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Is it really a good idea to keep your options open?

Confession: I have too much on my plate again.

It’s a problem that occurs every month or two as I struggle (usually unsuccessfully) to fit all the things I really want to do into a finite number of post-work hours.

I try to do this because in theory I want to do it all. But the reality (which I have a hard time remembering) is that when I’m busy trying to do it all I invariably end up exhausted and unhappy.

Instead of cramming more and more into my already-busy schedule, I find that I make the most progress when I have wide open space and only a few tasks competing for my attention. Into this wide open space my creative endeavors unfold gracefully, effortlessly.

But as soon as my schedule starts to get cluttered again, I find myself feeling overwhelmed. And once I’m overwhelmed I stop getting things done.

Learning this lesson has been hard for me because I taught myself to manage the opposite when I was at MIT. And so I know that the opposite is also true.

You can motivate yourself to achieve impossible tasks when your schedule is so cluttered it is beyond overwhelming and begins to induce panic.

Martha Beck would say that when the to-do list get to panic-inducing levels of overwhelm we shift into the place beyond fear (an idea from her book, Steering by Starlight: The Science and Magic of Finding Your Destiny) and from this place we can act with calm and clear precision, taking highly effective action toward our goals.

As a student at MIT I usually completed my work from the place beyond fear. The amount of work was so extreme that I had to stop worrying about if I could do it at all because every drop of my energy was focused into getting as much done as I could. I didn’t need to prioritize or schedule — I just started with the assignment that was most pressing and worked until I was too tired to press on.

In this way I accomplished impressive, impossible tasks as a student at MIT. But most of the time I was miserable.

Because this place-beyond-fear ridiculousness isn’t a healthy way to get things done in our day-to-day lives, but as a student it became the only way I knew. I didn’t know the steady effort of healthy progress — I knew the reckless, careening drama of a panic-stricken dash to meet a looming deadline.

And so I’ve struggled with finding a model for getting things done that works for me out in the real world, and especially one that works for me in my own personal life.
Because my personal projects don’t have deadlines really, and if they do have deadlines those deadlines were usually arbitrary goals I set for myself.

I’m not good at keeping myself accountable to my own deadlines. I expect to disappoint myself and so I usually do — partly because my deadlines often assume a willingness to pursue the kinds of herculean efforts I invested as a student, and partly because I find it hard to feel motivated when the only person my failure is disappointing is myself.

All of which is to say that I have a history of feeling ineffective when it comes to achieving my personal goals and it’s taken me a lot of experimentation and observation and practice to start to figure out why I struggle with this and what to do differently.

But I’m starting to get a handle on the answer. I’m slowly, grudgingly coming to the conclusion that I can’t do it all. I’m finding I can’t have more than one or two personal projects I’m focused on at a time.

Which brings me back to the title of this post, because i’ve lived most of my life in an attempt to keep my options open. When I didn’t want to get my PhD after finishing undergrad I got my Master’s degree instead because that seemed to “keep my options open”. When I didn’t know what I wanted to do after I graduated with my Master’s degree I accepted the first job that came along (a job that happened to be in science) because that felt like “keeping my options open”.

In some ways, the whole story of my life since I was a student at MIT has been a tale of keeping my options open about having a career in science.

And I apply the same principle in my personal life. I hesitate to cross projects off my list because leaving them on feels like “keeping my options open”.

Crossing off a project means saying I’m not going to work on this right now and making that decision can be scary.

What if I’m making a mistake? What if I decide something isn’t a priority and then find myself wanting to spend my time on it?

These sort of nonsensical concerns weigh on my heart and I think the real problem is that I still think it’s best to keep my options open.

But, increasingly, I believe that keeping one’s options open is a fool’s journey. Instead I think it might be better to slam doors shut early and often — after all, we rarely close a door that can’t be opened again.

The more I spend my energy keeping all the doors open, the more paralyzed I feel.

