Category: Quality over Quantity

Give your social media the ladder check

There are positive aspects to social media, definitely, but it can also suck away a lot of your time, motivation, and positivity. So how do you balance it?

First of all, you do balance it. You think about how it impacts your day; what the impact of different services have on you; how you feel depending on what you’re encountering in your timelines. You deserve to have this part of modern life feel good and help you be who you want to be, whether that means you end up engaging with social media a lot or not at all.

Think about different ways of using social media as ladders. There’s the short ladder that gets you out of a hole, that helps you break your isolation. That can be a really good use and if you’re going to use social media at all, make sure the services you use and especially the list of things each is showing you meet that basic requirement.

Looking down through a hatchway to a metal utility ladder that leads up out of an underground chamber. Another ladder leading up is in the foreground. All the metal in the image shows heavy use, with its orange safety paint worn away where feet tramped up and down.

This can be a very difficult minimum standard to maintain on services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that don’t give users control over what appears in their timeline. If you’re seeing promoted posts or viral content instead of the posts of the people you care about, reconsider your use of that service; its interests do not align with yours.

Even on services like Mastodon or Discord or Slack, where algorithms aren’t obscuring the posts of those you follow, examine what is appearing in your timeline. Many excellent people you like a lot do not feed you what you need or want.

Unfollowing isn’t rude; it’s self-care.

Unfollow that funny friend who’s burbling constantly about a new hobby in which you have no interest. Turn off boosts from that one who’s boosting magazine-loads of content into your timeline. Filter out keywords. Drag all your little-used Discord channels atop each other to create a server folder. Mute channels you don’t actually care about keeping up with. And especially turn off notifications; everything on social media can wait until it’s a good time for you to have a look.

The short ladder can be your friend. It’s good to have a way to climb out of your own head and make a connection with others, find a laugh, and be reminded of interesting things to learn or ways you can help in the world.

Old color photo of two wooden ladders in a room with built-in wooden bookcases, wainscoting, sedate wallpaper and a balcony (presumably with more bookshelves). One ladder is just four steps for reaching the top of the shelves at the ground level. The other is thirteen steps and has a handrail along the wall side.
from Het Utrechts Archief catalog number: 21516.

The next ladder is the one that gets you out of your bubble. Follow people who teach you about stuff you want to understand better. Let real voices of other people’s lived experience help you unlearn your biases. Follow people who are elsewhere in the world and see how life in different countries can be different. Follow hashtags which bring images of landscapes different to your own and gain a window on the world. Bonus points for places with very different climates and opposite hemisphere views of the seasons. Let this mid-size ladder be the one you use when you’re feeling good but need inspiration and insight.

Black and white photo from the 1940s. A person with short wavy hair and a mustache stands on a ladder while painting kettle drums in a stylized mural with a piano, sheet music, a microphone, and various wavy lines and geometric forms.

The long ladder is generally to be avoided. When you’re up at the top of it, you mostly see other people balancing at the top of their long ladders, trying to achieve the greatest visibility, but constrained in their choices and distanced from normal life. Don’t fixate on follower counts or other metrics; keep your life goals oriented to what you’re doing when you’ve stepped away from social media.

Black and white photo of an incredibly tall ladder leaning against a sizable church. The ladder extends well above the tall chimney and the roof of the church, with the vertical line it forms drawing the eye up past the church buttresses and tall narrow stained glass windows, across the tiled roof, to the person nearly at the top. A bird flies by below the level of the person.
from Het Utrechts Archief 406502

If you find social media eats up too much of your time, prune and prune heavily. Use fewer services. Follow very few accounts. Find interface preferences and apps which let you view just your follows and don’t automatically display the stream of activity and trending posts. You can like people and subjects and services and still not give them more of your time than you want to allocate in your day. Prioritize your real priorities, and configure things so the easiest thing to do is support them.

Make it easy to keep the ladder short; just enough to trot up out of your hole and then move on in an enlivened mood.

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.

Quality Over Quantity and your wardrobe

My big Quality Over Quantity theme this year (besides not over-scheduling myself, which is a big part of my health management) has been pruning and adjusting my wardrobe. My clothes need to reflect who I am now, feel good on the body I have now, and support my happiness and wellness.

I'll be sharing more about this in the weeks ahead, but for the moment here's a little excerpt from my book Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff:

The change of the seasons into summer and winter is a good time to revisit things in your closet because it gives you a chance to look again at clothes you haven’t worn since last year and decide if you love them enough to renew their contract as players on your team. When the chill grows in the air, go through all those coats, sweaters, scarves, mittens, boots, etc. and decide what you're going to wear within the next thirty days. If it doesn't make the cut, get rid of it.

