Alexandersmap

    Category: Productivity

    • Simply Do

      “I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.” — Naomi Shihab Nye (with a nod to @MayaCPopa for showing the way)

      Fame is overrated, contribution is where it’s at. We are utilitarian at the root of it, here to be productive in our time, whatever our calling, lighting the way until we pass the torch.

      We tend to lean into complicated. This is a distraction from the beautiful truth, a collective turn away from the briefness of being, a wish before the song fades and we blow out the candles. It’s contribution that lives beyond wishes.

      Poetry stares the truth in the eye, wanting nothing more than to face it. I wished somedays I was a better poet, a better writer. I’d forgotten what I could do. Now I simply do.

    • A Wisp of a Moment, Captured

      On a recent walk I noticed the recently painted median strip dividing the road featured artwork now and then. It seems they painted the road in autumn, as the oak leaves returned to the earth to close their cycle and begin again. A few rebels, wishing for immortality perhaps, found the opportunity to capture the moment. It struck me this was what all artists do; reach out from the anonymous mass of their moment and leave something of ourselves for others to find.

      There’s something lovely in the temporary nature of this street art, akin to chalk drawings on sidewalks or sandcastles at low tide. Some art is meant to someday be a memory, recalled in quiet moments when you again walk down that street or on that particular stretch of beach. Do you remember the leaves of autumn, swirling in the wind? How quickly they fade from memory. We surf on a wisp of a moment, sometimes captured, mostly lost forever. We ought to embrace the freedom in that, elusive as it feels, for this is our fragile dance.

      “If you would create something, you must be something.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      At times we hear the call from the naked page of a notebook, and at times from the middle of the road. Leaves locked in the amber of their moment are a whisper from seasons past to do something with this one. To feel the urgency of the season and make the most of it before the moment fades. This is the unique call of our work, leaping to our attention in the strangest of places. In each case, the question lingers in the moment: Where will you take us now?

    • The Rest of Your Life

      This is the beginning of the rest of your life
      You better start movin’ like you’re running out of time
      The realization coming over your mind
      That it should be a canter
      If you could just find the answer
      You know it could be a canter
      If you were just a wee bit less of a wanker
      More than half ae’ the time
      — Gerry Cinnamon, Cantor

      An old friend pointed me towards Gerry Cinnamon recently. Thick Scottish brogue filled with energy and clever lyrics. That friend has navigated the darkest of tragedies in his life, and I listen when he points me towards the music and writers he’s using to process his life going forward. Most of us are lucky to have easier hurdles than he’s had, but we still have hurdles. We all must find a way forward from whatever lingers.

      The first thing that old friend asked me about was how the writing was going. Not the blog writing, mind you, but that other writing. Not as well, I told him. Wrestling with fiction hadn’t felt right. Maybe non-fiction would be best. Just write and let it sort itself out. And so I am.

      What possible advice can you give a friend who has navigated grief you shudder to contemplate? Nothing unsolicited. Instead, we talked of finding beauty in a dark world, which prompted the Cheryl Strayed quote, which seemed like just enough in the moment:

      There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty.
      — Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found

      Life is short. We’ve wasted enough time already, and we must be deliberate and emphatic in how we spend our days. Whatever we wrestle with, demons and darkness or a tendency to idle through our time, we must break free of our inertia and get moving. It should be a cantor. But remember to find the beautiful on the journey.

    • Deliberate Reflection

      “Productive activity has nothing to do with being swept away by the inertia of busyness. It is not about quantity, either. Rather, it is a deliberate choice of where and how to direct one’s attention.” — Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

      We seek solitude, when possible, in the quiet places. Places of stoic beauty with elbow room necessary to reflect. Places of quiet walks and the indifference of cold. For me these places are off-season beaches and lonely trails that lead me deep into the woods, or most days simply the magic hour before the rest of the world awakens.

      Some believe solitude is the very opposite of a productive place, thinking collaborative effort and the energy of the pack fuels production. But we humans aren’t cogs in a factory, at least we aren’t meant to be. We can be so much more than that if we choose to find it within ourselves. There is no reflection in a turbulent sea.

      Sometimes, even in quiet places, perhaps especially so, we come across characters who are starved for attention. They’ll steal sand from our hourglass if we let them, and take us away from ourselves. These sand gobblers disguise themselves brilliantly in the faces we trust the most. There’s nothing wrong with sharing our sand with others, but we must guard against the gluttonous lest they take it all.

      We must be deliberate in where we use our time, and mindful of just who is the director of our attention. The world will always ask for everything. What we give to it is up to us. We earn our director position in every moment. Deliberate reflection is not an act of selfishness, it’s preservation of the self.

