the gym), and that whatever little bit of openness you’ve managed
to create lingers like a whiff of fresh air – like a good scent from a strange
mountain, to quote Robert Olen Butler – that wends its way into the rest of
your being-alive space, making it just a little bit less crowded and busy in
there. So even if you can only give yourself ten minutes of open space a day,
and even if you can only stop thinking and listen to the sounds around you for
a few seconds during that time, it really does matter. It can be one of the best uses you’ll ever
find for ten minutes, one of the best ways you can harness time to do something
for yourself.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-40605670812380217692013-04-19T09:42:00.001-07:002013-04-19T09:42:18.584-07:00Harnessing Time to Look at Kittens
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<span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">This
morning I went over to my friend’s house to see two tiny foster kittens she got
yesterday.</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">(They were spotted by a
passerby in a ditch near a street corner, their mother nowhere to be found, and
brought to the animal shelter; my friend is fostering them for a month until
they’re big enough to be adoptable.</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">For
about forty-five minutes she, I, and her nine-year-old son crouched on the
floor and watched and commented on the kittens' every move:</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">two tiny little fluffy things tottering
around on bow-legs, staring out at the new world through round blue alarmed
eyes.</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">They’re excruciatingly, unbearably
cute:</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">they have the super-power of
cuteness, as another friend’s son said about my cat when she was a
kitten.)</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">Yesterday afternoon I took time
out from my day to make a pasta dish my friend told me was really good (it </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">was</i><span style="line-height: 200%;"> good, even with tofu substituted for
chicken), and later today I’m going to stop whatever else I’m doing and clean
my bathroom.</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">I’m happy that I’ve learned
how to harness my time to do those things -- peacefully, mindfully,
without guilt or rushing to get to them or through them.</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">Happy that these days I actually do them.</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I’ve been
harnessing time for a few years now, and one of many important things I’ve learned
from it is that the little things we do purely for pleasure, just for ourselves
– cook something new, go for a walk with friends, sit and sketch, take a nap –
matter a lot more than we usually think they do. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Time,
as I keep saying, is like the wind – an incredible resource we can use to
accomplish anything if we can harness it and use it for our own purposes instead
of walking into it or letting it blow us around. I harness time by consciously
deciding how I’m going to use the time I have every day, and by calling my time
partner (another friend of mine) and
telling her what my plan is. My friend
tells me her plan too, and we tell each other in detail how our days went
yesterday -- what did and didn’t go according to our plans. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
It was through this
sharing that I learned what I know now about the importance of the little
things. I realize, of course, that I’m
not the first person to say that it’s the little things that count; it’s been
said so many times before it’s practically a self-help cliché. But it
wasn’t until I started planning my days and, in particular, hearing my friend’s
daily plans, that I felt the truth of it all the way down to my bones. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I love finding out
every single thing my friend plans to do today and what she did and didn’t do
yesterday – how she wants to use or did use her daily allotment of twenty-four
hours – but I’ve noticed that I really perk up whenever she says she’s going to
do one of those little, just-for-the-pleasure-of-it things. (I highly recommend doing daily harnessing
time check-ins with a friend; see <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/09/harnessing-time-with-little-help-from.html">Harnessing
Time with a Little Help from My Friend</a> and <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/03/with-even-more-help-from-my-friend.html">With
a Little More Help from My Friend</a>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Day after day,
I’ve noticed that I get a light, airy, open, happy feeling whenever my friend
tells me she’s going to do some little thing just for herself, and through that
noticing I’ve come to see, to really believe, that those things are not just
merely fun, not just guilty little pleasures, distractions from the real urgent
necessary work of the day – they’re <i>important</i>. They redeem us and spiritually feed us; they
might even be what we remember when we look back on our weeks, months, years,
lives.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
(<i>Will I remember this a month from now?</i> I try to ask myself that whenever I’m in a
twist over something, and almost invariably the answer is no.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
For a while, about
ten years ago, I made two lists in a notebook at the end of every day; on one
list I wrote ten things I was grateful for or that went well that day and on
the other I wrote ten things I felt bad about.
It turned out that the things that were going right in my life were almost
exclusively big and enduring, whereas the things that were going wrong were all
stuff that wouldn’t matter in a day or so -- in a month at the most. And yet the bad stuff was what I was focusing
on, if not outright consumed by; it was commanding almost all of my attention
on any given day. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
And I sort of
think that when we focus on what we <i>have</i>
to do instead of what we <i>want</i> to do,
something similar is going on. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I have this theory
that when we’re really, really busy – feeling totally overwhelmed by everything
we <i>have</i> to do – there’s a good chance
that we’re doing something, maybe a whole bunch of somethings, maybe even
everything, not really for our own sakes but because we think someone else
wants or needs us to do them. We feel
like we <i>have</i> to do those things
because someone else will… suffer, get mad, be disappointed, fire us, reject
us, think badly of us, not give us what we want (choose one of the above or
make up some more). (And for more about
this idea <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-people-pleasing-trap.html">See
The People-Pleasing Trap</a>.) When I
was writing down all the bad things that were bothering me, most of them had to
do with other people too: someone was
mad at me, or some potential boyfriend had abandoned me, or something I had
written was being rejected by someone, et cetera. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
All of this is
leading up to why, I think, doing those little things that are good for us and
only us, feels so good. And maybe why
doing everything we <i>have</i> to do feels
so bad, or at the very least urgent, hectic, and un-fun.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I’m not suggesting
that we all toss aside our obligations and just do whatever we want all the
time. Most of us couldn’t do that even
if we wanted to; there are people, places and things in our lives that require
our attention, we need to have jobs and do them effectively in order to
survive. And even if we do have all our
time to do whatever we want whenever we want, as I did for a while, sort of,
when I had money from a book contract and nothing else I had to do but write, we
can still manage to feel overwhelmed with everything we ought and need to do; when
I had all my time at my own disposal I worried constantly about whether I was writing
long enough, whether I should be doing more to clean my hour, fix my house,
etc. It was as if I was trying to make
myself stay busy, and feel busy, because if I didn’t I felt guilty.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
So that’s the
bottom line, I guess. It’s all about
attitude, all about what we do inside our heads, whether we’re the busiest
person in the world or someone with absolutely nothing we have to do. That’s great news because we can work on
changing our attitudes. And in the
meantime there are some simple easy measures we take that in and of themselves
might change our attitudes. We can look
at how we’re going to spend our day today and decide to throw in one or two
little things we want to do instead of feel like we have to do. Things like reading a novel, hanging out for
a while doing nothing, going to a friend’s house to play with some
kittens. And when the urge comes to toss
those things aside because it turns out we’re just too busy to do them, we can
ignore that urge, do whatever nice thing we planned, and see what happens. Maybe nothing bad will happen if we take a
little time off and do something fun just for the hell of it. In fact, more than likely something good will
happen. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
And maybe, just
maybe, it will turn out that we do have time for ourselves after all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
--
Mary Allen <o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-20354053543900782482013-03-20T13:40:00.003-07:002013-03-20T13:41:32.530-07:00With A Little More Help From My Friend<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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As I’ve said
before, planning my day is a two-part process.
(See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/09/harnessing-time-with-little-help-from.html">Harnessing
Time with a Little Help from My Friend</a>.)
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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>I did not do yoga, I
did not pay the water bill</i>, 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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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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.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-12559094650346170562013-03-11T10:46:00.001-07:002013-03-11T10:46:59.523-07:00How Long Does It Take to Clean a Cat Box?