Someone else needs to be warm more than you need to maintain The Gallery of Unwanted Winterwear. As the sunshine blooms and you shed layers, do the same thing, but with bathing suits, shorts, lightweight dresses, halter tops, sandals, and t-shirts.

Don’t hang onto things that you never use. Send that just-not-you suit to one of the great organizations helping low-income businesspeople carry themselves to success. Give that big, out-of-fashion winter coat to charity and save someone from the chill. Let that over-the-top formalwear send someone on a tight budget to the prom or a holiday party in style. Move the neglected items out of your space and into the arms of someone who really appreciates them.

Remember, Someday Is Now still applies when it comes to your dress clothes; we simply define ‘now’ as being a longer time range. When you haven’t worn that suit or gown in six months, but you don’t want to be in the lurch if you get invited to a fancy occasion, you can still hold onto it ‘just in case’ provided that it fits you well and you actually like wearing it.

However, I have seen people keep something ostensibly for the reason “I might need to wear it if I go to a formal event” but really for the reason “I spent too much on this and it fits me completely wrong and I haven't worn it the last five times I've been invited to a formal event, but maybe if I hold onto it somehow that money will magically have been wisely spent.”

I say keep the things that are both beautiful and useful to you and perhaps define the utility of formals in a longer than six month cycle, but move the rest along. Don’t let the fear of being caught unprepared for exceptional events make your daily encounter with your closet a hassle.

Effort doesn’t necessarily increase effect

Don't mistake the work of carrying anxiety in your body for progress on what you're worrying about.

Real, positive change doesn't require stress. Sometimes it comes along with it, but it's not mandatory & certainly not helpful.

Worry without the work doesn't help anyone.

Work without the worry helps—& does so by an order of magnitude more because when you're not stressed out, you can work longer and do better work.

A related tip for volunteering: Lean on your strengths & chill out to be more effective.

Doing what you're good at may feel like "cheating" because it's so easy, but you're giving better, faster results than they would otherwise get.

Making a difference doesn't have to be a strain. In fact, the less of a strain it is, the more likely you are to give.

You still have permission not to do everything.

September's Discardian season focuses on the power of quality over quantity. On that theme, here's a post from a couple years ago which is just as true today:

 

You have permission not to do everything.

“I know I’ve got more on my list than I could ever do, but I just can’t seem to keep up with it.”

Think about that sentence. Most of us say something like that to ourselves or a friend at some point—and most of the time when we do, we don’t notice the inconsistency at all. However, if we fully accept the truth that our to-do lists are bigger than our availability, we must stop beating ourselves up for failing to achieve the impossible.

September’s Discardia holiday is a reminder to practice Quality over Quantity and is a good time to revisit the expectations you’ve been setting. One of the best ways to manage stress is to manage your agreements with others and, especially, with yourself, so take a little time to think about those agreements.

That’s what your ‘to-do list’—whether you keep the things on it in your head or written down—really is: a list of everything you’d need to do if you wanted to fulfill all the things you’ve said 'yes' to. It represents agreement in its broadest sense, whether a commitment to another person or an internal affirmation of something you desire.

Being excited about things, working on them with others, doing the hard work to achieve progress, these are all valuable and can be highly motivating. But try to do too many at the same time and the effect will be negative. Fewer will be completed, with your work and the satisfaction you derive from it being less than it would be when you’re not overstretched.

I’m not necessarily recommending saying 'yes' less often. You can have as big a list of things you’d like to do as your heart and head can dream up, but the only way for that not to be a burden is to let go of the expectation that everything on the list is active right now. Become comfortable with the idea of inactive projects. They aren’t failures; they’re just not in play at the moment.

This isn’t as hard as it might seem. You have lots of practice with doing this in other areas of your life. Think about the music you like; you don’t listen to it all at the same time. You may not even listen to all the genres you enjoy every single week, yet that doesn’t create stress.

Start approaching your list of projects a little more like a D.J. What’s the right mix for here and now? Is there anything my audience will miss if I don’t get it out there? What will keep my energy up?

Asking yourself the right questions

September’s Discardia is all about Quality Over Quantity. This year it’s a very short holiday—just two days, due to the new moon following the day after the equinox—so rather than taking on a big project, I recommend using this time to create a list of questions which will inform your decisions between now and the end of the year. Which questions will be most useful to you varies depending on what you want to work on in your life. I’ve listed some of my favorites here and I’d love it if you add others that have been valuable for you in the comments.