When all my energy is spent holding doors open, I don’t have anything left to make progress toward reaching the goals that lie through those very doors I’m so busy holding open.

 

I’d love for this to be a conversation, and not a monologue! How do you feel about keeping your options open? Do you need white space to get things done? Do you struggle to prioritize? Let me know in the comments below.

 

Please note: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. This means that I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This commission does not affect your price.

 

Do you live in your body? (I don’t.)

Here’s an item from the list of things you might not know about me: I exist in a state of near-constant physical pain. Some days this pain is worse than others and during the past couple of weeks it’s been particularly bad. But fear not! This post is not going to be a long-winded elaboration of my discomfort — instead, I want to talk about our relationship to our bodies (or at least, my relationship to my body!)

Because here’s what I know about pain: when it gets bad enough it forces me literally, viscerally back into my body. When the pain is bad enough I find I can’t do anything except feel how much I hurt. Pain can force me directly into the present moment.

But when the pain is not so bad, when it is only a little tingling and twinging and soreness, that is when I find I exist outside of my body entirely. When the pain is not so bad, I retreat into the fortress of my mind and busy myself with thinking, with anything really, anything to keep my mind occupied so that I don’t have to feel the discomfort in my body.

This is easy to do because we live in a culture that idolizes the intelligence and value of the mind. We measure our worth not in the ableness of our bodies but in the cleverness of our thoughts — and so my physical pain does not threaten my self worth on the days when it is only a small discomfort. It does not call into question my utility.

And so I divorce myself from my body whenever I can and get on with the business of being human.

But there’s a part of me that wonders if perhaps this course of action is not so wise as it would seem. If you wander around in more woo-woo spiritual circles (as I have done in the past few years) you’ll encounter the idea that symptoms in the body can be messages pointing to where we are out of alignment in our lives.

I do not really believe in this theory. I have a very rational explanation for my pain involving too many hours spent at the computer compounded by bad posture and ergonomics leading to muscle imbalance, tension, and nerve pain.

And yet when I think whether this very rational story might carry a message, I am tempted to conclude that it does. Perhaps my pain carries a message about not caring for myself, about not standing up for and defending my needs, about not asking for help, about keeping my pain and my secrets tucked away safe and hidden where no one can find them and judge me wanting.

Because on the days when the pain is so bad that I can hardly bear to think or sit still, I inevitably pick myself up and get out of bed and go to work (easy, because lying in bed is the most uncomfortable thing I ask my body to do). At work I hurt too much to really think, but I try anyways because I am at work and at work I am supposed to be working. But there is very little that is easy about my job and when I am not at my best I find the work is sometimes too hard. I find myself stuck between bullying myself into working even when I’m aching or feeling guilty for idling away the hours when I hurt too much to think.

Our culture teaches us to value the mind and to set aside the needs of the body. Our entire medical culture is built around this principle — which is why, when I discuss my pain with my doctor, she suggests a low dose muscle relaxant instead of offering to refer me to physical therapy. We treat our bodies like disposable vessels, rented rooms that provide the comfort and safety of the mind.

But our bodies are more than that and we often don’t do enough to give them their due. So, no, I’m really not sure that our bodies hold messages for us about the things in our life that we’re trying to ignore. But I do know that it’s hubris to think that the mind can function when the body is unwell, and as such, we could all do more to take better care of our instrument.

I’d love for this to be a conversation, not a monologue! How do you care for your body? Do you believe your body carries whispers from a deeper, wiser part of you? Let me know in the comments below!

 

Some thoughts on faith

This week I had the pleasure of reading Glennon Melton’s Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life. The book is series of short memoir essays that read similar to blog posts (unsurprisingly, since Melton blogs at Momastery.com). The book is a quick read and delightful — honest and wise and laugh-out-loud funny in places.

The book is also rather Christian. Melton makes many references to Jesus, to God, and to her faith — unorthodox as her faith may sometimes be. (Her position, I believe, is that as a recovering “ex-everything” she really has no right to judge). But her faith is very much front-and-center in this book and I was surprised by how triggering I found that.