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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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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 <i>have</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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 <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/01/decision-fatigue-and-many-other.html">Decision
Fatigue and Many Other Fatigues</a>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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 -- ?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
-- Mary Allen</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-9174547172173206662013-02-27T07:28:00.001-08:002013-02-27T07:28:28.825-08:00Relaxing, Renewing, and Refreshing the Mind
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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
<i>New York Times</i> 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 <i>anything </i>else, not even change out of her pajamas – then the next
day she had the most productive day of her life. (See <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2012/09/grappling-with-procrastination-or.html">Grappling
with Procrastination, Or Letting the Monkey Off Its Chain</a>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
It helps to know
that we’re actually doing something <i>good</i>
instead of something <i>bad</i> 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.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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 <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/01/decision-fatigue-and-many-other.html">decision
fatigue and all the other mental fatigues</a>, 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-12005890302137411682013-02-15T10:15:00.001-08:002013-02-15T10:15:38.549-08:00On Slowing Down through Simplifying
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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 <i>have</i>
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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 <i>have
to</i> <i>do but don’t have time for</i>,
it’s a good idea to get quiet for a few minutes and reassess. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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 <i>not</i> 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 <i>had</i> to do them. I realized
that I had been listening to that voice once again and believing what it said.<o:p></o:p></div>
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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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
All of which leads
me to insight number two about slowing down:
(For insight number one see <a href="http://www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com/2013/02/on-beauty-and-grace-of-slowing-down.html">On
the Beauty and Grace of Slowing Down</a>.)
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 <i>that</i>.) 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 <i>really</i> have to do/consume/expend energy on all these tasks
today? Or can we postpone some or not do
them at all? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p> -- Mary Allen</o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-67663732159540466952013-02-04T15:44:00.001-08:002013-02-04T15:44:49.887-08:00On the Beauty and Grace of Slowing Down
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About a month ago, around the time
of the new year, I decided I wanted to work on slowing down. For me, hurrying
is mostly a state of mind. When I’m
hurrying, I keep thinking about the next thing I have to do instead of what I’m
doing now. I keep worrying that I’ll be
late, that I won’t have time to do what I need to do, that I should be doing
something else. I feel like I have to do
everything all at once instead of one thing at a time. Those thoughts make me tense; they lead to an
anxious, slightly irritable, unpleasant body feeling. I hate that feeling and I want to slow down
and stop feeling it as much as I can.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I have to say I’ve
already made a lot of progress with slowing down by using my own harnessing
time tools. Still, sometimes lately I’ve
noticed myself feeling rushed no matter what was going on, as if the feeling
had a life of its own, or had become a habit I was unconsciously holding onto
in my body. So I decided to see if I
could come up with some reliable ways to slow down.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Just
those words -- <i>slow down</i> -- give me a
taste of what I want. When I slow down I
feel notably more peaceful, restful, expansive. It’s like something in me --
some tense tightly held thing, like a big energetic clenched fist -- relaxes,
releases, opens up. It takes energy to
clench a fist, and it takes energy – a <i>lot</i>
of energy – to be constantly straining, rushing, worrying, hurrying. Slowing down is a way to conserve energy, to
rest your mind and your body – your inner energetic self -- while you’re awake
no matter what you’re doing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One
way to slow down is to plan to do less on any given day. We can make fewer appointments, take whole
days off where we don’t do anything but rest or schedule time for resting among
our other regular stuff. We can simplify
our lives. Those are all beautiful and even
necessary ways to slow down. But I
wanted to find a way to slow down that wouldn’t depend on changing something on
the outside; I wanted to see if I could slow down all the time. I
wanted to see if I could slow down in my head.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Since
I started working on this, I’ve noticed that one thing that helps me slow down
is to be consciously aware of how much time I’ve actually got. This helps me stop focusing on how much time
I don’t have, how much I have to cram into the little time there is, et cetera. When I plan my day every day, I write down what
I have to do, but I also – and here’s the important part – think about from
what time to what time I’m going to do each thing. Doing this can work as an emergency measure at
any time during any day. So if you’re
feeling rushed or like you’ve got too much to do and there isn’t enough time to
do it and/or you don’t know where to start and/or your day just isn’t going
well because you can’t get any traction with all those things you’ve got to do,
here’s what I suggest: Sit down,
consider how much time you’ve actually got to work with – so, say, maybe two
hours, from two to four in the afternoon – and then budget that time,
considering realistically what you can do during it and how much time each
thing is going to take. So you might
decide to clean your kitchen from two to two-thirty, fill out two job
applications on-line from two-thirty to three, and work on the article you’re
writing from three to four. Making the
plan forces you to be realistic about what you can get done (and let go of what
you can’t) and it also forces you to set some priorities. Once you’ve made the plan you can peacefully
work your way through it and at the end of the day you can feel good because,
even if you didn’t get everything done, you got something done. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ve gotten into
the habit of planning my whole day that way every day and I absolutely love
it. And when I start to feel rushed, I
make myself stop and look at the clock to see what time it is. Then I look at my plan to see what I’m
supposed to be doing now and what time I have to start doing the next thing on
my list. I might see, for example, that
I have a coaching appointment (I make my living as a writing coach) at
nine-thirty a.m., and it’s nine o’clock now.
Maybe I wanted to do yoga but had started to feel like there wasn’t time
and then I started to rush, to speed up on the inside and/or the outside. But now that I’ve looked at the time I
realize I have a whole half hour and that I can do my yoga – or as much of it
as I can get done – in that half hour.
In that moment I stop rushing and slow down: I’ve got enough time to do yoga. Or maybe I look at the clock and see that
it’s nine-twenty-five and there isn’t time to do yoga before my coaching
appointment. I make a decision – I won’t
do yoga today, or I’ll do it later, between three and three-thirty this afternoon
– I let go of feeling like I have to rush to do it now, and I slow down. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
So, slowing-down insight
number one: Feeling rushed is a
by-product of living unconsciously, of being unconscious about time. Slowing down is about being conscious of how
much time there actually is – in the moment, in today. It’s about planning how we’re going to use
our time; it’s about thinking about how much time things take, how
much time we have; it’s even about knowing what time it actually is. This may seem counter-intuitive – slowing
down seems like it should be about something light, free, airy, not about nailing
things down and looking at clocks and so forth. But it makes sense when you
think about it. It makes sense because what you know is a lot less scary than
what you don’t know. When you’re rushing
you’re living in the fear thoughts inside your head – there’s not enough time,
I can’t get anything done, etc. But when
you look at the clock and think about how much time you have and how
you’re going to use that time, then you can relax, slow down, and live in the
real world where things are actually a lot less frightening.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p> </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> -- Mary Allen</o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-49846037721242756162013-01-25T13:30:00.001-08:002013-01-25T13:30:17.720-08:00Decision Fatigue and Many Other Fatigues As Well
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About a year and a half ago,
researchers discovered that every time you make a decision, no matter how large
or small it is, the decision takes energy.
The very act of deciding is somehow literally tiring, and it’s
cumulative, the more you’ve decided on a given day or spot in time, the less
able you are to decide again. (So, for
example, judges are more likely to make the difficult decision to parole
prisoners at the beginning of the day when they’re fresh and have lots of
energy than at the end of the day when they’ve already made lots of other
decisions.) The researchers coined a
phrase to describe what you get when you’ve made a lot of decisions; it’s
decision fatigue. I got really excited
when I heard about that research, because it confirmed something I’ve been
thinking about for a long time. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Many
years ago I had a job in a toothbrush factory.