    • What to Do With Our Time

      you will never catch up.
      Walk around feeling like a leaf
      know you could tumble at any second.
      Then decide what to do with your time.
      ― Naomi Shihab Nye, The Art of Disappearing

      I’ve fallen in love with the bullet journal again. It’s not so much because of a love of organization, it’s more a need for organization that draws me deep into the pages of a blank notebook. Each X drawn through a bullet is uniquely satisfying, each habit represented as a filled in square that designates a day when I did what I told myself I was going to do fuels a desire to keep the streak alive one more day. As lines grow on paper day-after-day like a sideways bar graph, lies we tell ourselves become as apparent as the promises kept. How we reconcile each line tells us who we really are.

      If there’s one fatal flaw in the life of a busy soul, it’s following through on all that we want for ourselves. There’s only so many things we can say yes to, and endless things we must dismiss with a no. The yes’s seem so trivial stacked next to the no’s, but we forget that the collection of no’s is ours too. No’s matter a great deal in keeping us from tumbling. We aren’t leaves in the wind, to borrow Nye’s lovely analogy, we’re purposeful humans finding our way in the world.

      We must decide what we won’t be good at in this lifetime. We must see the path through the wilderness that carries us to a place where we might thrive. Breaking up is hard to do because we don’t want to let others down, but when we don’t break from things that don’t matter to us we’re letting ourselves down. Just who are we breaking up with? We must choose identity over misguided altruism. The world will ask for everything we’ve got. The best response in such moments is “Thank you, but that’s not for me”.

      Decide what to be and go be it. No isn’t fun, but it’s not ours to hold onto. The trade-off, becoming, is where the real fun is, for this is where we set our sights on big yes’s and watch them grow.

    • Something Meaningful

      Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn
      Every day I have to find the courage
      To walk out into the street
      With arms out
      Got a love you can’t defeat
      Neither down nor out
      There’s nothing you have that I need
      I can breathe
      Breathe now
      — U2, Breathe

      When you settle into a conversation about the best U2 songs, well, it’s best to have a comfortable chair and a full beverage to weigh the choices against. For me, the choices alternate based on my mood at the time, but top 3 includes Breathe and The Unforgettable Fire, and we can endlessly debate the order and the third from there. One could make a case that the album that Breathe came from (No Line on the Horizon) is their best album as well, but I write this knowing it’s a sure way to rise the passions of the fanbase. I’ve been known to shift favorite album based on my mood at the moment. The blessing of U2 is having such a rich catalog that it’s even worth discussing.

      Every day we are reborn, with an opportunity to make something of our time before the lights go out once again. The analogy of a lifetime in a day is nothing new, yet the lesson escapes us now and then. We woke up yesterday, we woke up today, and we expect to wake up tomorrow too. The trick is to do something meaningful with this stack of days, and accumulate our own catalog of mastery in our lifetime.

      What’s your soundtrack for doing bigger things? Play it loud. Sing your heart out.

    • The Truth of the Work

      Work is a funny thing, for it represents so much of our identity, yet, if we live well, it’s only a small part of who we are. For if this life is about the accumulation of experiences, relationships, knowledge and self-understanding, work adds to each of these things but isn’t all of any of them. We want to believe that our work has purpose, and so chafe at the jobs that seem trivial, menial, unfulfilling and generally dead ends in a climb up the career ladder. But this outlook misses so much of what makes work meaningful.

      When I look at the accumulation of contributions I’ve made in my work, it’s easy to see where I made a difference and where my contribution felt insignificant to the overall progress of the companies I worked for at the time. Ultimately, what mattered was showing up and being present for the work at hand. The value derived isn’t always up to us to determine, only that we do our part.

      “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” ― Thomas Merton

      We derive the most fulfillment from engagement with others, not from the accumulation of more wealth than the next corporate climber. Don’t get me wrong, financial security solves problems that linger in poverty, but at some point the pursuit of wealth and status is nothing but a distraction from the pursuit of meaning. Perhaps this is why those stories of people leaving the corporate ladder to run the country store or work in a non-profit are so fascinating. Deep down most of us just want to contribute and be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

      “Consider what a company is. A company is a culture. A group of people brought together around a common set of values and beliefs. It’s not products or services that bind a company together. It’s not size and might that make a company strong, it’s the culture—the strong sense of beliefs and values that everyone, from the CEP to the receptionist, all share.” — Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

      As Walt Whitman reminded us, the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse. All the meetings and the key performance indicators lumped together are nothing but a means to an end. We’re here to contribute to something larger than ourselves in our time, and showing up for work is a demonstrated commitment to that mission. What we realize in the end is that the work we choose to do is an expression of who we want to become.

    • One’s Way

      “The important thing is never to let oneself be guided by the opinion of one’s contemporaries; to continue steadfastly on one’s way without letting oneself be either defeated by failure or diverted by applause.” — Gustav Mahler

      Gustav Mahler was an Austrian composer who’s work is familiar to us whether we know it or not. His Symphony No. 1 in D is the basic tune of “Frère Jacques”, the nursery rhyme embedded in our brains as children. He built his legacy as a conductor and composer in Vienna, a place chock full of legendary conductors and composers, and navigated his career through both anti-semitism and general criticism of his work, which pushed boundaries many weren’t ready for. So in this context, his quote becomes illuminating.