Not because I was unaware that religion makes me uncomfortable, but simply by how much it bothered me to have someone be so candid about it. And so I think reading this book was really important for me (and I’m very glad I did!) because it forced me to reconsider a lot of my beliefs around religion and about faith.

I wasn’t raised in a religion or with a faith. If I was raised with a faith, it was probably “logic” or “science” or “reason” — and in retrospect these things make miserable faiths because they leave no room for our perfectly imperfect humanity. But I did not know this until I was much older and I never questioned these ideas of faith because organized religion does a terrible job of marketing itself and so I really thought that I was better off.

From where I stood, the advantages of a religious faith were invisible. In my admittedly limited experience, religion usually seems to do more to make people anxious and narrow-minded than to create space for more kindness and compassion in the world.

While I know that, in practice, this is not true, and that there are many people (perhaps even most) for whom faith is a comfort that increases their ability to extend kindness and compassion toward others (the “Christian feeling” of the 19th Century), the truth is that these days, from an outsider’s perspective, “Christian feeling” seems often to be more about hatred than kindness. (And I’m picking on the Christians here a little; I think the same is true of many of the world’s religions.)

So I don’t love religious doctrine or institutions, but what I realized in reading Carry On, Warrior is that Glennon Melton and I share a lot of the same ideas about faith.

Because as much as I don’t ever see myself participating in an organized religion — in the past few years I’ve been busy reinventing my idea of faith. And that idea doesn’t look much like Melton’s Jesus. But increasingly I think that faith is important, and a faith in Jesus seems to me no worse than any other.

My faith is not so well defined as any religious symbol — it is a faith in nature, in beauty, in goodness. I believe that nature is good and beautiful and that, as part of nature, we are good and beautiful, too. And perhaps this is not so different than what Jesus would have us believe — but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever worship in a church.

I prefer my worship out beneath the open skies or here, upon the altar of the empty page.

But I do believe we all need a little faith. Without faith we cannot trust or hope, and without hope we have no reason to act with kindness and compassion in the world.

If there is anything I feel certain of, it’s that the world today needs every drop of kindness and compassion we can bear to part with right now. We’ve spent the industrial era moving away from these ideals, I think.

The industrial era asked us to sacrifice our humanity in order to better play the part of the machine and we’ve done so. But now the machines are taking over and the only thing we’ll have left to call our own will be the strength our humanity. (Check out this article from The Atlantic if you want to know more.)

So I don’t know much about faith and nothing at all of God — but if I have to believe in something, I guess I choose to believe in the power of compassionate humanity to save the world. To believe in anything else seems just too dang scary right now.

 

I’d love for this to be a conversation, not a monologue! Do you have a faith? If so, how does your faith impact your experience living in the world? Let me know in the comments below.

 

Please note: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. This means that I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This commission does not affect your price.

 

Two kinds of truth

As a scientist, I’ve regularly been taught that there is only one kind of truth: the truth of facts and scientific proof. I don’t want to pretend that this kind of truth isn’t powerful, because it absolutely is. To my mind, scientific truth has contributed to innumerable discoveries and inventions that make my life easier and the world a better place.

But I don’t believe that scientific proof is the only kind of truth. I believe there’s a second kind of truth, a truth that has little to do with logic and reason and facts. I believe that we call this truth “wisdom” and we don’t need proof to know it’s true; when something is wise we can feel it is true without needing proof.

Sometimes, as a scientist, I find that this second kind of truth fills me with what Martha Beck calls “Yeah-buts”. “Yeah, but you don’t really know that.” “Yeah, but you have no proof!” And yet, the larger (perhaps the wiser) part of me usually can’t be bothered to care. At the end of the day the truth that really matters to me is that which I feel to be true.

Which is why I’ve decided on a new standard for truth in my life, and it’s not “can I prove this scientifically”. Instead, it’s simpler and usually more elegant: “does this help me?”

