Category: prioritizing

Focus Stars: motivation without guilt

For a month now I’ve been doing a very successful experiment in orienting my time to what matters to me most, without beating myself up with incomplete to-do lists. I track my successful focusing by coloring in part of a simple drawing I made. I use a color that makes me very happy.

A printout of a picture of a seven-pointed star made of ribbons, with some of the points and ribbon sections filled in with green felt tip pen. The points of the star are labeled Creative, Resourceful, Calm, Secure in Self, Strong, Kind, and Connected.
a focus star from a day where I didn’t do any housecleaning, but I did spend lots of time on creative work

I have seven areas I am choosing to focus on. For each of those areas, there’s a daily habit I want to do. When I do it, I fill in that point on the star.

Each of those seven areas also has other related activities or habits. When I do a chunk in that area I fill in one of the pieces of “ribbon” that form the star.

My areas are:

  • Secure in Self
    Habit: holding boundaries and not ruminating.
    Related: maintaining differentiation of self*, autonomy (avoiding leaning into the people-pleaser trap), emotional maturity, knowing myself, personal identity, honoring my true self, ability to have distance from volunteer work.
  • Strong
    Habit: working out for 30 minutes three times a week (strength, stretch, aerobic) and get otherwise getting active on the other days.
    Related: good sleep, movement, stretching, walking, sexiness, dancing, healthy eating, managing my health care.
  • Calm
    Habit: 10-15 minute meditating.
    Related: time alone, nature, journaling, hobbies, stability, gratitude including with me as the object of gratitude.
  • Kind
    Habit: love and listening.
    Related: compassion, forgiveness, stress management, giving help.
  • Resourceful
    Habit: keeping food and finances on track, and doing a housework task.**
    Related: maintaining a pleasant home, dishes, tidying, laundry, saving, budgeting, ability to splurge sometimes, clothes that please me, calendar and time management, readiness and safety information.
  • Connected
    Habit: social time and planning for future social time.
    Related: mutually supportive relationships, communication, asking for help, community, volunteering.
  • Creative
    Habit: 30 minutes working on my main creative project
    Related: learning, sharing, making, showing up for my creative self.

Secure in Self and Strong really are the legs that hold up the rest and Creative keeps me excited, though everything contributes to my sense of well-being and the energy I have to do anything.

This gentler way of reminding myself to give myself what I want and need is working incredibly well for me. You can give it a try using these images:

Focus Star with no writing, two to a page for printing
Focus Star with Dinah’s categories, two to a page for printing

I’m not a visual artist, so I’d love to see them if others create their own Focus Star templates! Please share them in a reply to this post. 🙂

*This is a good three part overview of differentiation of self (1, 2, 3) by therapist Martha Kauppi.
** Grocery shopping, cooking, paying bills, handling finance/bureaucracy mail, all are part of that “on track”. I broke my maintenance housework down into chunks that take about half an hour or less. My goal is to do each chunk every eight weeks.

Life in 2020 and Discardia

There are stressful times in our lives—whether personal, national, or global—in which changes are pushed upon us from outside rather than welling up within from quiet reflection. The book that’s useful to us in an externally-driven vs. internally-driven context is very different. I can’t predict which book we’re going to need next year.

If major action begins being taken to halt climate change, if the current U.S. trend away from the rule of law is stopped in time, maybe an updated book with lots of tips about how to handle household clutter and time management and lifestyle optimization will be exactly what we want. But even if it is, I do not believe our lives will be like they were in 2011 when the first edition of Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff came out. It’d be good to know a little more about the world we’ll be in before writing a new edition.

If local and regional disasters continue to rock the planet—and there is every reason to expect we need to be prepared for those at least in the short term no matter what we do on climate—then it’s the emotional journey of surviving loss that we will want to understand better. If places which were once safe to live in become more dangerous—whether due to influenza or intolerance—then it’s the practicality of protecting self and family which is the first priority. Others have suffered loss, bigotry, and displacement beyond my experience. Theirs are the voices we need to hear in such times.

At the end of 2016 when massive political change came to the office of the U.S. presidency and the magnitude of climate change was becoming clearer, I heard the good advice to think well in advance about what your lines in the sand are. At what point are we way past the range of normality, such that you’ll need to consider new options? In the months since my last post we’ve crossed several of my mental lines in the sand. It’s a new world and everything is up in the air. The 2020 U.S. presidential election is going to alter the path of everyone in the world, not only impacting whether the system of checks and balances in the U.S. governmental structure is abandoned, but whether the massive U.S. economy and patterns of consumption are diverted away from the path of further accelerating climate change.

