​on a coaching call, i was working with someone who said almost these exact words to me:
“i basically get to a point where i have so much to do that i don’t have time to work out or sleep. i just have to keep going to make sure everything gets done.”
when i heard it, i sort of couldn’t believe what i was hearing. but then i had a visceral flashback of a time i said those same words to my mom. and i realized two things: (1) it wasn’t just me that felt that way so there must be some societal/systemic forces making that belief possible and (2) it’s possible to change and not be like that! these were great realizations and i will expand on them in detail some other time, but, for now, i want to write about the steps i took to get past that type of thinking. and to be clear, i think the idea that we have too much to do to be healthy (because sleep and exercise are necessary parts of keeping the body working) is a personal system design problem that is predicated on a broken socioeconomic system.
so how did i move past that type of thinking? i think most simply it boils down to two things:
learning how to say no better
realizing that, when i’ve said an appropriate volume of “no,” i get just as much done when i’ve slept well and exercised as when i don’t.
wow. it’s already been 10 minutes. guess i’ll expand on the above points and the ones below tomorrow.
points to expand on later:
this broken idea this keeps oppressive systems functioning because it makes it possible for some people to find all their meaning in their work which makes it easier to create & maintain false class divisions. overwork also squeezes people out of work that could be distributed if our society actually wanted to achieve full employment instead of maximize profit for corporations. in the end, what we need is a society where everyone and everyone’s work is valued.
bell hooks and why we can’t love well (which breaks our society) when we’re too busy
the last 24 hours have been more explicitly about spirituality than any other time stretch i’ve experienced since like 2011. this post isn’t a cohesive thought, but some threads that i think are shaping up to be woven together later.Â
yesterday i had lunch with my neighbor yotam (and eventually his wife, shoshana, joined the lunch party, too). we wanted to get to know each other more intentionally and the frame we told our stories through was basically our spiritual arcs. he started out with his father’s spiritual and religious background and then traced out his own; i did the same.
one thing he said really stuck with me was that religions are living things. and, as a massage therapist, he knows that living things can hurt and sometimes need work. he and i both feel energy to put that work into our respective religions, but maybe not yet…
at the end of lunch with my friend, marilyn, we ended up landing on the discussion of religion and spirituality and why it’s seemingly so taboo in new england. it really was only the last few minutes of our conversion, but i’m excited to pick up on that thread in the future with her!
dinner with casper is always a spiritually focused endeavor (he’s at the harvard divinity school and doing all sorts of awesome work). he’s thinking about some next steps centered on what it means to be human and, maybe in the end, that’s all spirituality and religion really is?
this actually didn’t happen yesterday, but i’ve been thinking about my friend gibrán a lot lately. we’ve definitely talked explicitly about starting a church in the past and while i’m not actually sure what’s happening with that, i can certainly see that being a valuable endeavor…
this also didn’t happen yesterday, but i found this flyer on the bus the other day and thought to myself “this church has a fundamental design problem. this material is made with the wrong audience in mind. this is a solvable problem.”
anyway, the idea of starting a “church” (maybe cosecha style) with a focus on… something other than God is sounding increasingly attractive and also necessary.
this is much more of a public journal entry than a blog post… but whatevs. my blog. i do what i want with it lol.
ross and i are in a war against the 9to5 work schedule. i think we’re just two soldiers in a battle that’s been going on for a long time, but we’re definitely in it.Â
around the 20-minute mark in the episode, lauren discusses how her work schedules changes from day to day. for creatives*, it’s just unreasonable to assume that everyone is productive between 9a and 5p everyday. lauren said that sometimes early morning is great. other times, you get a flash of creative inspiration and you want to work all night. when you have a 9to5 job, you have to squash those potentially productive hours to sleep so that you can show up at your desk and putz around trying to make yourself look productive. at one point she said “i felt like i was spending most of my time trying to look productive instead of actually being productive.” i feel her on that one and there are plenty of studies about regardless of how many hours we clock, we’re still can only achieve a certain level of productivity.
