We’re getting to the end of another month. I’m planning and thinking ahead, as well as remembering what’s gone. Someone said, “No-one should assume that they will survive until tomorrow; it’s important to live in the moment and value those who share it with you.”
The inherent contradiction is that valuing the people who share your moments requires a certain amount of planning, which means being in future-world thinking, because to value them you have to respect their time and space, and whatever other plans and ideas they have in heart and mind. Just as we hope they do for us.
I have repeatedly tried to de-list my life, abandon all scheduling, live utterly spontaneously. Clearly, I’m not cut out for it. It does not work. I slip into lethargy and do nothing productive or creative, and that edges towards very negative states of mind.
So, I’ve come back to planning and scheduling, but with a lot more white-space built in, and a much looser hold on the reins. I’m learning that it wasn’t planning per se that has been my problem, merely that I hadn’t found the right methodology: the one that fits who I am now.
I hadn’t realised that having a plan actually facilitates more of the moments that are the ones worth truly living within – not only the peak moments, but the everyday ones. It is easier to enjoy washing the dishes at the end of the day if my mind isn’t on the hamster wheel of all the things I didn’t get done. Planning enables me to escape overwhelm, not by getting everything done, but by accepting that I won’t. That acceptance – I cannot do everything, so I can stop trying to – enables a better approach to prioritising.
Tidying my kitchen at the end of the day is almost a ritual, but it also a necessity. I don’t want to get up to chaos the next day. During the day I have more interesting and (to me) more important things to do than making sure every mug gets washed after use, and wiping down counters, making sure all of the shopping and bags and swim kits and pens and paperclips and half-peeled onions are put away. Sometimes those things occur during the day, often they do not; so long as I tidy up before bed, all is well.
And when I am ‘in the moment’ I do positively enjoy doing it. I notice washing-up-liquid bubbles with all their rainbows. I feel the order emerging from the mess. I remember to enjoy the spaciousness of my kitchen, the plants on the window sill, the view of the garden. These are also moments to be fully lived within. If the last thing I do on this earth turns out to be washing dishes, I would want to at least have taken pleasure in the doing of it.
The art of prioritising is knowing “what” is important and preferably also “why”. I don’t keep up on the kitchen stuff during the day, because having a showroom kitchen is not important to me. I make a point of putting it to rights at night, because starting my day in calm rather than chaos is.
My new-to-me planning methodology is not remotely scientific, nor is it revolutionary new. I’ve simply adapted all of the methods that have failed. It is very loose. It is based on a number of principles, all of which are intended to under-load my days, while still getting quite a bit of stuff done. Stuff that needs to be done (life admin) and stuff I want to do (fun, creative work, contribution etc). The principles all emerge from me being me.
- A week is a better batch of time than a day – otherwise too much of every day is spent thinking about the next one.
- Don’t overload the day. Leave space for everything to take longer than you think it will.
- A “to do” list is not a “to get done” list. I am going to write my blog, is not the same as getting my blog written, it just means getting it started, making a bit of headway.
- No time-boundaries. I have notional idea of how much time I will spend on any given thing on any given day, but I am not going to hold myself to that. If I sit down to write and get into flow, I am not going to stop just because the hour hand has moved along. Similarly, if I reckon cutting the shrubs will take an hour & I get it done in 45 minutes, I may do bit of something else in the garden, or I may just call it quits.
- The order of things really doesn’t matter. Some things are more likely to get done earlier in the day rather than later – but that is a limiting belief I am trying to erase.
- No deadlines. Most deadlines are moronic inventions that serve no purpose.
I am lucky that this is an area where I have more control than most, certainly more
than anyone who has a job, or children, or parents to look after. One of the few things my working life taught me is that the “deadline” is an evil concept. Too many people have their days littered with artificial, pointless, meaningless deadlines: end dates that have to be adhered to because “we’ve told the Board we will” as if the Directors will order out the firing squad if the project is late.
The thing that angered me most in those days – and in retrospect I notice that I
was angry all the time! – is that most deadlines were missed anyway, and nobody died. But quite a lot of people got quite sick from the stress of trying to meet them.
