Alfred Hitchcock was directing a film once when a member of the cast, a “Method actor”, came running up to him, waving a script.
“Mr. Hitchcock, I can’t play this scene!” the actor cried. “I don’t understand it? Why would my character say and do this? What’s my motivation?”
“Your paycheck,” replied Hitchcock.
The best way to accomplish things, as painlessly as possible, is a subject I’m interested in, and care a lot about. This is going to be the first of a series of postings on how to approach turning ideas into output, and how that means turning dreams into reality. Let’s start by framing the problem a litte, or at least a key piece of it.
Ever since David Allen came out with the Getting Things Done approach to productivity—and even well before that—the “To Do” list has been a staple of turning dreams and ideas into reality. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work for a lot of people: they get the list part done, or done enough as far as their concerned, and then go right back to getting caught up in the same old reactive circle of “Now, what? Now, what?”, and the list sits around, unaddressed and frequently unconsulted. Eventually a new list is made and—except perhaps by happenstance—duly ignored. It’s much easier, in a way, to get caught up in distractions, reactions, interruptions and procrastination that to actually attack that list we made.
This is where the rubber actually meets the road: it’s not enough to make To Do lists—although you can take it as a necessary, yet insufficient, condition for getting to a point where you’re actually being productive while incurring the minimum amount of pain in staying that way. All too often, a “To Do” list can be a way of putting off actually doing the things you’re writing up on your list. It’s easy to mistake having made up a To Do list for having done something, and taking the rest of the afternoon off. (I’ve done it; I bet you have, too.)
This is a weak point for many people, and a cause of a lot of wasted time (and paper, and App Store downloads, etc.) What’s needed, beyond the simple list of things that you might potentially be doing—something which also requires some attention in its construction, and which will be the subject of a more detailed article—is two things:
So, rather than go immediately to the mechanics of making a To Do list, I want to present how a list is actually worked once it’s been constructed, and only then talk about the best ways to construct one. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I’ve seen too many people get through the list building phase of setting up a personal support system only to get bogged down once they had to actually follow through on the list they’d created. Before long, things had changed, the list was no longer terribly relevant—some things having been done, some having been ignored, but in a reactive and unplanned way. And the cycle gets repeated. Or not.
So, the first issue—what to work on, the subject of this posting—is, sadly, usually not very well addressed, and there are any number of different approaches that have been suggested. “A”, “B” and “C” priorities is a long-standing one, and Steven Covey’s “Four Quadrants” is a similar one. The problem with static approaches like these is that they don’t tend to be very responsive to the needs of the moment, and either you end up working on items which are actually not as important as you thought they were when you first prioritized them, or you end up feeling a resistance to working on them at all, which turns into procrastination all too often.
One of the best approaches, in my experience, is Mark Forster’s “AutoFocus System”, which Mark has very generously developed, in the open, as a free technique available to all. Mark’s approach is to do a “brain dump” along the lines of what David Allen suggests, into a notebook with 20-30 lines on a page (I use 3×5 cards, again, more on this in a future posting), and proceed to work the list as follows, one notebook page at a time:
There are several advantages to this approach. First, you have a limited number of choices placed before you. A great deal of procrastination comes from having too many options to choose from. By sticking to the twenty or so items on a page, for the moment, you’re able to focus more realistically on them without feeling overwhelmed.
Second, the requirement that a task “stand out for you” is critical. We all know, really, what we ought to be doing, and productivity has a core requirement which is pointed out too infrequently: you have to be willing to be honest with yourself. This is a topic we’ll come back to when I go through the best way to construct your “To Do” list, or “Activity Inventory”.
Since we do know what we need to do—or at least have some sense of it—if we’re honest with ourselves (and we’ve been honest enough to construct our list with the right things on it, i.e. we’re not avoiding painful tasks by pretending they don’t exist), the thing we need to do really will “stand out for us”. It requires a leap of faith, at first, perhaps, but it’s a reasonable consequence of having some degree of awareness of what’s going on in your life. A To Do list can help you recall the things that you might be doing, but only you know what you should be doing Right Now.
No amount of pre-prioritizing can really tell you that (although it can potentially help, if used properly). This approach requires two things: the willingness to choose a task, and trust in your own ability to choose the one that best serves your interests in the moment of choosing.
Next: Now that you know what to work on, what’s next?
I read Chris Phillips’ excellent book, The Socrates Café, several months ago, and was inspired to try to set one up myself in the Santa Cruz area. As described on the website of the Society for Philosophical Inquiry:
Socrates Café are gatherings around the world where people from different backgrounds get together and exchange thoughtful ideas and experiences while embracing the central theme of Socratizing; the idea that we learn more when we question and question with others. It all started a decade ago when Christopher Phillips, then a freelance writer, asked himself what he could do that would in some modest way further the deeds of those noble souls who had come before him and, as William James put it, “suffered and laid down their lives” to better the lot of humankind? The epiphany and also the answer for him was to be a philosopher in the mold of Socrates, and to hold Socratic dialogues with anyone and everyone who’d like to engage in a common quest to gain abetter understanding of human nature – who shared with him the aspiration of becoming more empathetic people and more critical and creative philosophical inquirers.Today, there are over 600 ongoing gatherings around the globe coordinated by hundreds of dedicated volunteers who are deeply committed to making ours a more participatory and inclusive world.