None of this is normal. And we can’t go on pretending it will get better on its own.

We need to care for ourselves and manage our stress to get through these times. Sometimes creating order in the areas under our control is a big part of that. After a particularly bad news day, I’ve definitely resorted to organizing a drawer or decluttering a closet; and given the past four years, my house is looking pretty fantastic. But we shouldn’t be like the woman in The Day After who is still trying to make the bed when the missiles are flying over Lawrence, Kansas. We need to use some of our energy toward solving the real, much bigger challenges.

These massive challenges can be solved; humanity has gotten itself out of much worse situations.

It doesn’t take all of us devoting all of our time every day to it, but it does take most of us devoting a major chunk every week to it. That chunk needs to be action, not observation. Watching or reading thoughtful political analysis, while nice, is not action. It’s actions like volunteering to register voters and calling elected officials to advocate for policy changes to reduce carbon outputs and connecting with neighbors to make a plan for accepting refugees into your community which will make the difference.

Once you’ve done your chunk of work, relax. Take care of yourself. Avoid inflaming your system with shouting pundits on television and social media. Create calm and time to be thoughtful, so that you can maintain your values and kindness.

Once you are in that place of kindly calm inside, then look at what you’ve got on your ‘to-do’ lists, actual and unspoken. What can wait? What doesn’t move you or the world in the direction you want to go? What is it the wrong time for?Release yourself from those expectations and cross them off the list, or park them elsewhere in a “look at this next year” document possibly with a note on your calendar to remind you it exists.

If we’re lucky and work hard together, we can come back to those things with renewed possibility in our lives. For now, the path is narrower and lightening our loads is the way to move forward.

Here by the side of the path I am setting down the Discardia Patreon community and the writing of a completely revised edition of Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff. After all my volunteer work and self-care—I do administrative support for major Get-Out-the-Vote team and have an autoimmune disorder I’m working on getting into remission—I hope to pick them up again in 2021.

One of the advantages of being a long-time Discardian is already having a model for this. Every year when the big family holidays approach, I’ve gone through a mini version, making notes for myself to look at in January after all the travel and social occasions.

Along with Let It Go, Discardia teaches us Set It Down.

Let’s all give ourselves the breathing room to do good things for ourselves and our world. Be well, be kind, and get involved now.

Beware the Auto-Loading To-Do List

There are never enough hours in the day to do everything we dream of doing—and that's fine. The act of deciding what we will do is how we construct our selves.

However, overflowing lists of things we might do, which we feel we ought to do, or which others would like us to do, can be so significant a source of stress and indecision as to eat up time we could spend on what we most want in our lives.

I've spoken before about the vital importance of giving yourself permission not to do it all, for example in this talk which I gave at an OmniGroup event last year. Maintaining the difference between active and inactive projects (and their associated tasks) and clearly dropping those you decide not to do, while still allowing yourself to get things out of your head and into a trusted system, is how you manage all that potentiality.

Whether that trusted system is software or paper-based doesn't matter (though I personally find smart software to be less work to use and maintain), the essential part is that it is your system—and, critically, that nothing else is.

You email inbox cannot be your trusted system because things can be added to it without you having consciously processed each of them and affirmed them as something you are going to do (even when "doing" means "delegating" or "adding to a someday/maybe list").

Your physical inbox cannot be your trusted system for exactly the same reason.

Your calendar cannot be your trusted system because it can't hold inactive projects and tasks without becoming useless for managing the active ones.

The essential qualities of a trusted system are:

  • that it be easy to use wherever you are in order to see current tasks and to note new items (for later processing into active or inactive projects or tasks as appropriate);
  • that it be simple to toggle projects from active to inactive;
  • that it support a pleasant process for conducting weekly reviews;
  • that it helps in reminding you to review projects on their individual appropriate cycles (some of which might be weekly, others monthly, quarterly or even annual);
  • that it gets inactive and not-for-current-review things out of your face until it's time to consider them;
  • and that supports deletion by archiving of things you decide not to do.

When you know that adding anything into your system or noting a decision about something in your system means that that item will be presented to you at the appropriate future time and that you no longer need to carry it in your head, then you can trust it. Once you trust it, you can relax and use your clear head to engage with the present moment and whatever task you are deciding to address in it. The work of building a trusted system pays itself back a thousandfold. Your stress will drop and your productivity and self-fulfillment will rise.

