Avoiding the Woulda, Coulda, Shouldas

The other day I was waiting in line in the bank and an ad for refinancing your auto loan at a lower interest rate came on their TV screen.  The ad showed a young woman with startled eyes and a mouth open in chagrin, the words woulda, coulda, shoulda written in big bold letters above her head.  Woulda, coulda, shoulda was what she was thinking about having let the opportunity to refinance her car loan slip by, and at the bottom of the screen it said, Don’t you lose out. 

I thought about how powerful those woulda coulda shouldas are in all of our lives, that it’s those woulda coulda shouldas that are sapping our energy and adding guilt and anxiety and consternation to our every waking moment.   And the shoulds, the havetos, and the I-better-not-forgets aren’t helping any either.

And I thought about how I hardly have any of those woulda-coulda-etcetera feelings in my life any more.  I know that if there’s something that I would, could, and should do, I’ll use my harnessing time system to find a way to do it.  If I can’t fit the thing into my plan today (which is most likely), I’ll write something down in my notebook, knowing that tomorrow or the day after that or whenever, I’ll figure out when I can do it with the least amount of difficulty – combine it with another errand or find some way to make it painless -- and put it in my plan that day, and then I’ll do it. 

For example, at the moment there’s a postcard sitting on my desk from my optometrist telling me to call them to confirm an appointment I made a year ago, for my yearly eye exam.  The other day I looked at it and felt a stab of anxiety – oh, I should call them, but I’m in the middle of something else, should I stop what I’m doing now or what? – and then I instantly relaxed, because I knew that I’d find a way to fit that phone call into my day sometime soon. And yesterday when I was driving somewhere it came to me I need to get my oil changed, and instead of getting tense about it as I might have earlier, I simply made a mental note of it, knowing that I would fit it into my day sometime in the near future.   And that made me feel good – confident, solid, empowered – instead of anxious and sort of guilty, the way I felt in other years when I thought about how long it had been since I’d had my oil changed and then thought about how I should do it, needed to do it, and probably wouldn’t do it unless I did something about it in that moment.

I can relax now, knowing that eventually it will get done, and that I have the power – the system – to do whatever I need to, whenever I need to, and I can forget about it until then.

Time: The Secret to Happiness (or Misery)

I used to believe that what would make me happy was something splashy like falling in love or traveling to someplace exotic.  I must still believe that on some level, because otherwise why would I be so shocked to learn that one of the things that has made me the happiest in my life has been managing my time more efficiently, performing simple, constructive acts and noticing them – getting credit for them and giving myself credit -- in a daily reliable consistent way.

On the other hand, as a writer, I’ve always known that how I use my time is strongly linked to what kind of mood I’m in on any given day.  On days when I write I feel good about myself and on days when I don’t, no matter how over-joyed I was when I made the decision not to, I end up feeling significantly worse about myself at the end of the day.

I’ve also learned that the key to getting anything done is planning when I’m going to do it during the day, making little boundaries around chunks of time.  Almost every Monday through Friday for over twenty-five years, I’ve looked at my day, thought about what I had to do, and then figured out roughly when, in the midst of all that, I could do my writing. On days when I didn’t look at my schedule and figure out where I was going to fit my writing in, I often didn’t get any writing done at all. And on those days I had an uneasy, out-of-control feeling.  I felt like a person adrift on the ocean instead of a person in a little boat with her hand on the tiller – when you’ve got your hand on the tiller there are no guarantees the boat won’t get swamped by some small or big wave, but at least there’s a chance that you can make it go where you want.  The feeling of uneasiness, of aimlessness and adrift-ness, is subtle but unpleasant, and for me it leads to depression.  For years I managed to ward it off, for the most part, by planning when I’d write on any given day and writing then.

But over the last seven years I’ve taken on many new time commitments, and it took me a while to figure out how to get in all those new things as well as get in my writing.  For a while, until I figured out how to juggle it all, I found myself not writing on more days than I liked or that I’d care to mention.  And I also noticed my stress level rising.  There was no end to the fretting and general sense of uneasiness because there was no end to the stream of little things I needed to get done along with my own writing and meeting and working with other writers in my new job as a writing coach. On many days I made lists of things I needed to accomplish and as I did each thing I crossed it off the list and that helped with the sense that there was something I was forgetting to do.  But I still had a basic underlying feeling of anxiety that there was too much to do and that I was failing because I wasn’t getting everything done.  I couldn’t get everything done -- there simply wasn’t enough time for it all. 

