Alexandersmap

    Category: Productivity

    • Catching Up & Bridging Gaps

      The idea of catching up is tantalizing. I use this phrase often in two contexts; catching up with someone I haven’t spoken with in some time, and catching up on work that’s piled up in my work or personal ambition buckets. This week I did a fair amount of catching up in both contexts. But we never really catch up, do we? We mostly just shrink the gap between people, workload or expectations before we inevitably see the gap widen again. We’re all just so… busy.

      The act of getting reacquainted, of meeting to see how someone’s been, what’s up with the family, how so-and-so’s doing, is a lovely form of catching up. There’s so much loneliness and division in the world today, fueled by the pandemic and political inclination, and the general categorization of people into one camp or another. It should be so easy to just put it all aside and listen to each other. Many people just don’t want to deal with conflict or focus on differences of opinion, and so we just don’t communicate at all.

      But there’s joy in bridging the gap. Finding common ground and dancing in the light of understanding and acceptance. When we close that gap we draw closer together, and feel the humanity of another. When we ghost each other, block people on social media, and gossip about what the other is doing the gap widens. I’ve shrunk from a few people over the last several years, finding their opinions repulsive. Yet I know there’s still common ground should we ever sit down to catch up. We go on with our lives without those people in it, but feel the void where the relationship calved. Stack up enough of these and it’s death by a thousand cuts. No wonder people are lonely and stressed out.

      At least there’s work to take our minds off the world, right? But even here the gap between what needs to be done and what we can possibly accomplish feels impossibly large. We catch up on one thing and see the gap widen in another. Supply chain issues, labor shortages, trust issues… it’s enough to make you throw your hands up in the air and buy a boat or camper to get out of Dodge. We work until the wheels come off and then teeter trying to balance on what’s left.

      The reality is we’ll never quite catch up, and that’s okay. We decide where to close gaps and where to let things stay adrift. When the time is right–if the time is ever right–we’ll come back to that which we’ve neglected and, well, catch up once again.

    • Scheduling “Accomplishing Great Things” Time

      “A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world.” — Naval Ravikant

      The week after New Year’s Eve is when everything hits the fan. People are back from vacations, tasks that were deferred come due, new initiatives kick in, and most people want to start the year off on the right foot with a high level of activity. You want to push hard on the flywheel to regain any momentum you lost over the holidays, and to have a running start for the year ahead. This buzz of activity inevitably translates into a very full calendar.

      You want to get things done, so you say yes to meetings and projects that you believe will carry you to your goals. In the meantime everyone else’s hopes and dreams need to be met with some of your attention as well–maybe a 30 or 60 minute block of time next Tuesday? And this is where those lofty resolutions begin to hit resistance.

      This is the whirlwind that Chris McChesney speaks of in The 4 Disciplines of Execution. The more you can stay out of the whirlwind, the more you can focus on your real priorities. And the more you can do great things in this world. Don’t we want to do a few great things in our time here in this world?

      It feels like the most important thing to do is to simplify. But that’s a convenient buzzword to throw around. It’s easy to say it, but much harder to do in the crush of daily life. The answer, I think, is to book big chunks of time for thinking and working on your top priorities. To jealously guard the edges of your day when you can do the most. I’d rather get up two hours early and write than sleep in. I’d rather spend two hours reading at the end of my work day than turn on the television. Those four hours don’t make it on to my calendar, but they’re often the most productive time in my day.

      If I were to add one thing to Naval’s quote, it would be this: “A busy calendar, an unfit body and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world.” For I believe we forget sometimes (I do anyway) that a fit body and a productive mind are related. If we aren’t eating well, drinking in moderation, sleeping well and exercising regularly our minds pay for it. Blocking off time for exercise is as essential to accomplishing great things as giving yourself space to think.

