1 What will you do? |
I’ve noticed in the last week that I’m caught in the trough of a recurring cycle: a period of tremendous productivity that grinds to a halt when I encounter a high-anxiety obstacle in one of my projects.
Normally, I bring to bear lots of my procrastination-busting tools, which usually involve engaging with my troublesome projects in a more incremental and granular way until I push through the rough spot. This can take weeks to work through, and can feel emotionally brutal.
This time I’d like perform an experiment by taking the opposite approach: disengagement rather than engagement. The idea here is to spend less time grappling with a problem that is laden with anxiety, and more time pursuing activities completely unrelated, with the expectation that I can build up a reserve of positive emotion and energy that can sustain me when I next tackle my high-anxiety projects.
Part of my thinking here is informed by a blog post that has continued to resonate with me in the last couple of weeks. From the yoga blog “Namaste, Bitches,” a yoga teacher addresses the way that yoga can re-orient your attention away from obsessive behavior and open up possibilities that one is too otherwise preoccupied to notice: "Yoga can introduce a discontinuity into the momentum and fixation of addictive behaviour. Until this sort of gap occurs, no change is possible. Once a person chooses to continue to induce this discontinuity, other previously invisible or inaccessible choices become available.” [Here’s a link: http://namaste-bitches.blogspot.com/2010/06/interview-with-my-yoga-camp-crush.html]
This way of thinking is a leap of faith for me, but in the past I’ve found Einstein’s definition to be profoundly true: “insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
I’m going to kill a few birds with one stone here: I have a huge stack of unread and half-read magazines, some of which have sitting at the bottom of a growing pile for the last year. I’m going to make this giant pile go away by tearing out the articles I want to read and recycling everything else. Then, as the spirit moves me, I’m going to write a little bit about the articles that engage me, and post these musings to my Facebook page. I usually find that this combination of reading and writing unsticks gears in my brain that get rusted and frozen from lack of use, and that there’s a resulting burst of excitement, energy, creativity and productivity.
High-anxiety projects: I have to bill a half-dozen customers for work done over the last several months, write a contract for a current project, and re-estimate the cost of a large project that is underway and for which the scope of work has undergone a couple of dozen changes in the last several months. I’ll consider this experiments a success if I can take a step forward every day on each of these projects over the next two weeks, with specific outcomes detailed below.
1) Sort through magazines and clip articles to read over the next two weeks. Protect 30 minutes of reading time each morning and evening.
2) Protect 15 minutes of writing time each morning and evening. Post all written pieces to Facebook.
3) Assemble tasks lists for each high-anxiety project and undertake at least one task on each project during the work day.
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2 How will you test your idea and measure success? |
1) Assemble a checklist/spreadsheet of tasks: review each morning and evening.
2) Journal daily about this experiment, with specific attention to the emotional component of this, the concrete ways I squirm out of the commitment, the ways I re-engage, the concrete outcomes.
3) Measure success by tracking in writing my progress on each component: reading, writing, and completing next tasks on the high-anxiety projects detailed below. |
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Comments & Observations
Dan Owen Step 1 is complete: my two-foot high stack of magazines has been reduced to a two-inch high stack of clippings -- about 60 in total. The source material is now sitting in a box to be put out on the curb for recycling. I read the first piece on the pile last night (a 2006 piece from the Atlantic predicting oil prices), wrote a short piece about it, and posted it on Facebook. So nice to not be staring at that pile of paper anymore.
Jun 20, 2010
Lizzy Hey Dan, I like this. Getting past barriers with work, especially the aspect of our work we dislike, is a common challenge. Somet techniques I've tried include lighting candles to start my day, or making a cup of tea to begin a new project. Any kind of pleasant little ritual makes the project more fun. A friend once told me she has a glass of wine when she sits down to pay bills. In the past I would have waited until the bills were done to celebrate, but celebrating during the task feels very satisfying.