Draw that line in your life between your conscious engagement with potential activities and those things which are presenting themselves for your attention. As I indicated above, your email inbox is one of the critical areas for seeing the difference between what you have decided to engage with and a pile of stuff that you have not yet processed. Deletion, unsubscribe, and "No, but thank you for thinking of me!" are all your friends in keeping this territory under control.

Still, after you've got a trusted system and your email isn't driving you batty, and once you've gotten better at identifying an appropriate number of active projects, you may still find yourself feeling that you're running behind. Most peculiarly, you may encounter this feeling more often when you're not working than when you are. This is the signal to start hunting down and eliminating auto-loading to-do lists.

Information technology has made it easier than ever for us to be provided with things that truly do fit within our interests. Lots of things. More things all the time. And more things that are unconstrained by limits such as the number of pages in the daily paper or a magazine. Bit by bit, over time, we sign ourselves on for far more than we could ever hope to read or watch. Then we wonder why we can't seem to keep up and our leisure media nags at us.

Once again, decide what you are going to engage with, rather than letting someone else put those items on your list. You don't have to read everything cover-to-cover or catch every episode.

Here are great places to do some pruning:

  • Podcasts. Not only do many of these take longer to consume than the average "long read" link, they also may be living on your computer, filling up your hard drive. Unsubscribing from TEDtalks videos and a couple hour-long-per-episode podcasts cleared up 37GB on my laptop! Consider your consumption rate and downsize your subscriptions and downloads to match it, making use of episode descriptions to skip what doesn't really grab you.
  • Television. Don't watch things just because the fall in between two things you do care about. Watch what rewards you and watch it on your time. When it stops rewarding you; drop that show. Remember to answer that question "Is this rewarding me?" in comparison not only to what else you might watch, but also to all the other things you could be doing with that time.
  • Books. You don't have to finish a book you don't like and you don't have to keep a book that isn't grabbing you around in hopes that someday it will. The last time a single human had a chance of reading every book in print in English in their lifetime was over 500 years ago; you can't get to it all, so quit beating yourself up and free up some shelf space.
  • Magazines and email newsletters. If it isn't rewarding, unsubscribe unsubscribe unsubscribe! Plus, watch for boxes you can uncheck to keep yourself off these mailing lists when you're buying something from a business or signing up for a new service.
  • Social Media. Monitor your moods when you spend time on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Are you getting joy or positive self-insight out of making this part of your day? Pare back how many people and who you follow to just those who help make you more who you want to be. Don't keep these applications open all the time or let them distract you with alerts, sounds and unread counts on the application icon. When you choose to connect with them, really do connect and then unplug to take the energy and knowledge you've gained into the rest of your life.

When something seems to be piling up beyond your ability to keep up, take a good hard look at how things get added to that stack and make sure you're the one in control.

 

Keeping the right pots on the boil

"[Manage] your agreements with yourself. If you break your commitments with yourself, you'll be in negative stress. So you either don't make the commitments (lower expectations), keep the agreements (get busy and finish your stuff), or renegotiate your agreements (constantly review and make smart choices about what you can and should be doing, at any moment in time).”
      – David Allen

One of the scariest things when you get organized and pull all your obligations and expectations out of your head and into some trusted system for tracking them is that you can finally see just how much you've been carrying around in there. To overcome that tension, acknowledge that you can't and won't do it all.

Just as a chef has things on the stove, ingredients in the pantry, and cookbooks full of potential recipes, so too will you have active, inactive, and someday/maybe projects.

It's okay that a lot of your ideas about what you might do are hopes, dreams, contingency plans, or other things that aren't necessarily part of today, tomorrow, or ever. What is a part of today is capturing the idea for later review so that you can get it out of your way and get on with what's cooking now.

It's that act of review which keeps the whole system working. That doesn't mean you have to engage with every potential idea every single week—some things you might only want to think about once or twice a year—but it does mean you think every week about what matters in the week ahead. What are your goals this month? What can you do in the next week to help achieve them? What ideas and loose ends do you need to pack away from the past week so that you can focus on what matters most?

Give yourself a regular bit of quality time to pull back from the stream of reaction to see where you are and where you want to be. Look a couple weeks back and ahead in your calendar to find unfinished tasks and opportunities to make things go more smoothly for yourself. Even taking 20 minutes a week to do this will help you do more, and do it more calmly.

I like using the OmniFocus software for this, but paper works great too. Try starting with four lists: "Think about every week," "Think about every month," "Think about every quarter," and "Think about every year."

For example, you probably want to have "Home Maintenance" show up every week. Some of the time you'll look at it and move on right away, but often it will remind you of a problem to resolve (whether it's at the 'buy toilet paper' or 'start a savings account for better mattress' scale). On the other hand, "Career Advancement" would usually be on the quarterly or annual list, unless you're actively working to switch jobs.