I had to scoop up handfuls of toothbrush handles and align the handles
so the curves all went the same way and then I had to stuff them into two
different hoppers and grab little wads of bristles and stick them in a certain
place in the machine and keep an eye on the toothbrushes that were shooting out
the side, all at a rate of speed that I couldn’t possibly keep up with. I found it incredibly stressful and boring at
the same time and after three weeks I quit; I had taken a semester off from
college to live in the real world but three weeks of that kind of real world
was plenty for me. But during those
three weeks I drove to the factory every day in the middle of the afternoon –
the job was second shift, from three-thirty to midnight -- and worked on that
machine, grabbing the handles, wrestling with the bristles, et cetera, for
eight whole hours -- and then I drove home and went to bed and did it all night
long in my dreams. Of course, no
toothbrushes appeared in the real world while I was making them in my
dreams. But that doesn’t change the
fact that I was doing all that work while I was asleep.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And
since I’ve been harnessing time, thinking about how to get more peaceful <i>and</i> get everything I have to do done,
how to rest and relax in this era of constant busy-ness and constant stress,
I’ve been realizing that you can be doing invisible, metaphysical, incorporeal
work even when you’re awake. Just like
that decision fatigue research shows.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Decisions,
yes. They take energy, there’s no doubt
about it. While you’re struggling to
make decisions, the invisible worker inside you – like the part of me that was
making toothbrushes in my sleep -- is struggling to get something off the
ground: a thought, a decision. It picks up one alternative and puts it
down. Picks up another one and puts it
down. And so forth. Over and over. And that takes energy. That’s one reason I plan my day at the start
of the day: So I don’t have to keep
debating about what to do, don’t have to keep deciding, lifting the little
decision weights and putting them down, all day long. Right there I get some relief; the inner part
of me gets to rest a little instead of working all the time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But
I like to think the ramifications of decision fatigue go way beyond decisions. If decisions take energy, surely so does
worrying, where that tooth-brushing-making factory worker inside you is
basically experiencing some potential disaster in the future, having all the
feelings you might have when the bad thing happens, and then running around (still
on the virtual reality plane -- that is to say, still in your head) trying to
find ways to keep it from happening. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Regret
or second-guessing -- feeling like you woulda, coulda, shoulda done something,
like I saw in an ad that flashed across the TV screen once at the bank (see
“Avoiding the Woulda, Coulda, Shouldas,” posted here on July 13, 2012) -- are definitely
another heavy lifting job for the interior factory worker. And then there’s feeling like you should do
something (instead of <i>should have</i>
done something), don’t have enough time for something, or should quit what
you’re doing right now to do something else. Plus there’s worrying that someone might get
mad at you if you don’t, can’t, or forget to do something. There we’ve got worry fatigue combined with
decision fatigue along with guilt and self-beating-up fatigue. And if we blame someone else because they or
their needs are keeping us from doing something, we can add in the intense
thankless labor of resenting along with all our other psychic exertions. No wonder we’re so exhausted all the time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
So
how can we cut down on some of this <i>work</i>,
allow our inner workers to take a little time off? Planning is one way, like I already said. It’s
easier to make a decision -- a little series of decisions about what you’re
going to do today -- once, when you’re fresh in the morning, than it is to have
to keep trying to make decisions throughout the day. Planning the day also eliminates most of the <i>shoulds </i>and <i>should haves</i>, because you can be confident you’ll find time – make
time, harness time – to do what you should, if not today then tomorrow or some
other day, and you can also harness time to do what you should have done before. In addition to eliminating <i>should</i> and <i>should have</i> fatigue, this also cuts down on guilt, fear-of-screwing-up,
and worry-that-someone’s-going-to-get-mad-at-you fatigue. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Avoiding
making decisions altogether definitely isn’t the way to avoid decision
fatigue. On the contrary, we have to
make decisions once in order to avoid struggling with making them over and over. And in the same way, we should make definite
decisions about when we’re <i>not</i> going
to work. Because just thinking you should do something,
even could do something, is a kind of work in itself. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
So, for example,
if you’re going on vacation, you’ll probably enjoy yourself more and get a lot
more rest if you decide beforehand that you’re <i>not</i> going to go over that manuscript or … (fill in the blank with some other large
task), than if you tell yourself that maybe you’ll go over the manuscript when
you’re on vacation because after all you want to do it and you won’t get a
chance to do it any other time. Let’s face
it, you probably won’t end up doing that work while you’re on vacation anyway –
you’ll be to be too tired to do it, that’s why you need a vacation. And if you decide beforehand that you’re not
going to do that work on vacation no matter how much you might need to, want
to, et cetera, you’ll feel free, relaxed, unburdened, during your time
off. But if you think you might do that
work, some part of you will keep picking it up and putting it down, holding it
in your thoughts, carrying it around. The
tooth-brush-making factory worker inside you will never get a break, and
eventually it may collapse or run screaming out of the building and never want
to go back. <o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
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-- Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-5995357653993259172013-01-15T10:06:00.001-08:002013-01-15T10:06:40.437-08:00The Problem of Minutia
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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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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 <i>need</i>
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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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 <i>made</i> 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.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
-- Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-27843680633826787662013-01-07T16:23:00.003-08:002013-01-08T07:53:16.636-08:00The Special Challenge of the Day Off<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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The other day I
had a whole day off. There was nothing I
had to do: I didn’t have to work or
socialize or do errands or even talk on the phone. I was going out at six-thirty to a New Year’s
Eve event, but that was so late in the day it didn’t count. (In fact it gave me something to look forward
to at the end of the day without interrupting the day.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I’d made a point
of keeping the whole day clear because I knew I needed it, for two
reasons: One, there were some things I
wanted to do in my house and I also wanted to spend more time than usual with my
writing. And two, I needed a stretch of
time – I could feel this somewhere deep inside my body – where I didn’t <i>have</i> to do anything, time where some
part of me that feels crunched and rushed and obligated could stretch out and lollygag
and expand. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
So I took the day off,
and I had high hopes for it. Mostly my
hopes were attached to having that open, spacious, there’s-more-than-enough-time-for-everything
feeling. (This is what harnessing time is all about for me. It’s about <i>feeling</i> at least as much as <i>doing</i>:
I want to feel calm, spacious, peaceful, and present in the moment, and I don’t
want to feel anxious, rushed, overwhelmed, and crowded with stuff I have to do
and thoughts about stuff I have to do -- no matter how much I do or don’t have
to do. <i>And</i> I also want to harness my time to do whatever I need to
do. I find that it’s an endlessly
fascinating pursuit, because there’s always <i>something</i>
that can get in the way of that peaceful spacious feeling, and therefore there are
always things to learn.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
When I sat down to
plan my day, on this day I had off, I felt my mood starting to slip a little. I started debating: How much time should I put into the
writing? How much time should I spend
puttering in my house? Would I have
enough time to do both as well as time to lollygag around. I also remembered a few little things that I did
need to do, on top of focusing on my writing and working in my house – I’ve
been wanting to research a natural health issue on the internet for somebody I
love, there’s something I need to read for a new coaching client, et cetera. Right away I started losing that feeling of
spaciousness that I wanted and that I had imagined having on this day off.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I
planned my day the way I always do, and that helped quite a lot. I decided to clean up the house, do yoga, put
together a standing desk I’d bought from Office Depot, and do some other
puttering as well upstairs in my study (I thought that putting the desk
together would be a form of puttering), from ten to one. Then I would eat lunch and write (and maybe
research that stuff on the internet) from one to four. I gave myself extra time for everything (so, for
instance, instead of giving myself an hour to putter I gave myself two and a
half hours), which I thought would increase my sense of spaciousness. And it did increase my sense of spaciousness
when I was making the plan.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I
ran into trouble when I started trying to put together the desk that I had
bought from Office Depot. What I had
imagined as a fun, satisfying home project if only I had enough time for it,
turned out to be a frustrating, irritating, and futile time-eating pit. (Of course – I should have known that would
happen.) I managed to screw on one
caster but could have spent infinity turning the screw to attach the second
caster without the screw tightening. I
decided to bring the desk (it’s actually called a laptop stand – I want to do
some of my work standing up because new research shows that the less you sit
for long stretches of time the healthier you’re likely to be) back to the store
and have them put it together there for a small fee, which I knew they did with
furniture. But when I called to ask them
what they would charge and how late they were open, the guy said that they only
put together chairs at the store and that to put together a desk – even a cheap
flimsy little laptop stand like what I had bought – I would have to bring the
receipt to the store, arrange to have someone come to my house, and pay to have
them assemble the thing at my house.