Deadlines are set in the belief that without this fabricated sense of urgency nothing would get done. It is simply not true. Things take as long as they take. They do so because they turn out to be harder or easier than expected, because expected difficulties do not arise or unexpected
ones do, because help is or is not available, or simply because some days we are willing and able to work harder or smarter than we are on others. No amount of pressure changes any of that, except for the worse. - I am not my mother. I will never clean house top to bottom in a day. Nor will I ever ‘get the garden done’. These are never-ending jobs that self-perpetuate. Each thing I do, creates another thing to be done. This is a deep insight that has freed me from the tyranny of chores. Once I recognised why I want to do these things, I learned I can take my time over them. Do a bit, leave a bit, as a wise work colleague once said to me. It’ll never be finished anyway.
- Housework has to be done because clutter unnerves me. I know where not doing it leads and I do not want to go there. Gardening has to be done because nature is stronger that I am and that unnerves me. I know where not doing it leads and I do not want to go there.
Accepting that, and removing the pressure to get any of it actually done, I can step in and enjoy the physicality of engaging with my home and my garden, the visible progress makes me smile almost because I know how transient that state of affairs will be.
Bonus points: manual work frees up the mind, so I get day-dreaming and/or close noticing opportunities built in. Different ways of living in similar moments. - Every task can be subdivided. I dechunk to whatever level feels workable. And in whatever way suits. I slice vertically or horizontally or randomly. I cut smaller if that is still not working, or re-assemble if I’ve divvied up too small.
- Spontaneity must be honoured. Stuff happens. Good, bad, and indifferent. There is space in the schedule for many unexpected things to drop in, but an umbrella rule is that the plan is not
sacrosanct. It is just a plan. All manner of things are allowed to disrupt it. A phone call from a friend, a social event that feels like it will be fun or meaningful, the weather, all of these can shift or derail the plan for the day. Besides there will also be days when, frankly, I just can’t be bothered. - I do not need to “catch up” on what I’ve missed. It’ll come around again. Or it won’t. No matter.
The result is that I have notionally divided my house and my garden into ‘rooms’ and created a clockwise sequence of attention. I have decided, arbitrarily, that the sequence continues to rotate, like the clock. Anything I miss waits its next turn around; I don’t push the schedule forward or double-up the next day (that way madness lies).
I’ve developed a similar approach to menu-planning, to balance out the type of meals I eat, while still being free to just use whatever I happen to have at the time. Bonus points: this has taken me back to my long-neglected recipe books and the joy of actually cooking.
It’s possible that this makes no sense to anyone but me, but I have found (as a first result) that I can fully devote my time to the activity in hand (be it work, rest, play, dreaming, thinking, planning, creating, curating, deleting, discovering, discarding, just being) – fully live in the doing of it – without wondering if I should be doing something else instead. I know that I shouldn’t be, because I had intentionally planned to devote some time to this thing on this day. OR, because I had – in the umbrella plan – accepted that spontaneity is the trump wildcard that MUST be played with
abandon, so I'm doing something else instead.
I can fully live in the moment without worry about not having finished the thing I was working on last, because finishing it was never the objective, progressing with it, polishing it, trying to move it forward, was. Even if I didn’t progress - because sometimes progression is infinitesimally incremental. I know that I spent time on it and that was the only plan.
I can fully live in the moment without angsting over what I need to do next, because I know I will get to that in due time.
The deep insight is that I can only be productive and creative if I live with intention AND that allowing spontaneity and synchronicity to change the plan whenever that feels right, can be part of an over-arching intention which does not undermine the plan, rather it makes it more resilient.
Will it work long-term? No idea. In the short term, I’m feeling more focussed, I’m actually get on with stuff that has languished and – related or not – I’m sleeping better.
And yes, some stuff did fall off to await the next shuffle, not least because I ditched a whole day’s plan to go sit outside my beach-hut & write & walk on the beach & brave the waves, and on another day starting to read a book I’ve been asked to review kept me engrossed for a whole morning and well past lunch. These things make me happy – getting stuff done, and having good reasons for not getting stuff done. It's all part of the plan.
The picture of is the 'Nouvelle Fleurs' weekly planner from W H Smith, which has undated week-to-view pages, backed by a tryptich of 'Notes' 'To Do' & 'Doodles'. It's a structure that finally brought the whole thing into focus for me. Sometimes, maybe it is simply a matter of finding the right notebook. :)