The elegance of “does this help me?” is that it allows for a much richer experience of the world. Science, for all that it has generated many discoveries that taught us the universe is wilder and more beautiful than we could have dared to imagine, cannot reliably probe the mysteries of the human experience.

It is why disciplines like psychology remain “soft” sciences and though there is hope that someday neuroscience may explain the vagaries of the human mind, I remain unsure that a scientific theory can ever really capture the full breadth and complexity of the human experience (indeed, a part of me hopes it cannot).

In biology, we are taught that living systems achieve “emergent properties” — we are more than the strict sum of our parts. My body at it’s most basic level is a loosely aggregated bundle of cells and molecules and yet I experience a sensation of being that no single molecule or cell could likely achieve.

And I cannot help but think that though science may be able to explain why and how we acquire these emergent properties (though the study of anatomy, neurobiology, physiology, etc.), I’m not sure that science can ever fully account for the felt experience of a human being.

This is why we require wisdom: because there are elements of human existence that seem to escape logic and reason. I can be aware of my own vagaries, my own irrationalities, my own inconsistencies — but this knowledge doesn’t make them any less real. And, ultimately, it is not science that gives me my answers or devises strategies that help me live with my own inconsistencies.

There is no way in which science can help me accept (or even relish) the fact that I am irrational and falliable and blind to “truth”. Instead, science teaches me that these things are my faults — that I should be more rational, that I should be more perfect, that insignificant things should not bother me so unreasonably, that when I say something that is scientifically untrue this makes me a bad person, a victim to sloppy reasoning, rather than a person with an unalienable right to her own opinion.

My conclusion is that unadulterated scientific truth teaches me to be unkind to myself. It teaches me to hold myself to a standard of being and existence that falls not an iota short of rational, robotic perfection because to be anything less would be to fall short of the ideal.

And yet, what kind of life is this really? To my mind this belief only makes living life more painful. I can do little to change my irrationalities except to honor them with the fullest depth of my compassion.

I can do nothing to better understand my own existence than to learn the wisdom of the world’s traditions, hold each idea up against myself, and ask “does this help me understand myself? does this help me understand my experience in the world?”

I would like to invite you to do the same (but, of course, only if you find it helpful!).

 

I’d love for this to be a conversation, not a dialogue! Tell me how you define truth in the comments below.

 

The systems that make your dreams come true

Here’s a problem I’ve been pondering lately: when you have big dreams how do you make them come true?

There are obvious, unhelpful answers like “you pursue them!” or “you don’t give up!”. There are more practical, but still unhelpful answers like “you just write” and “you just do it”.

Because here’s the thing, often just wanting the dream isn’t enough to get it done. Lots of people want to write books, but very few of them ever do. You need more than just desire, you need systems.

Systems are like magic.

At their most basic, I think that systems are just habits that help you make progress on what’s important. Ten minutes of journaling before bed is a system that might help you get clear and accountable on how your actions that day have furthered or hindered your goals. Turning off your email notifications is a system that helps you remain focused on what really matters.

Systems can also be more complicated, the structures and scaffolding from which your sculpt your life. They can be complex creations with moving parts that flow throughout your days and help keep you on track.

And the system I want to talk about today is like that. It’s your productivity system, your calendar, your to-do list, your inbox. It’s the clutter in your house and the mess in your closet.

I’ve been deeply engrossed in the work of Anna Kunnecke for a couple of months now, and she places a lot of emphasis on how clearing up and clearing out one’s physical environment can have a huge positive impact on one’s internal world. Having tried it out for myself, I find I couldn’t agree more.

And yet the change that has made the most significant impact on my life isn’t so much to do with my physical world; it has to do without I keep track of all the moving parts that make up a life.

And my system is based heavily on Anna Kunnecke’s recommendations and on David Allen’s suggestions in his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

If you’d told me two years ago I needed to improve my personal productivity, I’d probably have laughed at you.

