Tools for Thought

I once had a poetry teacher, Ron Koertge, who constantly urged his students to eliminate weak lines in a poem rather than modify them. When we would present our poems before the class, he would often lob casual critiques like, “That third stanza should be cut” or “This poem probably needs to be cut in half.” He had no interest in rearranging a few words. For Koertge, modifying an ineffective passage in which the writer has an emotional investment yields incremental improvements, but cutting the passage qualitatively shifts the balance of the entire piece. A poem with three great stanzas is likely to have more emotional impact than a five-stanza poem in which one stanza has been improved from bad to merely mediocre.

Imagine a day designed along similar lines: with no mediocre activities, with no time wasted on optimizing the trivial.

How do the outcomes in your life map to your actions? If you’re like me, there’s probably more than a small discrepancy between your current lifestyle and the lifestyle that you would consider ideal. On some level, most of us realize that our activities throughout the day don’t comprise the most efficient path to acheiving whatever it is we want to achieve, the “whatever” we collectively file under “someday.” But with a quick reality check, it’s possible to reorient ourselves and bring our actions and intentions into better congruence and leave neverland. This blog finally got off the ground in large part because I took a look the activities that made up my average day, and eliminated the ones that were expendable.

Many people glance briefly at what they would like to accomplish today, then reflexively tell themselves that what they would need to make their intentions reality is “more time.” Let’s take a step back from this knee-jerk time famine by conducting a simple activity analysis:

1. List your desired outcomes
2. List your current activities throughout the day — actual, not ideal
3. Put a check next to the activities that correlate to your desired outcomes
4. Note the ratio of checked to unchecked activities

Notice that I am not suggesting that you do the granular time audit advocated by time management gurus. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter whether that mid-day commute to grab a latte takes 16 minutes or 12. What matters is whether or not the activity matters. Is it checked our unchecked? It’s really that simple.

Well, usually. More entrenched habits often require a little more mental massage. Rather than go cold turkey, we’ll taper them off by enlisting the 80/20 principle. Find some low-yield activity you’d like to get rid of that consumes a lot of time — watching television, for instance. The next time you want to spend an evening watching TV while not feeling confident that it would be the best use of your time, negotiate with yourself by asking, “What 20% of the shows I watch account for 80% of my entertainment?” I would wager that for most people, 80% of their television viewing doesn’t provide continuous entertainment, but simply alleviates boredom. A better focusing question might be, “What’s the one show tonight that would satisfy my urge to watch TV?” Watch that show, and forget the rest. Instead of letting your eyes glaze over a glowing screen for the rest of the evening, take another look at the checked items on your activity list, and use them as touchstones for further meaningful action. Which actionable item on the list would bring you closer to whatever it is you would most like to accomplish?

Focus on output. Challenge yourself to replace the more-is-better mode of consumption with some-is-enough, and use the time you reclaim to seize the day.