Healthy Negligence

Standing in my kitchen, I brown ground beef while reading this article by Oliver Burkeman about how time management is ruining our lives (multitasking, anyone?). I’ve been juggling the polar opposite goals of cultivating superhuman productivity to make More Time For All The Things and simultaneously striving to downsize my to-do lists and commitments to simplify and only do one thing at a time.  I secretly hope that the next piece I read is going to reveal the super amazing magic trick of all time that lets me compress all the mundane yuck in the universe that has to be done but no one likes into a simple five minute magic morning routine, leaving the remainder of the day unfurling before me like so much rippling silk to be savored and languished in.

This does not exist.

Further, I don’t actually think it should.

I really love it that it turns out the very guy who instigated the inbox zero craze actually hates it. It’s not that we, if we use email at all, don’t need to deal with the damn inbox already. It’s just that this notion of shoving the mundane out of the way is utterly and ridiculously misdirected. What is that empty inbox going to get you? Maybe a Zoloft prescription, if you don’t watch it.

Spoiler alert: It always fills back up.

I’m delighted to discover that I’m a “negligent emailer.” I struggle to remember to check my email once a week. Guess what? I never miss anything important. If someone sends me a message that actually matters, they always follow up if they don’t hear from me about it. 100% of the time. Turns out, I don’t need to stay on top of my email.

We attach like lampreys to these productivity plans that come along because we feel so out of control, so abysmally out of time.  But instead of freeing up more time, we mostly just generate more anxiety. We speed up what we’re doing so we can do more in a day. Doing more means we have less time than we had before we sped everything up!

I’m starting to see that what we really need to do is do a lot less stuff. We need to take minimalism to a whole new level. We need to-do list minimalism. Struggle to keep up with ironing? Get rid of the clothes that need it. Laundry issues? Don’t become more efficient at laundry, eliminate the complexity. Change your commute. Work from home. Eliminate debt. Stop buying stuff you don’t need!

Something I hope you know

“For what it’s worth … it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.” -from the screenplay by Eric Roth for the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Brad Pitt apparently said “strength” rather than “courage.”)

This was never written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, evidently, although most attribute it to him, probably because humans are lazy and who really checks sources, and everyone who ever failed an ELA class will tell you who cares anyway because it doesn’t matter… intellectual property does matter, a lot, and with all the AI assists burgeoning everywhere people ought to start to care, but I digress.

The gist of the quote is what I really hope you know. I hope you know that you can pick something up at any time. No matter what. If it has been days, weeks, months, or years since you last played that game, practiced that instrument, worked on that novel, picked up a paintbrush. It. Doesn’t. Matter. If you want to do A Thing, and it’s not going to harm anyone including yourself, and it’s possibly going to make you happy or at least a little less unhappy, DO. THE. THING. The collective cultural voice that burdens us with shoulds and shouldn’ts is bossy as fuck. In the end, you are the one who has to live with what you accomplished and what you gave up. So dare a little and do what you want.