I’ve arranged to have a first get-together at the Peet’s Coffee on Pacific Avenue, at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, February 1st. If you’re in the Santa Cruz area, I hope you’ll consider attending. You can visit the Meetup group to RSVP, or use the event on Facebook.
I’ve produced (with the kind permission of Todd Marrone, who’s responsible for the artwork) the poster above, which I’ll be putting up around town over the next few weeks. You can download a PDF of the full-sized poster from here, if you like.
I’ve just finished reading William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, which is a wonderful and well-written guide, by the way, and—having recently become nonconsensually self-employed, and being in a position to sit down and take a good look at what was going on and what I wanted to do next—found myself very happy to rediscover Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and others that I hadn’t really thought that much about since college.
We’ve come to think of “stoic” as meaning “grim” or “emotionless”, but—as Irvine makes clear—the ancient Stoics were not above emotion, though they had interesting ways of working with it. Philosophies like Stoicism—one of a number of competing schools in 1st Century Rome—were about promoting methods to enhance everyday life and make us better people, not about abstractions like “the nature of reality”. Each school had its own viewpoint on the matter, and its own idea about what the “highest goal in life” should be. For example, the Hedonists valued pleasure above everything else, which is how the word “hedonism” entered the English language, along with “stoicism”.
The Stoics, however, valued serenity. They recognized that we all feel emotion, we can’t help doing so, but they asked what was the best way to react in response to the emotions we felt, particularly the negative ones. We all face situations which will make us angry, or sad, but we also recognize that allowing anger to become rage, or sadness to become unrestrained grief is neither healthy for us nor those around us.
As a citizen of The Future, I find myself facing these same problems, and—in a time when world economies are changing around us, and the ever-upward growth of consumerism seems unsustainable—I also find myself wondering at the ever-present impulse to buy another book, another DVD, another shirt, another computer, another car…
Why do we do this? As Irvine points out, it’s evolutionary: in our development as a species, food, shelter, and other necessities would be scarce more often than not. Those of our primate ancestors who had more acquisitive behavior, and were better at collecting and hanging onto more food, a better shelter, better tools, etc., had a higher chance of reproducing, thus winning the big prize in the “natural selection lottery”.
The way this manifests in our consumerish lives is that getting something new feels good. This is why people love to shop for things: we go to the mall in the hopes of finding something that will impel us to spend some money in order to get that “rush” we find in something new. Unfortunately, there’s a psychological effect that works against us, called “hedonic adaptation” (there are those Hedonists again!) This simply amounts to “getting used” to something. While we love, love, love our nice new car for at least the first three weeks, we simply don’t get the “kick” we used to get out of having it after a while, and then we’re off in search of the next big-ticket item. It’s very much like an addiction (and, in fact, people do become shopping addicts).
We’re not much different from ancient Romans, who had no shortage of things to consume themselves, and the Stoics looked at this tendency as well. Their solution to both of these problems turns out to be the same: Irvine refers to it as “negative visualization”, but I think of it as “It Could Always Be Worse!” The basic idea is that, from time to time, you looks around at some concrete thing which you value in your life: your car, your house, your TV, etc., and you consider what it would be like if that were suddenly gone from your life. In effect, you mentally rehearse its loss. While this may seem a little odd, if you do this correctly, it can help you value the things you already have in your life, but which—because they’re familiar—you’ve allowed to recede into the background and take for granted.
I had a perfect opportunity for this yesterday as it happens. It’s just the beginning of rainy season here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and my cat, Lily—who actually hates the rain—ran outside first thing in the morning. This isn’t unusual, but given the weather, the fact that she hadn’t shown up at the door again in an hour or two, demanding to be let back in out of the rain, was unusual.
After several hours, she still hadn’t turned up, and I was starting to worry a bit: there are enough raccoons, occasional coyotes and such—we had a bobcat living in the ravine back of the house for many years—that it was possible she might have run into something unfriendly. She could have gotten hit by a car. I went out several times and called for her, but there was no sign.
So, what to do? I could become increasingly distressed, certainly, but that doesn’t seem terribly productive. Instead, I considered the situation. Cats don’t live forever, under any circumstances, and there will come a day when Lily may well go out and simply not come back; it’s happened before (with a 14-year-old cat who simply took off to find a place to curl up and die, apparently: we found what was left of her the following spring).
That would be sad if it happened, certainly—and some day it, or the equivalent, certainly will—but it won’t change how nice it’s been to have Lily around for the past three years or so, or however much longer she does stick around. No matter what happens to her, or when, I still have the positive value she’s brought into my day-to-day life, and that can’t be taken away. I can ignore it, if I choose, and focus on what I’m lacking now instead, but I would be doing so at a cost of ignoring whatever else is also going on now, which might have made me happier if only I were paying attention to it.
Late in the afternoon, Lily wandered nonchalantly back into the house, certainly none the worse for wear. I was, obviously, quite pleased to see her, but the key is that I was even more pleased to see her for having spent a minute or two here and there during the day contemplating what things would be like if I never saw her again. I appreciated her presence all the more for having considered her absence.
This is a practice that can be applied to anything in your life you value, and practiced regularly, can change your life tremendously. It’s a way of bringing not only a concrete sense of gratitude into your daily life, but also—by increasing your satisfaction with the good things you already have—can reduce your unceasing desire for new things you don’t really need.
And that can really change your life for the better.