As time passes you'll get a better sense of how often something needs to appear in front of you to prompt you to capture any unfinished business or opportunities.

The big reviews help keep you aligned with who you want to be and what you want to achieve. They reveal goals which can have projects and actions on shorter time cycles. The weekly review helps clear your head and get you back on the tracks you set out for yourself.

Granting yourself that quality time to catch your breath is vital to maintaining your momentum in your chosen direction. You deserve that chance to find clarity every week.

Creating the confidence to relax and love what you do

It's easy to waste time worrying that you haven't done something you should have done when you don't have a clear picture of what you're currently committed to—both to others and to yourself.

The solution to that problem has three parts: A system, a habit, and a piece of permission you give yourself. I learned what I think is the best version of the first two of these from productivity guru David Allen's great book Getting Things Done and his writings and lectures on the topic since, but some of it boils down to good advice any of us might have gotten from a parent or grandparent. "Write it down" and "Measure twice, cut once" are just another way of talking about these same two ideas. As for the third, it is in essence the Discardian mantra: "Let it go".

The system part is to get this stuff out of your head (and your calendar and your inboxes, etc.) and keep it in one master place. That place might be a digital tool (like OmniFocus) or it might be as simple as a paper notebook. Whatever it is, make it easy to get your ideas and commitments into it as soon as they cross your mind.

Constant and fast capture has several benefits. Obviously, one is that you're more likely to remember your ideas and obligations if you write them down. Another is that the faster and simpler you make it to capture these things—by using OmniFocus's quick entry shortcut, for example, or by always having that master notebook with you—the harder it is for those thoughts to seriously distract you from another task at hand. You can park the thought in the right place and carry on with what you were already doing. The last big benefit is that the more you trust and use your system, the better you become at focusing on the right things at the right time.

As writer and teacher Clay Shirky said, "Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity." In order to be making the right choice of what to do next, you need to understand your motivations (as I discussed in my last post) and make sure you have a complete and current picture of your obligations and options. When you know what you want to achieve and what you've said you'll do, it's much easier to identify the best match between the current opportunity—including your available resources and energy level—and the tasks on your list. But look out: If you don't have a purpose-driven list, other motivations will take over.

This is where the habit comes in. Until you pull back and consider those tasks (and the projects of which they are a part) in light of your goals and values, they can feel like a giant, depressing pile of undifferentiated to-do's.

How do you transform all that stuff you want to do (or someone else wants you to do) into something which will motivate you and keep you calm? You review it regularly. Every week you quickly look over the most important things. Periodically, you review the less important things. As you do that (along with looking at the past and coming couple weeks on your calendar), you'll add any commitments you haven't captured yet and you'll cross off those things which are complete or no longer necessary. By doing this every week, you will be able to trust on the days between that you will be soon returning to that big picture view where any date-bound obligations can be identified and scheduled. During this review—ideally through the very structure you use to organize things within your system, as I discussed last time—you will remind yourself of where these tasks and projects fit in relation to your higher level goals and the roles you want to be playing in the world.

It's easy to resist doing a review—it can take a couple hours for most busy people. But, as David Allen points out, "The additional amount of time and energy that you’ll have to spend, caught in the 'last minute' syndromes which will arise from avoiding a Weekly Review, so far outweigh what the Review requires, pure economics demand that you stop and do it – now!"

One of the things which keeps the review more manageable is to only be looking at the important stuff every single week; other things can be revisited on slower cycles. Use those shiny buckets I talked about last time—the roles you currently want to be playing in the world—as the identifier for what is important right now. For example, if you've currently got a bucket labeled "Awestruck Parent of a Beautiful Newborn Baby" now is unlikely to be the time that you also have in play that bucket labeled "Beginning But Getting Better Marathon Runner". It's fine to quickly note any less important ideas for the future—so you quit trying to carry them around in your head—but focus your time and energy on the projects and tasks for your active roles.

That brings me to the last element of solving the problem of worrying you haven't done everything you should and that is granting yourself permission to define "should". All of us can pile far more expectations on ourselves than any one person could achieve, let alone achieve while enjoying a happy, relaxing, rewarding life. Whether it's a single task, an entire project, a goal requiring multiple projects, or even something as big as a role you play in the world, you are in charge of deciding where it falls in your priorities. It might be currently active, it might be inactive and something you'll review and perhaps revive in the future, or you might exercise "completion by deletion" and drop it from your lists entirely. As I've said before, you can do anything, just not everything. Recognize that you will change over the years and filter your expectations of yourself to maximize your happiness and service to your highest values.