They couldn’t tell me how much it was going to cost until I brought my
receipt to the store, but I could tell it wasn’t going to be cheap. By then I felt really annoyed, and I said,
“So it’s going to cost more than I paid for the &*(^%ing desk to get it put
together,” and the guy at the store told me in a bawling-out tone of voice that
there was no need to use bad language. I
hung up in a thoroughly foul mood. Then I spent at least an hour looking at
standing desks on Amazon – I wanted one that didn’t have to be assembled, and I
certainly wasn’t going to give any more money to Office Depot. I finally ordered something, then went back
on-line to try to figure out if what I had just ordered was going to be the
right height, and then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I went back on-line
again, searched for and eventually ordered a floor mat that makes it easier on
your feet and back to work standing up.
So much for feeling like there’s enough time for everything, for
expanding into emptiness, silence, and spaciousness. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally
I sat down at my desk and wrote. It
felt good to be doing that, and afterwards I made my potluck salad and went to
my New Year’s Eve event. I didn’t have
very high hopes for it – I went to the same thing last year and it wasn’t much
fun. But this year it was fun, even
though two people I’d been looking forward to seeing there had called during
the day to say they weren’t going to go.
I had no expectations at all and perhaps for that reason I was
pleasantly surprised. I even ended up
having a nice long talk with someone I probably wouldn’t have spoken to much if
my two friends had been there. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
So what is there
to learn from all of this about harnessing time? I suppose it’s that life happens, things get
in the way of our best-laid plans, and maybe sometimes that’s not such a bad
thing. And even if it is a bad thing, there’s
always tomorrow. If we ended up feeling
irritated instead of spacious, we can always take another whack at spaciousness
-- tomorrow, or next week, or even right now.
And there’s always today, as imperfect as it may be. There’s always this moment, and the moment
after this one, and all the moments after that. Here at the beginning of this new year, we are
rich in moments – to use or not use, to revel in or rush through, to notice or
not see at all. It’s up to us to decide
how we want to use our time and spend our lives, and if we screw something up,
if life comes along and screws it up for us, we can always go back to the
standing desk and give it another try. <o:p></o:p></div>
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-- Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-78677309490093725572012-12-17T14:36:00.000-08:002012-12-17T15:40:22.947-08:00The Deafening Sound of a Thousand Little Emails<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
One of the
problems I have with email is that little dinging noise the computer makes
whenever an email arrives. No matter
what I’m doing, I simply can’t seem to make myself ignore that little ding. I know you can push a button somewhere in your
system preferences and turn the ding off, but I don’t want to turn the ding off,
even though it interrupts me all the time.
I feel a little excited every time I hear the ding -- I can hardly wait
to open the email to see if it’s something good or if it will make me feel good. And sometimes, especially after I’ve sent
someone an email containing information that might not make them very happy, I
feel a little anxious too. Maybe it’ll
be something bad, I think, and then I’m in even more of a hurry to see what the
email says. Every time I hear the ding I
feel compelled to stop what I’m doing, open the email it’s announcing, read the
email, and then answer the email. (It
goes without saying that the same is true for texts, which arrive with even
more fanfare and are even more impossible to ignore. I have pretty much the same issue with phone
messages too.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I think the real
problem with email is that it’s scattered throughout the day and therefore
makes us feel scattered. There’s no
sense of having completed a task when we email because just when we send one
email another one comes that needs to be responded to. It arrives in the midst of other tasks,
interrupts our concentration, and calls out to us – Pay attention to me! I might be saying something interesting! I probably need to be responded to! -- if we
try to ignore it. And it takes up time we’ve planned to devote to other things,
either by crowding them with little interruptions or by hogging their time all
together. How many times have you opened your email first thing in the morning
and then found yourself spending much more time on it than you thought you
would, or even ended up emailing instead of doing whatever else you had to do?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I know I’m not the
only person writing about this, and I’m certainly not the only person
struggling with it. A Pew Research
Center survey conducted last spring found that 67 percent of cell phone owners
find themselves checking their device even when it’s not ringing or vibrating. As far as being digitally addicted goes, I’m
probably somewhere in the bottom third of the pack. For me, at least so far,
emailing/texting/phone-checking is mostly a problem when I’m supposed to be
writing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
The other day when
I was sitting at my computer, I was dismayed to find myself checking my email
every few minutes. I also felt pulled by
my telephone, which I had turned off for the duration of my writing time, and a
few times I actually turned the phone back on and listened to my voicemail. (There was nothing interesting there, of
course.) Doing something compulsive to
get away from the hard work of concentrating on writing isn’t new to me. I used to eat during my writing time, and a
long time before that I used to <i>smoke</i>
during it. Still, there’s something
about this emailing and phone-message-listening-to that feels different. I feel pulled off course by it in a way
that’s stressful, somehow, at the same time as it’s compelling. I’m not alone at my desk with my writing any
more, I’m there with an infinite possible number of people who may or may not
want or need something from me. And the
quality of my attention, when I’m emailing or worrying about phone messages, is
different from the quality of my attention when I’m writing. It’s scattered and sprinkled with anxiety
about other people and their wants and needs.
And it’s watered-down – even when I was eating or smoking there were
times when I wasn’t eating or smoking and during those times I could write
without fear of interruption, and food and cigarettes didn’t pop out of nowhere
to tap me on the shoulder and get my attention, the way email does.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
The obvious solution is to bite the bullet and
put emailing (and texting and making phone calls and listening to phone
messages and let’s throw in surfing the Internet and looking at Facebook too)
in their place. That is, find some
spots for them during the day and do them then instead of doing them all the
time along with everything else. Timothy
Ferriss, who wrote <i>The Four-Hour Work
Week</i>, says in a recent book that he only checks his email twice a day. A writer I know says he’s had good luck
emailing only after one o’clock in the afternoon. And a number of experts on time-management
have been suggesting more or less the same thing – that you pick a number of
times you’ll check and answer emails every day – say, four – turn your email
off the rest of the time and let your clients, and whoever else needs to know,
know when you are and aren’t going to be reading and responding to your
emails. All of which seems like very
good advice. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
The only thing is,
I suspect it may be easier to tell somebody to turn off their email (cell
phone, et cetera) some of the time than it is to actually do it. That it might be similar to telling an
alcoholic to manage their drinking by only drinking wine from four to six in
the afternoon. That it might have about
the same result – that is, it might seem like a solution has been reached but
in the long run there won’t be much real change. I’m not saying that every single one of us is
a digital-aholic. But I do think we –
each of us, or at least most of us -- probably have to address or at least
consider the compulsive, addictive element of emailing (texting, surfing the
Internet, etc.) in our own situations before we can really get a hold of
it. I know I did, and I continue to have
to work at it. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I’ve started
turning off my email while I write. I <i>have</i> to turn it off -- I can’t just decide to ignore it, because I
can’t make myself ignore those little dings.