  • Is this on my ‘things that make me happy’ list or my ‘things I don’t want in my life’ list?
    I picked this up in 2010 at Maggie Mason and Laura Mayes' SXSW session on building your dream life. It’s helpful with everything from big life choices on down to deciding what should be on the coffee table.
  • Where is my attention? How am I spending my energy?
    This pair of questions is a reality check of your intentions vs. where your time and effort actually goes.
  • When did I last use or enjoy this?
    Find what has become stale and clear it away to make room for better things.
  • What could I take care of now that would reduce my risk of future hassle?
    Whenever you have a pause, this is a great way to give things a little nudge toward better or to identify and eliminate problems for your future self.
  • Which choice would the person I want to be make?
    Appeal to your best self even on small decisions and you will create the future that calls that version of you into being.

Put your questions where you’ll see them often—printed out and pinned over your desk or on the fridge or by the bathroom mirror or on a card in your wallet or all of these. Let them seep into your daily habits and use them to fine-tune your world.

The benefits of low-alcohol drinking

'Less can be more' in your glass as it can in your home and calendar. Many people enjoy mixed drinks—or would like to if they weren't laid low by them. It is possible to have the best of both worlds and sample great cocktails without getting sleepy, stupid, sad, or sick.

The core Discardian principle of Quality Over Quantity comes into play in multiple ways to achieve this.

  1. Slow down.
    Be mindful of what you're consuming. One of the best aspects of good cocktail drinking is tuning in to the present moment and to those you're with, so amplify that by paying attention to what you're having. Take time to enjoy what you've got and space out the alcohol with a glass of water between rounds. You'll get more enjoyment out of your drinks—and out of the next morning!
  2. Drink less of better.
    Satisfy your senses with smaller sips and smaller servings of something well-made with complex ingredients. Whether you like sweet or bitter, tangy or rich, there are amazing cocktails to be enjoyed in classic serving sizes (generally just 3-6 ounces).
  3. Base your drinks on lower-proof main ingredients.
    By not including more than half an ounce of high-proof spirits (40+% alcohol by volume) and carefully selecting recipes which allow their less "hot" components (such as sherry, vermouth, and port) to shine, you can discover a whole world of amazing cocktails, both classics and new creations.
  4. Be a snob.
    Now I don't mean you should only have top-shelf products in trendy bars; I'm talking about the good kind of snobbery that keeps you from wasting time and health on things that don't provide you with real pleasure. Save your liver for those cocktails worth having, in the time and place, and with the company that makes those moments special.

Want to explore more in this realm? I've got a whole book of ideas for you (my second book!) and it's called The Art of the Shim: Low-Alcohol Cocktails to Keep You Level.

Thanks again to readers of either of my books for your support and encouragement to keep on writing!

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.

You have permission not to do everything.

“I know I’ve got more on my list than I could ever do, but I just can’t seem to keep up with it.”

Think about that sentence. Most of us say something like that to ourselves or a friend at some point—and most of the time when we do, we don’t notice the inconsistency at all. However, if we fully accept the truth that our to-do lists are bigger than our availability, we must stop beating ourselves up for failing to achieve the impossible.

September’s Discardia holiday is a reminder to practice Quality over Quantity and is a good time to revisit the expectations you’ve been setting. One of the best ways to manage stress is to manage your agreements with others and, especially, with yourself, so take a little time to think about those agreements.

That’s what your ‘to-do list’—whether you keep the things on it in your head or written down—really is: a list of everything you’d need to do if you wanted to fulfill all the things you’ve said 'yes' to. It represents agreement in its broadest sense, whether a commitment to another person or an internal affirmation of something you desire.

Being excited about things, working on them with others, doing the hard work to achieve progress, these are all valuable and can be highly motivating. But try to do too many at the same time and the effect will be negative. Fewer will be completed, with your work and the satisfaction you derive from it being less than it would be when you’re not overstretched.

I’m not necessarily recommending saying 'yes' less often. You can have as big a list of things you’d like to do as your heart and head can dream up, but the only way for that not to be a burden is to let go of the expectation that everything on the list is active right now. Become comfortable with the idea of inactive projects. They aren’t failures; they’re just not in play at the moment.

This isn’t as hard as it might seem. You have lots of practice with doing this in other areas of your life. Think about the music you like; you don’t listen to it all at the same time. You may not even listen to all the genres you enjoy every single week, yet that doesn’t create stress.

Start approaching your list of projects a little more like a D.J. What’s the right mix for here and now? Is there anything my audience will miss if I don’t get it out there? What will keep my energy up?