Jun 22, 2010
Matthew Cornell Excellent idea, Dan. Looking forward to your results. Got a chuckle from "Namaste, Bitches" (I did yoga for years). You might have seen it, but here's a very good article on willpower: [Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind - New York Times | http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html?ex=1364788800&en=43baa50ffa5fbac4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all]. Finally, I'd like to follow your writing on FB [http://www.facebook.com/ideamatt]. Good luck, and keep us informed!
Jun 22, 2010
Dan Owen Liza, I have a huge number of tools I use to ease myself into difficult projects; one problem I face is that I can easily spend more time on the ritual than on the work itself. This experiment is an attempt to come at this problem from a completely different direction: to disengage COMPLETELY from the work, then come at it again after engaging with something completely unrelated. It's an attempt to get away from the incremental approach I tend to favor.
Matt, I remember the NYT article. I never quite know what to think about research like this: so many variables, so hard to hold factors constant in real life. What I like about this article, though, is the idea that, as a practical matter, the brain's capacity for giving something it's undivided attention is in fact biologically limited, so switching tasks, instead of being a kind of failure, can actually be an effective way of leveraging the brain's natural capacity. Thanks for sending this my way.
I'm getting very close to starting a blog, and will probably upload some of the writing related to this experiment there. I'm trying to find the right balance between public accountability and private engagement with my "monkey mind," the part of my brain that fears public scrutiny. It's an ongoing battle.
Jun 26, 2010
Dan Owen An interim status report: I'm loving the reading part of this. I've been climbing into bed at 7:30 or 8:00 pm and reading for an hour or so before falling happily asleep. The writing part is going in fits and starts: my tendency to polish as I write is such an aggravating obstacle.
Essay #2 is turning into a major piece of writing, drawing together very diverse articles and touching on fundamental beliefs I have about living a purposeful, reflective, engaged life. The fact that big ideas are coming out of this exercise is something I'm having very ambivalent feelings about: I have actual work to do! Bills to pay! Employees to manage! This feels like an ADHD experience: how do I contain my awareness of one set of interests and preoccupations and keep them from interfering with other parts of my life? I'm afraid of my capacity to distract myself with interesting preoccupations.
Having said that, I tackled a couple of my high-anxiety tasks with great results earlier in the week. I failed to draw up a spreadsheet to track my progress, so I've moved that up the priority list. I'm back to using incremental tools during the work day, but succumbing to anxiety and inactivity at the end of the workday. There's movement here, though. I'm re-engaging with my GTD practice, which has been dormant for the last several months, which has been bringing me relief as store fewer of my commitments in my head and transfer them to my lists.
Jun 26, 2010
Dan Owen This has been a huge learning experience for me. I'm just now processing what's taken place in the last three months and learning from it.
When I posted the experiment in late June, the building project that was underway was entering a new phase: it was shifting from work that didn't require a lot of my attention to work that required 100% of my attention. I didn't notice or understand the significance of this at the time, but the fact that I was starting to feel overwhelmed was the signal. Because work on the site was occupying all of my attention for 10 hours a day, I had no attention left for all of my other commitments -- bookkeeping, non-job-related paperwork, estimates and proposals, a social life, time to cook meals or work out, etc.
Sep 09, 2010
Dan Owen Then a few crises hit -- sick relative, disappearing employee, deadlines -- and my whole system more or less collapsed, including some psychosomatic back pain that kept me off the job site entirely.
What I then did in late-August -- and should have done in late June -- was hire more help. This enabled me to move forward on both the site and in the office, and move through some of the anxiety-laden tasks that typically blow me off course. For the past three weeks I've reduced the back-log of work and am continuing to do so.
A couple of new experiments have resulted, including hiring both a virtual assistant and an office assistant whose tasks verge on those of a "personal assistant." Although I'm not feeling like a movie star. I'll report back.
Sep 09, 2010
Matthew Cornell Thanks for the updates, Dan. I'm enjoying your progress and insights. Good news re: realization of needing to hire; sounds like it helped. Movie star - Ha!
Sep 16, 2010