It’s been hard, I admit it, to turn off my email and leave it off. So far, during my one- or two-hour chunks of
writing time, the longest I’ve managed to avoid turning my email back on to
check my messages is fifteen minutes.
I’ve noticed that when I’m turning it back on I have a brief feeling of
pleasurable anticipation. Getting a nice little email, it turns out, feels to
me (and probably everybody else) like a little reward, like eating a cookie or
something. Usually the emails I get are
not particularly nice – they’re either totally boring advertisements or humdrum
communications about work or something else.
But there’s always a chance that one could be nice -- could make me feel
good, accepted, loved, rewarded -- and every so often one does. So I guess I’m like those research monkeys
that kept pushing the bar to try to get an intermittent dose of cocaine. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
So what can we do about all of this?
Do we all need to go to twelve-step meetings to deal with our addictions
to instant communication? I don’t think
there are any such meetings, but maybe we can take a page from other
twelve-step programs. First of all, we
probably need to admit there’s a compulsive element to the whole thing, that it
might take a little more than just making a decision to change how and when we
email (and text and surf and Facebook, et cetera), to actually make
changes. It might help to try to change,
as I did, and then see what happens. Try
turning off your email (or your smartphone) for certain periods of time during
the day and see how it feels: Can you
stand it? Do you have to keep turning it
back on just in case? If you find it’s
hard to keep away from instant communicating, then that information in itself
may be helpful. Maybe you can just sit
with the feeling, acknowledge and accept it, notice how the compulsion to
communicate is taking away from your ability to peacefully stick to one task at
a time. (This is similar to step one in the twelve steps: “Admitted we were powerless over alcohol,
that our lives had become unmanageable.”)
Maybe that’s all we have to do for a while; maybe doing that in itself
-- just recognizing what’s going on and accepting it – will make things better. It did help, has helped, me. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
It might also be helpful to take a little inventory of whatever we’re
getting from constantly checking our email (as in step four: “Made a searching and fearless moral
inventory of ourselves”). Or we can make
a goal, such as only emailing at certain times of the day, and then picture
ourselves accomplishing that goal during our meditation or ask the larger
smarter part of ourselves to help us accomplish it. (Step three:
“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a
power greater than ourselves.”) Or maybe
all we have to do is make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to
ourselves and our own lives, instead of turning them over to our computers and
our cell phones and other people’s needs and communications. And if worse comes to worse we can always
try taking a digital sabbatical or attending a digital detox retreat, as some
people are doing these days.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
We can try all of the above, and then keep trying, until we find something
that works. We’ll know when we’ve
accomplished what we wanted to achieve, whatever it was, because we’ll feel
peaceful and productive – more peaceful than we ever have before, maybe – and
we’ll find time – more time, stretches of time, all of our time -- opening up
in our lives in ways we never dreamed of.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
-- Mary Allen</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-75014531325174966162012-12-09T15:41:00.000-08:002012-12-09T15:49:58.611-08:00The Power of Ten Minutes<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
The longer I work with harnessing
my time, the more I appreciate the power of time – power as a tool, as
something you can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">use</i> -- to
accomplish just about anything and transform your whole life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today I was thinking about it in terms
of blocks of ten minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
I
meditate every day for ten minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>During those ten minutes I try to quiet my thoughts and focus on the
sounds around me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not always
easy to do; in fact, it’s often just about impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But every day, I put in those ten
minutes and eventually during that little window of time I do stop thinking, if
even for a few moments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And during
those moments my entire being feels infused by something lighter, happier,
sweeter, than anything I ever normally feel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s like I manage to plug into some power source, and that
power shines a little light and a little clarity into my psychic being. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then, having
done that, a trace of that light and clarity stays with me all day long; my
whole day is changed by that little ten-minute meditation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The change is so subtle I hardly notice
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But when I don’t do the
meditation – that’s when I really notice it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel crabbier, more rushed and confused and irritable,
more crowded by the world and by my own and by other people’s needs.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
could go on and on about what I get from my little meditation, but the point I’m
making here is about time – the power of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Time isn’t a power like the power I plug into when I do the
meditation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The power of time is
the power of a practical tool that you use to get something done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But time is an important tool, maybe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> most important tool, because it makes
everything else, all other tool-using, possible. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without it I wouldn’t be doing that little meditation everyday;
time gives me the socket to plug into, the means or the chance or the opening
or whatever to turn on the light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We all have time in our living tool-boxes, but mostly we ignore it or forget
that we have it – most of the time we don’t know how to use it or know that we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i> use it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we can pick it up and use it consciously, it will
give us the power to do anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve
learned that through my own experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
But
I started off talking about blocks of ten minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ten minutes is a nice manageable amount of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody has ten minutes to spare;
it’s the amount of time it takes to go to the bathroom if you include staring
at yourself in the mirror, the amount of time it takes to make a cup of coffee
or glance at the newspaper or do some other throwaway thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing else will be lost or harmed or
missed out on if you spend ten minutes doing something; no one’s too busy to
fit something in for ten minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was that idea that helped me start meditating regularly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
For a long time I
wanted to meditate a little bit every day but I just could not find time to do
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every once in a while I’d
remember that I wanted to meditate, but then in the next moment the very idea
of meditating, not to mention meditating itself, would get swept away by all
the everyday stuff I had to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then
one day it came to me – like a little gift from somewhere, perhaps the same power
I plug into during the meditation -- many of my best ideas show up this way –
that nothing would be lost if I spent ten minutes meditating in a certain spot
in my day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so I did, and
I’ve been doing it ever since.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Then
it came to me that nothing would be lost if I spent ten minutes exercising on
the Nordic Track I have upstairs in my house – exercising is another thing I
have a hard time fitting into my days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So I started doing that almost every day too.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I know ten minutes
isn’t very long to exercise, the way ten minutes isn’t very long to
meditate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know the experts and
therefore the voices in my head all say you should do both longer to get the
maximum benefit. But ten minutes each of meditating and exercising is better
than nothing, especially because when I try to fit longer periods of both into
my days, I usually end up not meditating or exercising at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And ten minutes every day adds up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In ten minutes I can plug into that
power source; in ten minutes I can get my heart rate going and break into a
little sweat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I can always add
another ten minutes somewhere else in my day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Recently it came
to me that I’d like to start exercising for another ten minutes on top of the
ten minutes I spend at it every morning, maybe in the afternoon in the spare
moments between one coaching session and another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I make a living as a writing coach.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then I decided I’d like to start
opening that little window inside me through meditation three times a day,
maybe once before every meal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love that idea, because I love the