      With that in mind, I’m beginning to use my calendar differently than I used to. I schedule more “accomplishing great things” time. I’m keeping myself accountable by listing and checking off the key priorities in my bullet journal. And I celebrate when I draw a box around my top goals of fitness, nutrition, writing, reading and my top work priority when I can check all of them in a day. My goal is to string together a full week of closing the boxes. This turns busy into productive in a visible way. When I do, I know that I’m on the path to greater things.

    • Serious, True Work… Foreseen

      The stamina of an old, long-noble race
      in the eyebrows’ heavy arches. In the mild
      blue eyes, the solemn anguish of a child
      and, here and there, humility—not a fool’s,
      but feminine: the look of one who serves.
      The mouth quite ordinary, large and straight,
      composed, yet not unwilling to speak out
      when necessary. The forehead still naive,
      most comfortable in shadows, looking down.

      This, as a whole, just hazily foreseen—
      never, in any joy or suffering,
      collected for a firm accomplishment;
      and yet, as though, from far off, with scattered
      Things,
      a serious, true work were being planned.
      – Rainer Maria Rilke, Self-Portrait, 1906

      Rilke wrote this after three decades on the planet, with an assessment of himself that doesn’t leap out for its enthusiasm, nor with overt criticism. Here was a man who was planning great things for himself but knew he had a long climb ahead. He apprenticed with Auguste Rodin around the time he wrote this, and got a sense of what the singular pursuit of mastery looks like. And he’d apply it to himself.

      Rilke’s future was hazy, but he could sense his own potential. He sought an apprenticeship to learn how to cross the chasm from average to master himself. The last line betrays his belief in bigger things. I don’t speak German, and thus rely on the translation. Here is his original:

      Das, als Zusammenhang, erst nur geahnt;
      noch nie im Leiden oder im Gelingen
      zusammgefaßt zu dauerndem Durchdringen,
      doch so, als wäre mit zerstreuten Dingen
      von fern ein Ernstes, Wirkliches geplant.

      So here we are, collectively emerging from the shadow of a couple of dark years and looking squarely in the face of a new year. New possibilities. What do we make of it? What do we sacrifice or say no to in pursuit of our plans? For in looking inward for the answer we must wrestle with the question of what we might leave behind. The comfort of the familiar pulls us backwards. The only choice is moving ahead. Should we dare act on what we’ve foreseen.

    • My 12 Favorite Books of 2021

      I’ll finish the year having read somewhere between 34-36 books. That includes some heavy lifting non-fiction, some escapist pager turner fiction and a couple of books of poetry. All but one are older classics that I finally tackled in 2021. We ought to live a bit outside ourselves more often, and reading is an easy way to travel back in time, far into the future, or to places we thought we knew better. Here, in no particular order, are some favorites:

      The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods – A. G. Sertillanges
      “If you produce nothing you get a habit of passivity; timidity grows continually and the fear caused by pride; you hesitate, waste your powers in wasting, become as unproductive as a knotted tree-bud.”

      Referenced in Newport’s book (next), I immediately purchased a copy and placed it on the top of the pile. The book is a bit dated, certainly written through the lens of a French Catholic philosopher in the first half of the 20th century, but bits of brilliance shine through. I’ll return to this one now and then in the future.

      Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport
      “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy.”

      Reading this book finally pushed me to delete Facebook from my phone, and to put the phone itself in another room when I want to get deep work done. The world is increasingly distracted, but we don’t have to be. The people capable of focusing and rising to the next level will fare well in a world where artificial intelligence and globalization threaten more and more jobs. Go deeper and differentiate from the shallow, distracted masses.

      The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals – Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey
      “When a team defines its lead measures they are making a strategic bet. In a sense, they are saying, “We’re betting that by driving these lead measures we are going to achieve our wildly important goal.” They believe that the lever is going to move the rock, and because of that belief, they engage.”

      A classic in business writing, this book outlines the steps needed to identify and execute on the most important goals for an organization. The secret is deep focus on no more than one or two wildly important goals. The magic is in drawing the entire organization in to help make the dream a reality. Most people want meaning in their careers. When they identify the actionable tasks that contribute to the overall win and execute on them, everybody wins.

      Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania – Erik Larson
      “In his final log entry on the attack, at 2:25 P.M., [Kptlt. Walther] Schwieger wrote: It would have been impossible for me, anyhow, to fire another torpedo into this crushing crowd of humanity trying to save their lives.”
      Schwieger directed his U-boat out to sea. His crew was jubilant: they had destroyed the Lusitania, the ship that symbolized British maritime prowess.”

      Larson is one of the great historians of our time, and he unpacks moments like the Blitz and the sinking of the Lusitania with a style that few can match. We all sort of know the story of the Lusitania, but Larson unpacks the tragedy of it in a page-turner style. This book will fascinate you, and even as you know the inevitable ending you’ll be surprised by many of the details.

      Mastery – Robert Greene
      “Your true self does not speak in words or banal phrases. Its voice comes from deep within you, from the substrata of your psyche, from something embedded physically within you. It emanates from your uniqueness, and it communicates through sensations and powerful desires that seem to transcend you. You cannot ultimately understand why you are drawn to certain activities or forms of knowledge. This cannot really be verbalized or explained. It is simply a fact of nature. In following this voice you realize your own potential, and satisfy your deepest longings to create and express your uniqueness. It exists for a purpose, and it is your Life’s Task to bring it to fruition.”

      How do we reach mastery? Most don’t. Most settle for a life of unfocused and relative comfort, unwilling to spend the hours of apprenticeship to master their craft. For those who want to rise above the average, this is an excellent playbook. Greene walks the talk–few take the time to research and perfect a topic as he does.

      Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
      “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”

      Enlightening book that reveals how humans got to be who we are. Harari makes a strong case for the rise of humanity being great for us but catastrophic for every other species. This is a foundational book that I’d delayed reading until 2021 despite consistent prompts from friends.

      Keep Sharp: Building a Better Brain at Any Age – Sanjay Gupta M.D.
      “We don’t usually think about dementia when we’re entering our prime, but we should, because it provides a remarkable opportunity. Data from longitudinal observational studies accumulated over the past few decades have shown that aside from age, most other risk factors for brain disease can be controlled. That means you indeed have a powerful voice in controlling your risk for decline. As you might guess, some of the most influential and modifiable factors related to that decline are linked to lifestyle: physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, smoking, social isolation, poor sleep, lack of mentally stimulating activities, and misuse of alcohol.”

      Brain health is top of mind for me, and this book proved a reassuring playbook for controlling some of what happens with my own brain health over the second half of my life. Not surprisingly, what’s good for the body is usually good for the brain. Good nutrition, restorative sleep, proper hydration and exercise all help the brain as much as the body. Knowing this, you can fold the right kind of lifestyle choices into your daily routine and put yourself in a better position to have a vibrant, healthy brain to our final days.

      The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts – Shane Parrish
      “If we never learn to take something apart, test our assumptions about it, and reconstruct it, we end up bound by what other people tell us—trapped in the way things have always been done.”

      A playbook for conceptual thinking, this is one of three books Parrish published on mental modelling. It’s a helpful guide for framing a problem or decision using proven methodology. Parrish has an excellent podcast called The Knowledge Project that builds on this framework by exploring just how the world’s great thinkers frame their own decisions and build great organizations.

      West With The Night – Beryl Markham
      “The air takes me into its realm. Night envelops me entirely, leaving me out of touch with the earth, leaving me within this small moving world of my own, living in space with the stars.”

      This is a breathtaking book that sparkles with magic. Markham writes with an elegance that Hemingway would strive to match, raising the bar for writing in the 20th century. If you want to travel back in time to the barnstorming days of early flight, elephant hunting when the elephants had the upper hand and a glimpse of the changing landscape of Africa between the two World Wars this book is for you.

      Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek
      “Before it can gain any power or achieve any impact, an arrow must be pulled backward, 180 degrees away from the target. And that’s also where a WHY derives its power. The WHY does not come from looking ahead at what you want to achieve and figuring out an appropriate strategy to get there. It is not born out of any market research. It does not come from extensive interviews with customers or even employees. It comes from looking in the completely opposite direction from where you are now. Finding WHY is a process of discovery, not invention.”

      Why do we align ourselves with brands, political parties or people? Because they speak to us on some level. We desire to belong to something. How we arrive at that feeling of belonging is the “why” that drives the “what” something is and “how” it’s done. Organizations that do this well, think Apple, create a compelling case to identify with the brand. The very best leaders create a compelling why.

      On the Road – Jack Kerouac
      “Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.”

      On the Road nagged me for years. For a few years in my early 20’s I chased the legend of Kerouac through the streets of Lowell, Massachusetts. I drank in some of the same bars that Kerouac drank in. Walked the same streets he grew up on. But I stubbornly kept his most famous book at arm’s length. I made a point of reading it in 2021 and saw the brilliance in his prose even as it betrayed the lifestyle that would eventually kill him.

      Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life – Richard Rohr
      “By the second half of life, you have been in regular unwelcome contact with your shadow self, which gradually detaches you from your not-so-bright persona (meaning “stage mask” in Greek) that you so diligently constructed in the first half of life. Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not “true.” It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die.”

      If we’re lucky, we all live two lives. We eventually transcend the character we are in the first part of our lives and “fall upward” into a higher self. I wouldn’t say I’ve arrived at that higher self, but I’m aware that it’s there should I stay on the path. Reading is a big part of that journey, and this and the other books finished in 2021 are stepping stones across the shallow stream to the other side.

    • Rest and Revovery

      “Rest is not death; it is life, and all life bears fruit.” – A.G. Sertillanges

      I worked my way back to the office to finish some work after dinner. There’s a lot to do lately. And it calls at me, nagging for more time. But getting to my desk, my chair was occupied by a cat with a different idea of how to live. Taking the hint, I decided to leave the work for another day and sit down to listen to music instead… and promptly fell asleep myself.

      The end of the year brings a certain level of chaotic completion with it. Things come together in the end, or they don’t and slip into the next year. What are we to do about it but our best?

      Proper rest is the key. Sleep, recover, begin again. The cat knows this, and deep down I do too.

    • Crossing the Stream to Deeper

      “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else….

      The way to discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education… Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping obsessions.

      The information universe tempts you with mildly pleasant but ultimately numbing diversions. The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions six fathoms deep. Down there it’s possible to make progress toward fulfilling your terrifying longing, which is the experience that produces the joy.”
      — David Brooks, “The Art of Focus”, The New York Times

      The tricky thing about discovering “primary source” material is that you’ll uncover that what you believed to be primary source references other primary sources, which infers they aren’t the primary source at all. Such is the Great Conversation, spinning through life one book, interview or article at a time. We leap from one to the other, like stones across a stream, until we reach our destination with delight (and a new stack of reading material).

      Something recently pointed me towards Cal Newport’s Deep Work, which is a how-to book on pushing the shallow work aside to get to the deep work, where we differentiate ourselves and find true meaning in our careers and lives. Newport, in turn, pointed me towards several articles and books that I hadn’t previously been aware of, and a couple that I hadn’t fully absorbed on the first go-around. I’ve pursued them all recently, all in an effort to get meaningful work done. For we all must go deeper if there’s any hope for us to contribute something meaningful. And that requires breaking the spell of distraction:

      “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.” — Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

      Here’s the thing: In diving into all this material around deep work, I’ve questioned whether this blog is itself deep or shallow (It aims for deep, but sometimes skims a bit shallower than I’d like). But what is the purpose of the blog but to establish a daily habit of writing and finding things out—things that gradually pull me deeper? Put another way, those stones I’m hopping across in life are documented, one at a time, for anyone that wishes to follow along. But even here, we all choose our own path across that stream of life, we just happen to land on the same spot now and then.