I’d have pointed to my two degrees from MIT and said “me?!”. But the truth is that MIT didn’t teach me good productivity habits — what MIT taught me was how to fight fires with incredible efficiency. At MIT every assignment was a crisis, every week was overloaded and I raced about in a kind of dazed panic from problem to paper to exam without a moment to gasp for air.

Which means that when I graduated I didn’t have any skills for getting things done in a less-stressful environment. In real life there aren’t so many deadlines. The book I’m writing doesn’t have due date. There’s no teacher leaning over my shoulder, fingers shifting restlessly in anticipation of each completed chapter. There’s really no reason to finish writing my book except that I want to.

The truth is that it’s very hard to find the time to write.

This is a truth that so many writers seem to gloss over and so many aspiring writers can’t seem to move past. So much writing advice boils down to “just write” including the oft-cited quote from Neil Gaiman to “write one word and then another”, or this recent post from Chuck Wendig. And this advice is not untrue — it’s perhaps the truest advice there is — but my quibble with such advice is that it also doesn’t help.

It doesn’t help the aspiring writer finally start writing the novel they’ve always dreamed of. And it doesn’t help them keep putting down words every day, even when the story takes a left turn somewhere on page 50 and suddenly they haven’t got a clue what the story even is anymore.

I’ve spoken about some of the tricks I use to help make my writing feel effortless, but when we get down to the nitty gritty of it, no amount of desire or effortlessness is sufficient to help me prioritize my writing over all the other things that need to happen in my life. Should I do my writing or my cooking first? Well… I’d really rather not starve. Should I do my writing this morning or be on time at my job? Well… I’d really rather not be late.

So in order to actually get my writing done I need to find a way to hold myself accountable to actually doing it — otherwise, I can say I’m writing a book till I’m blue in the face but if I’m not actually putting words on the page then (as Anna Kunnecke would say) “it’s kind of bullshit, isn’t it?”

And the system I’ve found myself turning to with great efficacy is based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

On the surface David Allen’s system is simple.

It really boils down to just five steps:

  1. Capture. This is where you identify and catalog all of the things that you need to do from the mundane (empty the dishwasher) to the complex (finish the first draft of my book).
  2. Clarify. What is the very next physical action I need to take to move forward on this? This is where you determine what actually needs to be done next for each of the tasks you captured in step one.
  3. Organize. This is where you organize the actions and projects you identified in steps  one and two into a system that presents them to you at the appropriate time and prevents things from slipping through the cracks.
  4. Reflect. David Allen suggests we need to take time weekly to reflect, to capture any new tasks from the week, to look ahead and make sure nothing is sneaking up on us, to look behind and make sure there’s nothing pending we should follow up. It’s also a moment to take a look at the bigger picture and reset one’s priorities.
  5. Engage. This is where the rubber hits the road and you act on all those next actions.

As David Allen says, there’s really three kinds of work: the work we plan to do (the stuff that is on our to-do lists), the work that shows up (emails, bills, etc.), and the work we do to define our work. After MIT I was fantastic at doing work that shows up, but not so fantastic at doing the work I’d planned to do and I’d never really learned to do the work to define my work at all. My next actions had always been decided by due dates and professors.

In the past few weeks, as I’ve been increasingly thorough in implementing David Allen’s system, I can tell you that being able to take control of defining the work you do is one of the most powerful systems I know for making your dreams come true.

Suddenly I’m finding time to write because my lists keep me accountable and they help me understand everything else I might also need to be doing so that I know that if I sit down to write for 30 minutes or an hour on a Tuesday that I’m not suddenly going to find Wednesday morning I don’t have any food for breakfast. And it turns out simultaneous accountability, security, and a deep honoring of my priorities are just the things I need to make my dreams (and this book) come true.

Now it’s your turn! What tools do you use to make your dreams come true? What systems support you in your life? Let me know in the comments 🙂