I’m not sure when it happened–maybe it has always been this way–but it feels like my days have morphed into a series of steps and tasks that carry me from dawn to dusk. Instead of waking up and wondering what the day will bring I shut off my alarm and, for the most part, know in far too much detail what lies ahead. And along the path are the variety of distractions that make focusing on the importance of that day really hard. Do you know the feeling of really wanting to do Thing A–read, play hide-and-seek, write an email–while Thing B–play Madden, check email, answer an IM–keeps tugging at your attention? It’s a problem that affects me at work and at home; it’s the world of shiny distractions.
So I’m at the office and I need to do some focused work on a project that I’ve been putting off. I have to create a bunch of tasks, write-up some process steps and finish some market research. Slack notifications ping me, email notifications alert me, coworkers with the best of intentions stop by my desk, reminders of upcoming meetings catch my eye and the cashews in the kitchen call my name. All of these things and more pull my mind away from what’s right in front of me. I’ll eventually finish that work but it will take days instead of hours because I just can’t mute everything on the periphery.
Now I’m at home and I want to enjoy the few hours I have with my wife and daughter before bedtime. Can I spend those handful of hours playing, cooking, eating, talking and laughing? Sure but not without a reminder that maybe I’m wasting too much time. My to-do list is telling me that I need to sign my daughter up for swimming lessons, my laundry is still in the dryer and I still haven’t replied to a few personal emails that have been sitting in my inbox for days. I still play. I still cook. I still laugh. But I do it with that nagging feeling that I’m putting off other important stuff. I’m not fully in the moment.
Notifications and to-do lists are killing me, Smalls! I have so little confidence in my own memory that I’m convinced an uber-detailed to-do list is the only way I’ll remember it all. And without notifications on my iPhone and laptop I won’t remember to write on my friend’s Facebook wall for his birthday, get to my 1:00 meeting, make that doctor’s appointment or sweep the apartment. So here’s the question. Can I actually get rid of fifty percent of these beeps, boops and buzzes and still manage my life?
I’m honestly not sure. With the number of things that demand my attention I’m just not confident I’ll remember the small stuff. There’s a lot to keep in mind and I don’t know if my brain (or my brain plus a post-it note) can contain it all. But what if that point right there suggests that I’m spending too much time sweating the small stuff? There could be a better way to live. Perhaps I can’t eliminate to-do lists entirely but maybe I can move the far-off, low priority tasks to some less attention-seeking place. What if a post-it note hidden away in a desk drawer reminded me to drop off my old desktop computer for recycling so I wasn’t reminded about it when flipping through my phone’s daily to-do list? That could work. Would crossing off unimportant work like buying a board game that I’ll probably never play make my life less meaningful? Doubt it. Maybe accepting that I’m going to forget about some not-so-important things is alright because it means I’m giving more attention to what really matters.
My wise wife once told me that we should strive to be human beings though many of us have become human doings–we should be about more than the tasks that make up our lives. I’m going to spend some serious 2017 time on that because, as I’ve learned from reading Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, changing long-wrought habits takes effort, work and devotion. But once new habits are established it feels like you’ve been doing them for years. I’ll give it a whirl and see what happens.
Make your own happiness,
Niral
misterniral@gmail.com
Mr. Niral Rambles 