      That terrifying longing? It’s on the other side, and the only way to reach it is to stop watching the debris float by in the stream of distraction and focus on the next landing spot, and the one after that. Our time is short, and we have so far to go. So go deeper.

    • Reaching Your Creative State

      “Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while.”
      – A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. The Intellectual Life

      Every day is a reinvention, a chance to be reborn into whatever you wish to become in this life. For me, this becoming is the whole point of living. But it begs the question—becoming what? Not an easy question, one most people immerse themselves in distraction to avoid answering (present company accepted). Blogging is a public sorting of this becoming bit. The messier work happens behind the scenes.

      When you have a general idea where your compass is pointing, you must put yourself in a state where you might execute on that vision for yourself. And this is where it gets tricky. All those skills you’ve learned to distract yourself from figuring out what you want to be when you grow up work equally well at keeping you from getting things done.

      “Creative people organize their lives according to repetitive, disciplined routines. They think like artists but work like accountants.” – David Brooks, “The Good Order” The New York Times

      And there lies the secret sauce to doing anything worthwhile: Repetitive, disciplined routines applied daily from now until… ad infinitum. Sertillanges calls this productive place your state of soul. A place where we can actualize the spirit of our deepest work and bring it to the world. What a gift. When you’re in this state, why would you ever want it to end?

      The trick to reaching this state of soul is hidden in plain sight: Establish routines and have the discipline to stick with them. Repeat. None of this is revelatory, what’s required is consistency of effort. So get to it. The world awaits your best work.

    • Promises to Keep, Promises Kept

      “Whose woods these are I think I know.
      His house is in the village though;
      He will not see me stopping here
      To watch his woods fill up with snow.

      My little horse must think it queer
      To stop without a farmhouse near
      Between the woods and frozen lake
      The darkest evening of the year.

      He gives his harness bells a shake
      To ask if there is some mistake.
      The only other sound’s the sweep
      Of easy wind and downy flake.

      The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
      But I have promises to keep,
      And miles to go before I sleep,
      And miles to go before I sleep.”
      — Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

      You can’t really live in New Hampshire without hearing the echo of Robert Frost in every stand of trees or old stone fence. I could drive to his old farm in fifteen minutes give or take, should I be inclined to. Some days I’m inclined to. But like so many things, not nearly enough.

      I woke up in the middle of the night with this poem running through my head. It’s been awhile since it’s lingered there, or if it had it didn’t bother to wake me from my slumber. Maybe it’s the cold days and the pleasant thought of woods silently filling with snow that seized my attention. But no, I should think it was the many promises to keep that are waking me in the middle of the night.

      That’s it: promises to keep. Big projects due this week that occupy my mind, and things left undone in my life that nag at me, so much more than the things done in my life that I don’t give myself enough credit for. It’s funny how the promises to keep are so much louder in our heads than the promises kept. We are our own worst critics, aren’t we? But after running through the promises I broke to myself that kept me awake I began listing the ones I kept, and eventually drifted back to sleep.

      To borrow from another Frost poem written in nearby woods, that made all the difference.

    • Thoughts on Get Back

      You and I have memories
      Longer than the road that stretches out ahead
      – John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Two of Us

      Watching close to eight hours of the creative process as The Beatles hash through two album’s worth of material in the Disney+ series Get Back was fascinating and informative. Fascinating as a lifetime Beatles fan watching these four guys work through songs you know by heart from the first basic notes to the arrival at magical songs that became so essential to your own life’s soundtrack. Let It Be and Abbey Road songs developed before your eyes and ears. Informative as you see four guys on the edge of breaking up, still pushing through with the work.