The very thought that there wasn’t enough time made me anxious.  It was a kind of low-level scarcity consciousness that affected me all the time although I barely noticed it, the way you don’t hear the muzak in a grocery store after you’ve been there for a long time.  It made me physically tense and used up lots of mental energy.  It affected how efficient I was too.  When I was doing one thing I fretted about not doing another, or I flitted from one thing to another and then back to the first as if I had to do everything at once. I rushed through all of my tasks without really noticing what I was doing -- the way you might gulp down food without noticing what you’re eating, let alone tasting or enjoying it -- and I didn’t take much pleasure in my day.

It wasn’t until I started putting boundaries around little chunks of time – planning what I was going to do over the course of any given day and when I was going to do it (more about my planning system in future blogs) -- that I started to feel better.  It was the knowing what I was going to do when – and the knowing what I was not going to do then -- that was and still is bringing me relief and relaxation.  If I don’t plan and everything is just vague and open-ended, I may get things done, I may even get everything I need to do done, but somehow I’m not totally, consciously aware of what I’m accomplishing.  I feel anxious the whole time about whether I’m doing what I need to, whether there are things that I’m forgetting, and about all the things I should be doing that I’m not.  And often I don’t accomplish very much.  I try to do everything at once and end up doing nothing, or I can’t decide what to do and end up doing nothing.  Or I may go from one task to another, touching on each one but not completing it, like a butterfly lighting on one flower and then flitting to the next flower it notices.

When I do that I feel scattered and discombobulated; I keep rehearsing all the tasks “on my plate” (I hate that expression, as if work was food that you have to eat whether you want to or not) and worrying about whether I can get them all finished when I have to.  Whereas, when I know what I’m going to do and when, when there are boundaries around the tasks in my day and the time they’re going to take, I feel in control of my day, I feel like I’m making choices about what I do instead of having those choices made for me by default or not made at all.  

Time Is the New Wind

It seems like everybody’s struggling with time these days.  Life is going faster and faster. Our jobs are demanding, our kids need to be driven to violin lessons and soccer and a million other activities, there are emails that need to be answered and the Internet and Facebook and Twitter and a whole lot of other things competing for our time and attention.  It’s hard to find time to deal with all that day-to-day stuff, not to mention to make any progress accomplishing the sorts of big things that make us feel good about ourselves and give our lives meaning.  It’s easy for those big things to get swept up and lost in the whirlwind of all the ordinary little things that feel so urgent in our daily lives.  Time slips away from us, we get anxious or depressed or guilty because we can’t get hold of time, can’t find time to do what we feel like we should do, need to do, and we lose track of what we really want to do. 

            On the other hand, time is a resource we all have.  It doesn’t cost anything, you don’t have to earn it, nobody gives it to you and nobody can take it away from you.  It’s a simple basic thing that we all have and we all have choices, more or less anyway, about how to use it.   I heard President Obama talk about harnessing the wind -- he said that the wind is a cheap, ever-renewable, ever-available source of energy if we can only do what it takes to harness it.  And I thought that time is like that too; like the wind, time is always there, freely available, an endless source of power and energy if only we can use it instead of letting it blow us around.  And unlike the power of wind, we don’t need any windmills or other technology to harness the power of time.  All of us can harness and use the time in our lives, can actually use this great resource and feel good about the way we use it, can relax about the way we use it.  And just doing a small simple thing like that can totally turn our lives around.  

            I’ve been working with time in my own life for many years -- first and foremost as a writer who needs to make space for writing among the crowd of daily tasks and other people’s needs that always seem to call out to me so demandingly and in increasing numbers over the years.   In recent years my life has diversified and I’ve had to work even harder at fitting writing into my day along with everything else I’ve got going, and as a result I’ve learned a lot about time and how to harness it.  I’ve learned about the power of consciously making space in my day for whatever I need or want to get done; about accomplishing big goals by taking small steps; about taking life a day at a time and letting go of whatever’s outside of the boundaries of today.

And I’ve learned that harnessing time is not just about fitting everything into my day that I need and want to do.  It’s about not fitting things in too, about creating space to not do things – space for silence and rest and emptiness, for filling back up and recharging.  And it’s about becoming mindful of what I’m doing while I’m doing it, so I can notice and enjoy the activities of my day instead of just writing them on a list and then doing them, nervously, joylessly, painfully.  Harnessing time is about using my intuition, listening to my deepest inner voice and paying attention to what it has to tell me about what I do and don’t want to do.   And harnessing time is about working with boundaries, making decisions about what and how much I do with and for other people so I can make more room for myself.  It’s about learning about myself and making space for myself and nurturing myself on a daily basis, getting peaceful and happy with the decisions I make every day about how I spend my day, about accomplishing big goals as well as small goals, taking small steps to accomplish big goals.  It’s about feeling good about myself, about knowing what I want in life and doing something on a daily basis to get it. 

            Please join me here as I share some things I’ve learned about harnessing time and some of the adventures I’ve had in the process of learning them.