feeling I get when I meditate, and I’d like to be getting more exercise too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But so far I haven’t done either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just keep forgetting, the way I kept
forgetting to meditate at all before I came up with my current routine. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Still, I’m
optimistic that, having had the idea and the desire, someday soon I will put
the plan into action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe I’ll
get some extra power from my power source to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then again, maybe all I have to do is write those extra ten
minutes down on my daily plan every day when I make it, and then when those
times come, those extra ten-minute windows, I’ll remember to stop, sit down –
or in the case of the Nordic Tracking, stand up, go upstairs, and get on the
exercise machine – and turn my plan -- my wishes, my desires -- into action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
All I have to do
is put aside a little time, harness a little of the power that magical tool, time,
and then I can do whatever I want to.<br />
-- Mary Allen<br />
<br />
P.S. I welcome your comments!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-73290974793187242132012-12-03T13:01:00.001-08:002012-12-03T13:01:09.155-08:00On the Pleasure of Not Feeling Guilty
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
you ever wondered why you feel guilty taking time off, even when you’re sick,
you have no farther to look than the wrapper on your Hall’s cough drop. “A pep
talk in every drop” is printed in small blue capital letters on the reverse
side of each wrapper along with little “pep talks.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each cough drop has a different set of admonitions, the way
fortune cookies have different fortunes:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Be unstoppable,” my most recent cough drop said, as well as, “Turn ‘can
do’ into ‘can did.’” And, worst of all:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Push on!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s
easy to make fun of Hall’s cough drops, but of course they’re just mirroring the
good old Protestant work ethic and what the whole society, from your bossy mother-in-law
on down, has to say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I’m sure the people who came up with this promotion strategy think they’re
helping people, the way your mother-in-law (not to blame mother-in-laws, but I
have to pick somebody to use as an example) thinks she’s helping you when she
tells you how to raise your kids, clean your house, or ask your boss for a
raise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
But still.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do we really want or need to tell
ourselves, “Push on!” when we’re coughing so much we need to open and eat a
Hall’s menthol cough drop?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we
probably really need are cough drops that say, “Relax, take it easy,” or
“Stop!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Go back to bed.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, “You’re sick!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t you dare go to work.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
A couple of weeks
ago I spent the weekend hanging out with my friend’s nine-year-old son while my
friend and her husband went out of town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>From three o’clock on Friday afternoon to ten o’clock on Monday morning
(I was supposed to go home on Sunday evening but my friends’ flight was delayed),
I did nothing but play games, read kids’ books, watch Phineas and Ferb
episodes, eat, and go to bed early.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My friend’s son is normally allowed forty-five minutes of screen time a day
but we asked for and received the special dispensation that he could spend as
much time playing video games as he wanted that weekend if he was playing the
game with me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was my idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was also my idea to go to the video game
store and buy a copy of Pacman, the original game, for two or more people, since
that’s the only video game I know how to play or have ever enjoyed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We played game after game of it,
alternately shrieking with fear and joy, depending on whether our Pacman was
getting away from or getting squashed by the red, pink, turquoise, and orange ghosts.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We also played Donkey Kong, Super
Mario, and 2012 Olympic table tennis on Nintendo Wii.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I laughed so hard when we were playing virtual table tennis
I almost peed my pants, because the ball that I was trying to virtually serve
kept falling to the ground at my virtual feet while the virtual crowd in the
cartoon Olympic audience stands roared. “I’m glad those people aren’t real so I
don’t have to be embarrassed,” I said to my friend’s son and that made us laugh
even more.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I
rested and had more fun than I’ve had for years. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But at the same time I kept noticing myself feeling a kind of
low-level discomfort over the fact that I wasn’t being productive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I kept getting this queasy naughty
anxious feeling and when I examined it I found it was about stuff I should have
been, could have been, doing just then instead of what I was doing:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I actually found myself at one point
feeling bad that I wasn’t sewing buttons on a fall jacket (which has been
missing some buttons for years and for which I recently bought buttons and a
little sewing kit). I
kept feeling guilty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
So there it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Guilt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this case it was my guilt, but all of us have it to one degree or another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It gets in the way of us resting, it ruins our fun, it
makes us take on more than we can do. It causes us to make promises we kill
ourselves trying to keep. It might be what makes us feel like we have to be busy
all the time in order to justify our existences. Where does it come from? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It probably doesn’t really matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It comes from everywhere and
nowhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It comes from the
messages we received as kids, from TV ads and our role models and the
Protestant work ethic; it can even come from the inside of our Hall’s menthol
cough drop wrappers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I’m
not suggesting we should try to make ourselves stop feeling guilty. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We probably couldn’t even if we tried,
so let’s not feel guilty about feeling guilty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we can harness our time
so that we don’t have to feel guilty about squandering our time, so that rest
becomes something we do instead of everything we’re not doing, so that we pay
attention to what we’re actually getting done instead of thinking we’re not
doing anything, not doing enough, and then feeling more and more guilty.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
-- Mary Allen</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-18192808113351540322012-11-20T10:56:00.001-08:002012-11-20T11:19:51.368-08:00The Incredible Power of One Day at a Time<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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For years I’ve
known that living one day at a time is a simple, almost magical spiritual tool
for solving just about all of life’s problems.
Almost all problems happen mostly on the thinking-feeling level: Even if you’ve lost your job and are going to
run out of money next week, even if you have a debilitating illness that’s
going to get worse and worse, even if you’re going to die tomorrow, the real
problem is how you <i>feel</i> about that
today – it’s the fear, the dread, the projecting, the imagining, the things you
tell yourself about how bad it’s going to be. And almost always, when you ask yourself, <i>Am I okay right now?</i> the answer is yes. Even when the worst thing that could happen
is happening right here in this moment, there’s usually some part of it that’s
not as bad as you thought it would be and/or there are usually things you can
do to make it better.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
That’s why living
one day at a time solves almost all of life’s problems: because there are no
real problems in this moment, in today.
The only thing is, living one day at a time isn’t that easy to do. I
used to think it was something I had to accomplish with my thoughts. I thought I just had to get my mind situated
firmly in the present moment and keep it there. I kept thinking I should be able to do that,
would be able to do that, whenever I remembered I wanted to do that, but I
couldn’t. I’d always forget and go right back to living in the future and/or in
the past. I’d go back to thinking I had
to do everything all of the time. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
A few weeks ago my
friend Bruce said that one of the things he’s gotten out of planning his days a
la my harnessing time deal, is that he no longer feels like he has to do
everything all the time. (See “The
Doing-Everything-All-the-Time Trap,” November 5, 2012.) I thought that was brilliant, and that it
captured how harnessing time works for me, too, in a nutshell. Instead of feeling like I have to do
everything all the time, and feeling scattered, burdened, anxious, confused, and
kind of miserable as a result, now I’m able to focus on one thing at a time: I know when I’m going to start focusing on it,
whatever <i>it</i> is, and when I’m going to
stop focusing on it, and as a result I know that I don’t have to focus on
everything else.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
One thing this has
done for me is allow me to live one day, one hour, even one minute, at a
time. I might not be able to get rid of
every single thought projected into the future, but I’m much more present in
the day and in the moment. I don’t worry
about what I’m going to be doing tomorrow, because I know that I’ll figure out
what I’m going to do tomorrow, tomorrow.