      There’s a moment after we’ve tied a shoe or set a sail just so when we look up and begin going where we determined we’d go in our minds just a beat before. It’s that moment of beginning on one’s way, wherever it may bring us, that is transformative. Everything that comes after is a matter of resolve: Do we finish what we started or to let it fall by the wayside and try something else?

      Most likely, the worst criticism we face comes from within. Self-doubt, imposter syndrome and fear of failure have destroyed more art than all the critics and book-burning zealots combined. In such moments, we must keep going, one way or another. Easier said than done, of course, but pushing through has a way of building confidence and resilience. We simply learn to ignore the voice inside.

      “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” — Steven Pressfield

      That moment of beginning, of breaking through that Resistance, is a big step in reaching our unlived life. But every step thereafter has its own subsequent Resistance. Put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking across the floor, as the song goes. To reach our potential we must overcome all the external and internal noise that is distracting us from that voice in our head that is telling us quietly, persistently, what we ought to do.

      Today we’re beginning something, and continuing other things. Who we once were passed away in that beat. This blog post, like the 1,663 before this one, is another step for me across that proverbial floor, with the character who wrote each long gone. What remains is the sum of each, on the way to becoming something entirely new. Who we become is in so many ways up to us, determined by the choices one makes on one’s way and our steadfast resolve to arrive at what’s next.

    • Spending Time

      Planning is generally done in earnest this time of year, but at some point, action must take over. Too much planning becomes procrastination. We can plan ourselves all the way to the grave if we let ourselves. We must do to become. I believe it was Melissa Heisler who said living is a verb, not a noun. There’s a deep truth in that statement. We must act to live a full life.

      We must begin in earnest, today, to build on those hopes and dreams we spent New Year’s thinking about. For if not now, when? There is no other time. Baby steps turn into long strides that turn into giant leaps forward. There’s momentum in forward motion.

      “Six months from now, what you will you wish you had spent time on today?” — James Clear

      Where we spend time matters a great deal. We forget that sometimes as we go through our days getting from here to there. But where is there anyway? Is it simple here with a few more aches and pains? Time well-spent resonates differently for us than wasted time does. Wasted time feels hollow, while our well-spent time feels far more fulfilling. Who wants to look back on a day or a year or a life feeling empty?

      We intuitively know not to drink stagnant water, but forget we’re mostly water ourselves. Are we flowing towards something or settling into stagnant? Puddles stagnate then evaporate. We must find our ocean before we turn to dust. Too harsh? The point is to find the channel that keeps us flowing creatively, contributing to a greater purpose, so we might ultimately look back on this part of the journey as the point where we broke through the dam and really began making a splash.

    • The Steps Between Hurdles

      “Set it in your mind right now that the process is more important than the result. You don’t control the result; what you control are your actions.” — Brian P. Moran, The 12 Week Year

      It’s that time of year, when some of us are more hyper-focused on improving our productivity and effectiveness in our chosen work than usual. I have a few friends who roll their eyes when I start rattling off words like productivity and execution, but they’re also highly productive and execute on the things they choose to focus on. Think about what you’re most passionate about in life, be it your family, your writing, your fitness level, or your career—each thing that we’re highly engaged in features higher levels of execution and attention than the things we find less interesting. We naturally try harder to be good at the things that matter more.

      But what are we to do with the things that matter less but still matter a great deal? Nobody wants to stumble through life, we all want to lift ourselves and others through our contribution. And that’s where developing good habits and a process or system for living matter a great deal. If we fancy ourselves writers or athletes or accountants, we ought to refine our system of living to optimize our efficiency and results. I write best in the morning but find the afternoon better for a workout. You might find the morning the only effective time for a run, and late night the best time to focus on your best work. We learn what works over time and apply it to our lives.

      “Accountability is not consequences; it’s ownership.” — Brian P. Moran, The 12 Week Year

      If change is our constant companion, then refinement of our processes is our tool to overcome the hurdles we encounter. Each day is an opportunity to reflect on what’s working, what’s not, and what we must change in our system to be effective in this new reality. What we can’t do is bury our head in the sand and hope the world changes back again. We might as well finish the job and bury the rest of ourselves at that point. We must rise up, dust ourselves off and get to work on improving our lot in life.

      I’m not a runner, but I’m deeply invested in people who are. Having spent many hours on tracks, I know that effective hurdlers use a 3 step technique to clear hurdles in sprints. Some people use 4 steps between those hurdles because they have shorter legs or their gait between hurdles is off. This is less efficient and slower than 3 steps, but the point is to get over the hurdle and try to improve your steps on the next one. It seems this is a good analogy for our lives between hurdles too. The trick is to quickly adapt on the fly for what comes next.

      We’ve all just been through quite a hurdle, and yet we cleared it. Sure, maybe we banged our shin or stumbled a bit on our landing, but we’re on to the next hurdle now. That’s life in the race, isn’t it? We must focus continually on where we are and what we must face next. Best to have a system that enables, not hinders.