“Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.”

— Zen Proverb

I’m not going to pretend I know a damn thing about being “enlightened.” I can barely make time for a ten minute sitting practice. Therefore, anything I say below that touches on anything spiritual should be taken with several grains of salt, as I am largely pulling it out of my butt, despite a couple of college Philosophy courses.

Whatever your chosen interpretation of “enlightenment,” however, the important part of the proverb is the repetition: “chop wood, carry water.” Sure, most of us don’t have to chop wood and carry water unless we want to. Many of us have heating and indoor plumbing in our homes. The proverb isn’t about chopping wood and carrying water, it’s about how we’ll always need to do the things necessary for survival and life, no matter our spiritual state. For you and I, to “chop wood [and] carry water” means to go to work, to take care of our children, to wash the dishes, to do all the day-to-day things that have to get done to keep afloat in this world.

That’s all there is to it, right? Thing is, it’s easy to let these required day-to-day things fall by the wayside. It happens to so many of us. One or more days where you forget to wash the dishes, and suddenly your kitchen smells funny, and you’re eating terrible delivery food out of planet-killing styrofoam with plastic utensils. If you forget about your children, they’ll also smell funny and then there’s someone from the state banging on the door.

As I was thinking about this proverb today, I got an email from Patrick Rhone’s This Could Help newsletter that touched on this very concept.

I find that one of the most important motivating factors in accomplishing any of our tasks is remembering the “why” behind it. And it is here that considering our missions will come into play.

“Why am I doing this? Why is this important right now? Where does completing this take me? What does finished look like? Where does this fit in my life-long mission?”

All of these should be able to be answered by first defining your missions and life long goals. Even the most obvious or overarching ones. Any single task on our list should align with these. Therefore, it is important that we do all we can to quantify them. For, all of our tasks leave an open question as to their value until we do.

To put it another way, “First, care.”

Another thing I ready today is a piece on Medium by Tami Sigmund, “I’m a thinker, not a doer.” It hit home. Her conundrum is so much like my conundrum was when I emailed Merlin and Dan in the early days of Back to Work.

I can never just sit and ‘be’ who I am. My mind is always heading off in some new direction, trying to come up with some grand scheme. I have a sense of anxiety when I’m not actively planning out the next ‘thing’ in my life. The next thing never happens though, because I’m too busy trying to figure out exactly what it should be, and how I should do it, and who would join in, what implications it could have on my life, and what holes I can poke through my plans to sabotage them before they get off the ground.

I could have easily written this myself. In fact, digging through my gMail archives, I still have the original email I wrote to Dan and Merlin then. Here’s the crux of it:

…I’m in my late 20s, working a full-time, menial clerical job along side a part-time telemarketing gig, to make sure I can keep a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and pay off the corporate masters I owe my education costs to. Neither of these jobs fulfills the yen I have to be… creative.

What does one do to find out what one is good at/suited to do/their passion/etc? This is, I guess, the crux of that whole “quarter-life crisis” thing…

The unwritten part of that is my own endless questioning of what I should be doing, whether it will work, and whether I can live with myself if it doesn’t. I’m reminded of a minor meme that went around Twitter a while back about your “Burlesque Name”. Your first name is your favorite drink. Your last name is your greatest fear. So, I’d be either Bourbon Success, or Bourbon Failure. I haven’t figured out which.

Part of the whole journey, since Episode 7, has been about finding the direction I want to go, lead by determining what I care about. That’s the hard part. I’ve got a vague sense of it now, which is more than I did three years ago, but even a vague sense of direction and understanding is better than none. But, to wrench this train back on the tracks, knowing my direction, having a goal, being enlightened to your purpose and design in life is not going to mean you won’t have to do all the mundane crap embodied in “chop wood, carry water.” This is the foundation upon which you can, with a little luck and perseverance, take that journey and reach the goal. It’s all connected.

