The reason you might sit in the emergency room for hours with a broken arm is that you are not dying. And someone else is. Clearly, they need to treat the dying person before they treat your painful but not life-threatening broken bone. Your situation is important but it’s not as urgent as the guy with the heart attack. That’s triage.
You set the priorities for your life. You are in control. Not of everything. But of a whole heck of a lot of things. You’re the doctor making the triage decisions. That’s your power, right there. Claim it.
PROCRASTINATION
“There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you’re not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.”
—PAUL GRAHAM
Computer scientist Paul Graham’s concept of good procrastination is nothing short of a revelation.
He goes on to explain: “There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: You could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination . . . That’s the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They’re type-C procrastinators: They put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.”
Are you getting this? We can, and should, deploy procrastination as a tool of triage!
When we put off that obligatory small thing (writing thank-you notes, say) to work on that important big thing (writing a novel, say), we are engaging in Graham’s “good procrastination.”
If prioritization is how we figure out what’s really important to us, procrastination is how we figure out what we can let slide in order to make room for the important stuff.
It might be that, for you, the novel is actually the less important thing. Perhaps you’re just working on that novel because you think it’s what smart bookish people like you are supposed to do. Perhaps what you really want to do—what is for you bigger, more important—is writing those notes to your family and friends, nurturing those relationships, keeping up those important connections. Only you know for sure.
And you do know.
Graham wraps up his essay saying, “Let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you . . . and you’ll leave the right things undone.” When we make delight one of our metrics for choosing which tasks to prioritize and which to procrastinate, things suddenly get a whole lot clearer.
POCKETS
“Change will not come . . . if we wait for some other time.”
—BARACK OBAMA
Let’s be real.
It’s not going to be all delight all the time.
You need clean socks, so you need to do laundry. Probably not too much delight there (unless you count smooshing your face down into the just-out-of-the-dryer clean clothes and letting their warmth envelop you—and it’s strongly recommended that you indeed do count that).
As much as we’d all love to chase joy and urgency all day long, the reality is that most of the hours in the day are already spoken for. In fact, right now, it probably feels like all the hours are spoken for, and then some. Workers gotta work. Sleepers gotta sleep. Parents gotta parent. And so on and so forth.
But the remarkable thing you’re going to discover is the immense power of locating and dedicating small pockets of time in your day, week, month, or year for the things you really want to be doing. Sometimes they’ll be truly tiny, sometimes a bit bigger.
It is truly astonishing to observe how much can be accomplished (even if that “much” is intentionally actually sort of nothing—like people-watching or meditation) in relatively brief pockets of time carved out regularly.
Much of the rest of this book is concerned with exactly how to do that carving out in your own life. But before you go on to read about how to do it, you have to believe that you can do it. That it is possible. That this magical tool with the silly name (be honest now: Who among you didn’t raise an eyebrow back on page 33 when the list of the three big mind-set game changers ended with the word “Pockets”?) is going to fundamentally alter your reality.
A lofty claim? Oh yeah. You’ll soon see why.
ALL THE STUFF WE NEED TO DO
I DON’T KNOW HOW THEY DO IT!
“The world needs our immediate presence.”
—LOUISE PENNY, PARAPHRASING MIGUEL CERVANTES
Somehow, we all have to show up. Whether it’s the world that’s demanding our presence or our own selves, we’ve all got to find a way to show the hell up in our lives.
Everyone reinvents this wheel for themselves. No two people are handling this time mess in exactly the same way. People are figuring out the strategies that work best for them.
What allows folks to make time for the things that matter to them? It can seem like others are balancing everything effortlessly. They’re not. A lot of thought and hard work are going into making things work.
By examining how a wide range of regular, everyday people make time—for their work, families, relationships, practicalities, creativity, activism, and selves—we can start sorting out which of their strategies might work for us and, just as importantly, which might not. What to use and what to discard.
People do all kinds of stuff. Let’s see what we discover.
WORK
“What do people do all day?”
—RICHARD SCARRY
Oh, work. Sometimes it feels like it takes up all our time, just by itself.
And, in some ways, we have no choice about it. After all, we have to earn a living. But in fact, we do have a degree of agency. We can think about how we organize our working lives.
While things like flexible schedules or remote work are not available to everyone, it can nevertheless be useful to examine some variations to the typical workday. Not only might we find something we could perhaps try, but, also, looking at others’ creative solutions can inspire wholly new ideas about what our own work might be and how we might do it.
Here are six people who work in somewhat unconventional ways, whose normal day-to-day experiences challenge what we think a work day can look like. You’ll know right away which of these ideas are (or are not) exciting to you. Use that knowledge.
Tiffanie, an artist, often works from late evening until the wee hours of the morning. She says, “As many times as I’ve tried to shift my schedule back to the ‘normal’ circadian rhythm enjoyed by my family and friends, I find I cannot resist the temptation of working at night. Nighttime (or ‘second shift,’ as we call it in our house) is when I am guaranteed no one is going to disrupt my work for five or six hours. I can become as absorbed as I need to be.” Likewise, people who’d dislike these sorts of almost-all-nighters sometimes get similar results by rising as early as four in the morning.
Erin, a production coordinator, works in an office, but works from home each Friday. Working remotely means she can slow down, focus, and look at the big picture. “Mondays through Thursdays my thoughts are racing from one task to another,” she says. “I am running from one meeting to another—sometimes literally! By Friday I am usually exhausted and behind. Working from home gives me time to concentrate on individual responsibilities (compared to the more collaborative or supportive work I tend to do in the office) and provides a space for uninterrupted, deliberate thought.”