And if I need to figure out what I’m going to do tomorrow today – for
example, if I need to decide today what I’m going to bring to a Thanksgiving
potluck tomorrow – I put time aside to do that today. Once I’ve put time aside for something, I can
let go of it, and if I haven’t put time aside yet I know I will. So I don’t have to keep worrying about
whether I’m going to do it, whatever <i>it</i>
is, or when I’m going to do it, whether I’m going to have time to do it, et cetera. I don’t have to keep doing all that mental
work, don’t have to keep doing the thing itself along with everything else in
some vague, anxious, rehearsing-stuff-over-and-over way on the mental plane. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
It’s the mental
stuff that’s the problem, not what’s really going on in the world – I truly
believe it. It’s the mental stuff that
makes you tense, anxious, nervous, miserable – or not. And that’s the good news, because you can
work with the mental stuff, even if you can’t change the outside circumstances
at all. And the even better news is that you can
change the mental stuff by changing what you do – by taking certain small
actions that you do have control over -- within the confines of the outside
circumstances. So you might not be able
to change what you have to do, but you can change how you make plans to get
done what you have to do, and doing that changes how you think about what you
have to do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
There’s another
way I’ve used one day a time very successfully with the help of harnessing
time. And that’s working on big,
intimidating projects one little piece at a time, one day at a time, and then
letting go of the rest. Big projects
like writing a book. Big projects that
might otherwise make me go crazy if I even thought about trying to do them,
having to do them, to the point where I’d get so uptight I’d give up after a
few days or never even get started. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I read a story
recently about an artist in Italy who was commissioned to create a mosaic in a
cathedral, involving millions of tiny different-colored pieces that had to be
placed, just so, along the lower part of the cathedral’s entire wall. It was an enormous backbreaking job, and
someone came along and asked him how he had the courage to take on such a
difficult task. “It’s easy,” the artist said. “Every day I figure out how much
I can do comfortably that day. I mark
the area and I don’t think about how much I have to do beyond that point. Before
I know it the whole job will be completed.”
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
When I read that
story, I thought about harnessing time – how harnessing time is my way of
figuring out what I can do comfortably every day, marking the area, not
thinking beyond that point. I’ve been
doing that for years with writing too – in fact, it was writing that helped me
come up with the rest of my harnessing time practices. Every day I write for a certain amount of
time and when that time is over I put my writing aside and don’t even think
about it until tomorrow. And, with the
help of my harnessing time tools, I do that now with many other big goals
too. I don’t let myself think about how
far I have to go, how little I got done today, how much there is left to do,
how I have to hurry up if I’m going to reach the deadline I’ve set for myself. I just do what I’ve set aside to do today and
then I stop, feeling happy and peaceful because I’ve made some progress toward
the goal. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I haven’t written
the whole book, haven’t gotten into perfect shape physically, haven’t
decluttered my whole house or accomplished whatever other big goals I’ve got. But I know that I will. I will because I’ll harness time to keep at
it, doing a little bit every day. And so
I relax and feel good about myself. Good
enough to keep going, to tackle my big project tomorrow and every day after
that, until it’s done. And that’s what
counts.<o:p></o:p><br />
-- Mary Allen<br />
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-8328946939544584202012-11-13T08:07:00.001-08:002012-11-13T08:07:20.772-08:00The People-Pleasing Trap
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Last time, I wrote
about how time anxiety is at least partly caused by feeling like you have to do
everything all the time, and how one solution to that is to consciously put
time aside for whatever you need to do. This time I’m going to write about something
else that makes us feel crazy-busy no matter how much we’ve got to do. It’s what we call people-pleasing in the
twelve-step program I belong to.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
When I agreed
recently to do an extra hour of editing that I didn’t have time for (see my
post, The Doing-Everything-All-the-Time Trap, November 5, 2012), I was thinking
of my client’s needs and wants more than my own. Of course, since my client and I have a
business relationship, it could be said that everything I do to help him with
his writing is about his needs and not my own – my need is for the money he
pays me for my services. But I wasn’t
going to be making much money for that one hour of editing and if I had been
thinking about my own needs instead of his I would have passed. But I thought the client wanted me to do it
and I wanted to make him happy so I agreed.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Because I hadn’t
fully taken my own needs and wants into consideration when I agreed to do that
one hour of editing (or when I agree to anything, really; I’m just using the
one hour of editing as a simple example, the way I’m using my own experience as
an example of what can happen to anyone), I had mixed feelings about it. It wasn’t clear to me that I wanted to do it,
but I felt like I had to do it. Right there, those mixed feelings, that little
inner conflict, added some weight, however slight, to my time anxiety. I felt guilty too – somehow, I was worried
about what that guy was going to feel if I didn’t do the editing (or maybe I
was worried about that when I initially agreed to do it and I just continued
worrying), and I felt a little resentful too.
All those feelings added up and caused stress and used energy, in the
same way having to make decisions (remember that study about decision fatigue;
see my post Avoiding Decision Fatigue, October 17, 2012) uses energy. I kept putting the thought of that editing
out of my mind (after all, it was just one hour), but every time I remembered
that I was supposed to do it, all those feelings came back along with a little
stab of guilt and anxiety – time anxiety, that nuts, I’m-too-busy,
I-don’t-have-enough-time-for-everything feeling. A good portion of my time anxiety, I
realized, was actually all those other, mostly unconscious feelings I was
having because I was people-pleasing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Plus, it was true
– I was too busy. I was too busy because
I had all the regular things that were scheduled on my list every day -- and
that one extra thing that was making everything else feel crowded. Once again, I felt like I had to do
everything all the time – or at least I felt like I had to all my regular work
and that one hour of editing all the time, which added up to the same
thing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
But the
people-pleasing trap made me feel like I had to do everything all the time on a
much deeper level. I felt like I had to
worry about that other person and his needs and wants and feelings at the same
time as my own. I couldn’t do what I
wanted to do because I had to do what I thought he wanted me to do, but I
couldn’t do what he wanted me to do because I had to do what I needed to
do. My needs and wants were crowded in
with his needs and wants, and there wasn’t enough time and room for both. And it all added up to a lot of work –
thinking work, feeling work, on top of regular work. All because of that one stupid little
hour. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Of course, for most
of us, it’s never just about one hour or one person. And if just one hour for one person can make
you feel that busy, just think what you feel like when it’s all your time and your
whole family and three or four friends plus your employer and who knows who or what
else.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Of course, we have
obligations to other people, to our children, our friends, our spouses, our
employers and clients, to our parents and our community. It’s normal, sane, and ordinary to put our
own needs aside sometimes and do things for others, and everybody, unless they’re
a narcissist or a sociopath, does and should do a certain amount of
people-pleasing. The problem comes in
when we’re doing it in a compulsive knee-jerk way; when we’re doing it more often
than not; when we’re taking care of other people’s needs so much we’re not even
paying attention to our own. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
So what’s the
solution to that kind of people-pleasing? I can only share what I’ve learned over the
years about what works for me. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
First of all, I
try to stop and think before I agree to something. I ask myself:
Do I really want to do this, or do I just think so-and-so wants or needs
me to do it? Am I really just wanting to
make so-and-so happy, or maybe even trying to keep so-and-so from getting mad
at me? I try to say things to the person
like, “Let me think about that and get back to you.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
And then I do
think about it: I listen to what my
intuition is telling me about whether I want to do the thing or not. I ask myself what I would do if there was
nobody else in the picture (this is a good way to get disentangled mentally
from other people’s wants and needs); I look at my time and consider whether I
can fit the thing into my plan and still feel relaxed and sane or whether it’ll
make me feel crazy-busy. And then I make
a decision and communicate it. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