now, the 9to5 work schedule made sense as a protection for workers who were being overworked (more history in my other post over here). having a maximum number of hours in a day you could expect someone to work is great when everyone makes widgets or is supervising people making widgets. but knowledge workers no longer make widgets in that way and as automation continues to expands, fewer and fewer people will work jobs that having them working in a widget-making sort of way (did you see that mcdonald’s is automating more and more parts of its stores now? i think the line that it’s because of the fight for 15 is a myth; they were gonna do this anyways, but it’s really great story to blame the workers for their own job loss instead of the fact that the automation is more profitable…)
more flexible work hours would allow more people to be productive when they’re maximally productive. i think it would also have the effect of making “vacation” time less important as a balancing force. because who needs vacation when you can vacation a little every day? i’m not saying that taking long stretches of time off isn’t important (they really are and those long breaks are where i find some of my best inspiration and have major breakthroughs), but i do think that the vacation as an antidote to working is problematic. people are happiest when they’re doing meaningful work. pitting vacation/leisure tie against working time to me is not actually what we want to be doing.
*note: “creatives” is a term i don’t like, but still use because it’s easier, conveys meaning quickly, and i haven’t found a better word. i don’t like it because i think all people are inherently creative and that creativity is the only thing people have to keep themselves doing meaningful work when the robots come, heh.
this year, i’ve been thinking and learning a lot about friendship. i made an intentional choice to have a group of people i consider really close (best?) friends, a group of people i consider close friends, and then everyone else. i wrote a bit about why over here, but the practice is continually teaching me.
i now realize (believe?) that having regular time with close friends is a necessity; not optional. spending time with them gives me energy and that makes the rest of life easier and better. how? some reasons:
they teach me new things
the people i choose to keep close are some of the smartest, most passionate people i know. john rohn says that we’re composites of the five people we spend the most time with and so i want the people who are influencing and shaping me to be people who inspire me. these friends often teach me things they know that i don’t because we come from different places. this makes moving through the rest of my life make more sense because i can draw on experience other than my own. i like to think the teaching and learning goes both ways, too.
i learn about myself
i’m an external processor and so i actually learn what i think in explaining it to someone else. and, yes, this can happen with people i know less well, but it’s different with someone who knows you well. people who know your whole story can make connections across parts of your life that you never had. it’s harder for strangers to do that, though it is possible. close friends can also tell you tough things (because you have built up a foundation of trust) that you couldn’t hear from someone else.
we share resources
my close friends and tend to share resources in a different way than i do with other people. these obviously aren’t hard and fast rules, but i think resources flow more freely because we know we see each other often. sometimes that just means eating food together without worrying about who’s paying what. other times i means sending each other links and articles that are relevant to a degree that only a close friend would know. also, when a close friend tells me that i should meet someone, i know that that’s a really important connection to make; some of those connections have been game changers for me in terms of career and life trajectory.
being in flow is super valuable. getting into flow is a difficult thing. it’s even more difficult to get into i tif you aren’t used to working in that way. here are two tips on how to get into flow faster.
recognize that getting into flow takes time
this might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s actually important to recognize, consciously, that getting into flow takes time. it’s similar to weightlifting or doing any strenuous exercise. you don’t go from straight from standing still to lifting a ton of weight or doing an intense yoga pose because you’ll hurt yourself. with flow, you probably won’t hurt yourself, but you’ll definitely set yourself up for failure if you assume you can just jump right into flow.
this same insight helps make the point clearer about why you should maximize the amount of time you can’t be interrupted. the true costs of multi-tasking are high and getting back into flow is costly. so if you know you’re trying to get into flow, get somewhere (physically) where you can’t be interrupted.
practice makes perfect
humans are creatures of habit. thankfully, we can use habits to prompt /trick ourselves into doing what we want. the more times you practice getting into the flow, the better you get at getting in it over time. here are a few examples that either i use or i’ve heard about that are effective:
specific triggers or environments that prompt particular actions
turning my phone on airplane mode and flipping it face down is my trigger for a pomodoro session
the first two songs on a specific album are my writing soundtrack. they two songs combined are almost exactly ten minutes (my writing cap-ish). now, when i play them, i know i have exactly two songs to finish my piece. it helps me keep pace (though i often write for too long) and keeps me focused because i that certain parts of the song tell me how much time i have left to finish.
i heard on a podcast once that a person who has a home office actually does a full morning routine as if he they were commuting before starting work. they shower, eat breakfast, take a walk around the block, and then comes back in their house through a different door and into the home office. it helps him get his head from ‘home’ to 'work’ in a way that works for him.
overall, the point isn’t that any specific trigger with work for everyone (although many of mine are inspired from other people). the point is that practicing getting into flow makes it happen faster and certain triggers over time can help your brain remember that it’s flow time.
