Each day as I begin the work day, I make a short list of my highest priorities. It’s generally a combination of items from the team’s project board, and items I have tagged for later from emailed requests and things communicated over messaging apps. Easy. My list is intended to help me focus. I follow a similar practice on weekend days, and on vacations. I make a list. I get things done. I check them off the list. This is a practice intended to limit distractions, and keep me focused on the things I want most to accomplish on a given day. Seems simple enough, and over a lifetime of practice (with making lists), it has generally served me well…only… there are some exceptions.
… When the list is too long, I sometimes find myself stalled, feeling overwhelmed. I don’t end up getting much done, at all.
… When the items on the list are poorly chosen in some way, I sometimes feel as if I’ve “gotten nothing done” that needed doing, in spite of possibly having worked down the list quite efficiently. I may have gotten things done, but the things I got done weren’t what most needed my attention that day.
… When I become distracted in the moment by some conversation or task that seems more interesting, I sometimes find that I’ve entirely failed to get the things I had identified as important completed at all. Maybe I still get things done, but likely not the things I intended to focus on.
I guess my point is that making a list isn’t enough. There’s a measure of discipline involved in staying focused on priorities identified in advance. There’s a matter of will (even just to keep going at all some days). Then, too, there’s the matter of boundary setting and preserving capacity to do the things that most want doing, and limiting distractions by maintaining strict focus on the task(s) at hand. There’s just more to it than a list.
Yesterday, my day quickly skittered sideways. This morning, my plan as I begin the day is quite precisely what it also was yesterday, because yesterday the items on my list sat untouched and unnoticed all g’damned day. I’m more than a little irritated with myself. I breathe, exhale, and relax. Wasting time being annoyed by a moment in the past that can not be changed in the present is pretty silly and pointless. I made choices. Like it or not, that was in my hands, entirely. This morning, I have a new day ahead of me, and a new opportunity to work down yesterday’s list – all of which is now ever so slightly higher priority even than it was yesterday. lol I sigh to myself and look over my plan for the day. I’ve got this – if I stay focused, and work with purpose.
…Discipline is a practice…
Funny thing, the discipline I bring to simply working down a list of projects and tasks on a work day is the same discipline I may need to fall back on in some moment of chaos. Practicing that discipline is multipurpose: it gets work done today, in the moment, and also builds both resilience and further discipline for those moments ahead when I may earnestly need (and value, and benefit from) that long-practiced discipline. Handy. Here’s the thing, though, we become what we practice. If I fail to continue to practice that small amount of discipline it takes to stay focused on a selected priority on a given day, over time my ability to be disciplined, at all, ever, will diminish, until I find that I lack the discipline to follow a list, to stick with a commitment, to complete a project that needs to be finished but isn’t very interesting, to run errands purposefully without detours, or even to answer a simple question with a simple answer. Fuck. Being human is complicated sometimes.
…Have you noticed that you have less discipline, yourself, since you began using a smart phone, or relying on Alexa, or using an LLM like ChatGPT, or spending hours on one feed or another that pumps mindless repetitive slop into your staring eyes? I’m asking because it definitely seems like a common complaint these days, and I feel it myself. I personally don’t have the attention span to waste. I have so much to do, and so much life to live. I’m thinking about it this morning, because I’d like to avoid repeating yesterday’s reduced productivity, today, and that list of shit to do? It’s only going to get longer if I fall behind. Another common complaint is that it’s a busy world, but a considerable portion of what we think we’re busy with is entirely a waste of precious mortal moments. (That is something worth thinking about – are you spending your time the way you want to?)
That’s an entirely different question. I put it aside for another morning.
I’m not even sure, right now, what it is I do want to be doing. Probably not working. I’d like to take off for a few days on the coast to watch the king tides from the balcony of a beachside hotel, or pick a highway and drive for days until the view is so substantially altered it feels truly new. I’m not so deeply fatigued as I have been (it helped to take it easy for a couple days over the weekend), but I yearn for… something. Something new? Something different? Something… effortless? Something distracting. I laugh to myself; human primates reliably make a lot of their own problems, and then seem to complicate those problems quite deliberately. So weird.
I sip my iced coffee and think my thoughts. Making my plan for today was pretty easy; I copied it from yesterday, and then set myself an alarm. When that alarm goes off, I will get to work. One task, one project, one experience at a time, until the list is completed, and the day is at an end. It’s not fancy. There’s nothing mind-blowing about this approach. No novel buzzwords to market it with, it is what it is; discipline, and it requires practice. I sigh again in this quiet space. No distractions or interruptions to be found here. I think that makes it a good time to begin again. 😀
Evening Light 