      They knew who they were. The Beatles were the biggest band in the world, the biggest band that ever was, and they recognized that what they released mattered a great deal. That must in turn be both an enormous burden and a cattle prod to get to it already. But then you had this other dynamic at work, with each of them building their own lives, four egos growing increasingly independent of each other. Paul deeply involved and at his peak creatively, pushing for more contribution from the rest of the Beatles. John nonchalant and locked in on the ever-present Yoko. George rising to a higher level and chafing at John and especially Paul’s perceived dismissiveness. Ringo showing up early, ready to go, watching things falling apart and trying to be the glue that kept it together just long enough.

      And then they started playing music preparing for their live rooftop concert. Originally it was going to be an indoor affair, maybe even some exotic location, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with that. They were tired and weren’t going to leave the country for a show, nor were they going to do the same old thing they’d done before. There was a captured moment when they told Paul about the rooftop idea and his eyes lit up, “That’s it!” all over his face.

      Growing up with The Beatles larger than life, you tend to stick each of these four young men into a bucket, representing something in your mind. But each turned out to be much more than you thought they were. Get Back reminds you of this. They were just four guys with a special chemistry that became a force of nature. And you see that as they jam together, mastering the new songs and plucking old ones out to play. Playing music together is when they rose to be The Beatles again. And the room filled with joy.

      They had memories that were longer than the road that stretched out ahead. Together for over 14 years at that point, they were about to break up and go their separate ways, still competing and trying to one-up each other for years to come. But John would be dead in just less than 12 years. This was their famous final scene as a band, something the viewer knows all along. We find ourselves wishing they’d snap out of it and focus on the work a bit more. Squeeze just a little more brilliance out of their time together. But in the end celebrating what they did give us.

      And maybe turning a bit of the spotlight back on yourself, recognizing that you could be producing more too. For if there’s a lesson in Get Back, it’s that even the most brilliant magic starts off as an awkward tune in your head. Put yourself into the work and see what grows from it.

    • Getting to Deeper Work

      “In an age of network tools… knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality…. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.” – Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

      I think the reason I get up early is to think, uninterrupted. And when I am interrupted, by other early risers or by something as simple as the cat meowing for food my own deep thinking is disrupted, often to a point where I have to put away the work and find a way to reset myself. The beautiful thing about posting a blog every day is I’m forced to find a way through the shallow pool I find myself swimming in back to deeper waters, distractions be damned. But the work never feels the same.

      Noise-cancelling headphones help a lot. When I go deep I’ll play the same song on repeat until I’m done with whatever project I’m committed to finishing. For me, two songs work particularly well for this, Mark Knopfler’s Wild Theme (no surprise if you know what my favorite movie is) and Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune because they both quietly soar and have no lyrics to draw me out of my focused state. After years of this trick, playing one of these songs becomes Pavlovian in snapping my mind to attention.

      Long walks in nature help reset the mind when you find yourself in frenetic shallowness, and I have my go-to spots for this too. Walking helps you sort out the puzzle pieces in your subconscious mind, putting all the pieces on the table and shuffling them one step at a time. If the walk goes well you sort things out just enough. But sometimes I find myself dwelling on another puzzle altogether, and realize the distraction wasn’t swimming shallow at all but this elephant in the room that you’ve got to remove before you can properly focus on the original project. Long walks help sift the pieces enough for you to see what you’ve been staring at all along.

      Another trick of the trade that countless brilliant minds subscribe to is strict daily application of Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. Write whatever comes out of your mind onto the page for three pages in a gushing stream of consciousness until you’ve gotten all the noise out of yourself, and then shift to creative output. I’ve tried this a few times but find myself frustrated by the time spent on Morning Pages that I could be spending on the work itself. The fault isn’t in the process but in my commitment to it. Enough people swear by it that it must work, and to go deeper I might have to recommit to this process myself.

      “The way to live is to create.
      Die Empty.
      Get every idea out of your head and into reality.”
      – Derek Sivers,       How to Live

      Whatever gets you there, deeper work is where we mine the very best of ourselves. Eliminate as many distractions as possible, retreat to your proverbial cabin in the woods and do the work. While there’s still time.