THE PATH OF THAT WHICH YOU SHOULD BE DOING

I’ve been on a productivity training course today. It’s a part one of two (more tomorrow) but so far, mostly as you’d expect. Turn your notifications off, use a to-do list tool, group your actions, drink tea, make toast, drift off, stare out the window… oh wait. No, not that.

I chipped in with a thought.

“Hayley,” I said, raising a hand, “I had a thought.” Hayley let me talk. Nice of her really.

“It seems to me that distractions are like questions marks about your focus. When you’re really focused on one thing, by definition you’ve convinced yourself that that thing is the most important thing you’re doing and so when something else comes along, like the doorbell, your phone ringing or a Slack message, you have to quickly decide what the most important thing is now, and either choose to carry on or ignore it. It’s stressful in the fog of not knowing what to do, who not to let down, and which task deserves you. The fog, I think, forces you to really quickly prioritise…”

She came in and agreed, though steering it expertly away from where we’d landed. I didn’t mind that. I was lost in thought still. It’s not like me to pipe up in those moments, yet there I was. Interesting.

Also, I’d accidentally tickled the edge of the elephant in the room - the truth (and it is a truth) that work might not be the most important thing in any of our lives. Harumph says the elephant. Hurrah say the quiet freedom lovers. Hayley I think, would be keen to think of distractions as things that distract you from the noble path of That Which You Should Be Doing, to bolster the corporate world and the capitalist system. I had been quietly radical, though admittedly in a way so subtle that you’d blink to miss it.

Tomorrow we get a bit more detailed. Using tools to capture actions, organising your email so you can finally get down to that utopian dream of Inbox Zero, scheduling, reviewing, adminning (not a word but you know what I mean) your life like a planning board.

Sometimes the path of That Which You Should Be Doing is hard to find, easy to question, and yes, lost in the fog. Sometimes I think it’s not a path at all but a maze, or a looping set of circular walkways, or perhaps an incomplete slab that looks like it might drop off the very edge of the world.

By the time I’d thought of all that of course, Hayley had moved the conversation on to writing stickies and depositing your thoughts into a ‘second brain’ like a notebook or an app or something.

Honestly - dumping all your random thoughts on a page somewhere, as they spew endlessly from your overactive brain?

It’ll never catch on.