If I’m going to
say no to something I say it as nicely as I possibly can. I used to be afraid that people would get mad
at me when I said no to something – hence, the urge to say yes even when way
down deep I wanted to say no; sometimes I even convinced myself I did want to
do something just so I wouldn’t have to say no to it. But I’ve learned that what people react to
isn’t whether you say yes or no. It’s <i>how</i> you say whatever you say. If you say no in an abrupt, rude-sounding
way – which you might do if you’re not comfortable saying no – they’re likely
to get a little offended. But if you’re
really nice about it, if you offer an explanation and perhaps suggest an
alternative, people are always really nice.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I don’t always do all
of the above. I’m always nice when I
have to say no – I even work on that a little, think about what I’m going to
say beforehand, or maybe talk to a friend who helps me figure out what to
say. But I don’t always figure out right
away whether I do actually want to say yes to something, and I often seem to
forget to take time instead of rushing my decisions. Even though I’ve worked on this issue for
years, there’s still a part of me that wants to jump in and solve everyone’s
problems and make everyone happy – and that part still sometimes succumbs to
people-pleasing. Invariably, when that
happens, I end up getting time anxiety – I end up feeling too busy, like I’ve
got too much on my plate. (Yuck.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
As soon as I’ve
figured out that that’s happened, I employ the magical harnessing time tool of
flexibility, and change my mind. I call
the person up (or send him or her an email) and say, as nicely as I possibly
can, in a friendly tone of voice, that it turns out I can’t do what I said I
would. I apologize profusely, I offer a
reasonable explanation, and often I offer an alternative suggestion or two – a
different time when I could do it (whatever it is), or another person who might
be able to do it instead of me. The
person on the other end is always absolutely fine with my changing my mind, and
somehow everything always works out, often better than it was going to before. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
And I go back to
feeling peaceful, to harnessing my time in all the ways I do on a day-to-day
basis.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606914997437939544.post-69930940465595934602012-11-05T10:05:00.004-08:002012-11-05T10:05:57.168-08:00The Doing-Everything-All-the-Time Trap
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Lately I’ve been realizing that how
busy I <i>feel</i> isn’t necessarily a
reflection of how busy I <i>am</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Of
course, I am truly busy. We all
are. I might not be quite as busy as
some people; if all of the busy people were in a pack I’d probably be somewhere
toward the middle, a six-and-a-half or seven on a scale of one to ten -- but
that’s busy <i>enough</i>, busy enough to
know all about busy. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
When I was in
college and felt overwhelmed by all the exams I had to study for and papers I
had to write at the end of the semester, I used to go around asking my friends
what they had to do, and if they had more to do than I did I felt a little bit
better and if they had less to do I felt a little bit worse. And maybe now I’m worried that someone else
is going to be doing that with me – looking at what I’ve got to do every day
and saying, enviously and maybe a little bit rancorously, that’s easy for you
to say, you don’t have as nearly much to do as I do. If that’s how you feel I
don’t blame you – when I look back on my college days, and, to be truthful, some
other times since then, I know exactly how you feel. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
But I truly
believe that it doesn’t really matter how busy you actually are. I’m convinced that you can feel anxious and
stressed about how busy you are even when you don’t have that much to do, and
you can be super-busy and still feel peaceful and serene. And that if you are
chronically anxious and stressed about how busy you are, there are easy ways to
get more peaceful without changing how busy you are. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
So what makes us <i>feel</i> busy and what can we do about it? Last night when I was having dinner with my
friend Bruce, he said, “I used to feel like I had to do everything all the
time.” I introduced Bruce to my
harnessing time practices and now he, like me, plans his day most mornings by considering
what he’s going to do during the day as well as roughly when. Last night we were talking about how much we
like planning our days this way, and that was when he said what he said about
how he used to feel like he had to do everything all the time. And I thought, that’s exactly it – that’s
exactly what makes you feel busy no matter how busy you are.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Like Bruce, I used
to feel like I had to do everything all the time. I could never just settle down and do one
thing at a time without obsessively focusing on everything else that was on my
plate (yuck, I hate that expression). But I don’t do that any more. <span style="line-height: 200%;">Nowadays,
I don’t feel like I have to do everything all the time, because I know (and so
does Bruce and everyone else who’s harnessing time) when I’m going to be doing
what and I also know that during that time I’m </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">not</i><span style="line-height: 200%;"> going to be doing everything else.</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">I know that all the other everything elses
will get done when their times come, and that until then I don’t have to worry
or even think about doing them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
One of the areas
of my life where I can see this working really well is in my writing coaching
business. I have a lot of clients and
I’ve learned that the way to carry on my business sanely -- the way to keep on
top of what I need to do with and for my clients <i>and</i> the way to keep myself from spending all my time on other
people’s writing and never doing my own – is to do everything I do with and for
my clients in chunks of time that I plan in advance. During a typical weekday I coach in two
one-and-a-half-hour sessions, and I write every single bit of coaching work down on my appointment calendar, even when I’m not actually meeting
with somebody but just editing their work.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I learned a lot
about how much this system was helping me not feel overly busy when I didn’t
stick to it recently. I have a client
who meets with me twice a month. This
client asked me to spend an hour editing some of his work in between his two
regular meetings and I said I would. I didn’t bother to find a spot for that
one little hour of editing because I figured it was no big deal. But somehow I never found time to do it, and
as my next meeting with this client approached I found myself getting grumpy
and anxious, feeling sort of guilty and even overwhelmed by the fact that I had
to do that one hour of editing and I just couldn’t find time to fit it in. I started getting that old time anxiety, that
I’m-too-busy, there-isn’t-enough-time-for-everything feeling; I started to feel
a little bit nuts, a little bit out of control – all because of that one stupid
hour. I decided that in the future,
whenever anyone asked me to do a little extra work (especially editing, where
I’m not meeting with someone in person so I have more wiggle room about when
I’m going to do it and it’s more tempting not to pin myself down), I would make
myself pick a time on my calendar when I could do it. I would put time aside for it, because if I
didn’t put time aside I’d end up not having time for it, and then I’d get the
rushed, I’m-too-busy, time anxiety feeling. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
It’s amazing to me
that just one little hour of editing could result in so much time anxiety, but
it did. To me it said a lot about how
the real problem isn’t everything we’ve got to do – it’s the fact that we feel
like we have to do everything at once. In that case I just felt like I had to do two
things at once – the stuff I had scheduled on the days when I needed to do the
editing, and the one hour of editing itself. I was surprised by how strong and unpleasant
my feeling of time anxiety was -- that feeling of not having enough time to do
what I had to do. Maybe it was just that
I hardly ever have that feeling any more, so I really noticed it when I
did. But still – if just one little
thing that takes one hour can make you that miserable, just think of how
miserable you can be if it’s everything in your life all the time. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I learned a few
things from the whole experience: One,
it really isn’t just about stuff you have no control over, about the fact that
you have too much to do and not enough time to do it; it really is mostly what
goes on in your head and how you work with that. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Two, you can
change what goes on in your head by doing a few simple things, like picking a
spot in your week where you can do one hour of editing and doing the editing
during that hour. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And three, my
harnessing time practices are really working.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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I think there’s at
least a four and a five too, on the topic of why we feel like we have to do
everything all the time, why that makes us feel crazy-busy, and what we can do
about it. But I’ll cover those in other
posts.<o:p></o:p></div>
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--
Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mary Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11689300982206133528noreply@blogger.com0