It is that permission to let go which is one of the essential ingredients to sticking with a system like this (and to getting back on track when you veer). Productivity guru and humorist Merlin Mann noted that "The danger of tracking everything is setting yourself up to a) have to keep revisiting them and maybe b) feel bad about not doing." This danger led to my labeling the inactive section of my system as "Things to think about again sometime".  Thus I remind myself that these inactive things are not a commitment to do, just an acknowledgement of a thought that I will reconsider at some point in the future, so it can get off my mind now.

Getting stuff out of your head and safely parked somewhere in your system—whether paper or digital—combined with picking today's top few priorities is vastly more productive than perfect fiddly management of all possible tasks. The best systems will support all three aspects I've discussed. They will make it easy to capture an idea for later without losing focus on your current task. They will support weekly review for the important stuff and less frequent reviews for the lower priority things. They will enable marking projects inactive and getting them out of the way of your current focus.

Constant capture to a trusted system, weekly reviews, and choosing to let go of some expectations previously laid on yourself are powerful tools, but can be tough to get into constant use. The value of such organization and habit change can be profound, though. Coach Clarissa Rodriguez said, ''Even if you only save an extra ten minutes a day, over the course of a year that adds up to forty hours… Who couldn't use an extra week in their year?''

Keeping roles, goals, and projects aligned for success

Ideally, our hour-to-hour decisions should serve our highest values. But how can we encourage this simultaneously strategic and tactical behavior in ourselves? My solution is to organize the way we think about projects and tasks to be in alignment with the way we prioritize our goals and the values they represent.

Take some big-picture contemplative time away from distractions to think about who you are and want to be. What fundamental beliefs drive how you relate to the world? What roles do you play?

You can start by identifying the big areas in your life (e.g., family or other relationships, work, creative expression, social responsibility), but push down to greater detail and articulate to yourself the roles in which you manifest these. In the book, I refer to these roles as "shiny buckets" and I believe you really can't be effective over time if you're trying to carry more than five or six of them at once. Its fine to periodically swap out those buckets and emphasize different roles (with their different goals and projects), but focusing on a few at a time is what creates success and avoids overload.

Within those buckets are your goals, and the projects that you use to achieve them. Again, you can only handle so many at once and focusing on fewer makes for faster and less painful accomplishment. If one of your buckets is very full (many simultaneous goals and projects) or very heavy (involving tasks that require exceptionally high amounts of time or emotional energy), you should lighten your load of other buckets to compensate.

Identify your buckets.

Now imagine yourself faced with a personal or family crisis. What's the first bucket you'd set down? What next? What could wait when a real emergency came up? This exercise serves two purposes: 1) To remind yourself that you are allowed to set a bucket down when you need to and pick it up again when you're ready; 2) To reveal to yourself the priority order of your roles and therefore of the goals and projects they contain.

Reflect that priority order in whatever system you use to track your goals, projects, and tasks. Review it regularly—quarterly is good, I find—to confirm that these are still your current buckets and that they are still in the right priority order.

By reflecting your buckets as the core organizing principle in whatever system you use to track your tasks (e.g., as folders in OmniFocus or as flagged sections in a paper notebook), they are automatically prioritized. When you review your projects on a weekly basis, you will be approaching them in the order that echoes your higher vision for yourself.

Executive Christie Hefner said, "Be sure you’re true to what you believe… I would argue that the way to do that is to spend less time thinking about what you’re doing and more time thinking about what you represent."*

Writer and Kirtsy founder Laura Mayes, in her session "Be Your Own Boss: Create a Life You Love" with Maggie Mason at SXSW Interactive conference in 2010, put it even more succinctly, "Be really solid on what your intention is."

By making time for the big picture thinking that enables structuring your to-do system around your fundamental priorities, you give yourself the daily freedom to spend more time doing and less time figuring out what you should do next.

Pick a road and get moving

Choose three things you want and three things you don't want in your life.

Think big. Don't edit what your heart and your gut are telling you; it's the truth of your wanting which will fuel your change in the right direction. Something that sounds little and achievable that you basically like the idea of will not lead to as much positive growth as burning for something huge you're afraid you can never have.

You can change your choices later, but choose something now.

I want…
1.
2.
3.

I don't want…
1.
2.
3.

Next time you have an option – and we are faced with options all day long – make sure whenever possible that you're going for things that fit the Want list and avoiding things leading to the Don't Want list.