Yet, it’s the mundanity of those day-to-day tasks that makes it so easy for us to forget what they’re really for. It helps to remind ourselves of just why we do all this stuff, be it washing the dishes, running on the treadmill after work, or sit and think about the next step in our lives. To “be who we are” is to do all these things. That’s what “be”ing is.

The quiet scares me. So, I make my own noise, plugging little smooth white plastic buds into my ears to listen to podcasts, audiobooks, and loud music. It helps me work, I tell my coworkers. It keeps me sane, I tell myself. It keeps the silence away. Well, the near-silence of whirring air conditioners, and the dull clacking of people typing on cheap Dell keyboards. Hearing Dan and Merlin chat is much more comforting.

As a lifetime city dweller, and current denizen of one of, if not the loudest city in America, I have an odd relationship to noise. It’s been a constant in my life, with cars driving past my windows, planes flying overhead, kids playing in the street, and the various noises of household appliances and computer hardware. If I ever want to shut out the din, and take control of my sonic environment, I have those little white buds in my pocket, ready to be plugged into infinity. At home, I have the option of big, heavy cans to clamp around my ears, not only blasting sound in, but keeping outside sound out.

Which is why it’s taken a conscious act of will to keep the white buds out of my ears for a chunk of my day. I’d already opted to stop blasting my own noise into my ears on the subway, after being attacked for my phone one Christmas Eve in Philadelphia. (The kid didn’t get it, but ended up breaking a pair of $80 Apple In-Ear Headphones in the process.) When I go for my long walks, I often don’t have the buds in as well. It keeps me more in tune with my environment, which is to say it keeps me from getting hit by cars when crossing the street. Now, at work, once my morning podcasts are done, I’ll take the buds out and try to face the silence there.

I figure it’ll make my co-workers think that I’m not trying to avoid them. Maybe it’ll make me more present as I take orders by email, process them through the black box of brain and fingers, and put the product out into the world. At the very least, working in the silence will teach me to live with the silence. I may never accept it, but perhaps the silence and I can reach a détente. It exists, I exist, and we’re both going to have to be okay with that. Until then, I’ll still pop in the white buds when I need to. I do need to know what happens next in my audio book of Operation Mincemeat, after all.

I’m as much of a sucker for the personal productivity game as any other geek enraptured by systems and organization while suffering from ADHD symptoms. In my procrastination reading, I’ve read a fair amount of pushback on complicated task management systems. I don’t think it’s indicative of a trend, just different people coming to the same set of realizations at different times. The latest for me is Seth Clifford’s “The sickness of efficency”, which makes a lot of great points about workflow tweaking.

All told, it’s harmless if all your tweaking and playing with workflows and apps doesn’t get in the way of doing stuff. After all, isn’t the whole point of this personal productivity stuff is to give us more time to do the stuff we really want to do? When personal productivity becomes a goal in itself, we miss the point. If we can get our work done in six hours, instead of eight, that’s two extra hours to live—or at least work on something else we want to do.

I’m reminded of the great John Cleese talk on creativity. (Transcript] In it, Cleese talks about “open” and “closed” modes of thinking and working—how we need to be an open mode to be creative and create new ideas, but a closed mode to implement those ideas. And also tells a bunch of terrible lightbulb jokes.

Part of the push back against systems and heavy task management is that is far too easy to put yourself in a straightjacket. We can get so caught up in the act of productivity to enter that “open mode” of thought that makes creativity possible. Something I’ve banged my head against multiple times in figuring out just how the hell to keep me on track with creative projects is how to fit them into my system. The trick for me, it seems, is to fit the time to be creative in my system, not the act.

Systems are great for putting everything in place to clear up the time for that “open mode” thinking. Though, no matter how good we get, we can still sit in our creative space and get bupkis. Or worse, get distracted. As John Cleese says, “…[A]s we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking.” And, for us geeks who get off on systems and organization, and all that jazz, we’ll probably end up thinking about our systems, and how to tweak them for optimal efficiency. So, the cycle continues.

There’s a happy medium somewhere for all of us. Some of us will use OmniFocus, some of us will write stuff on a 3×5 card, and some of us will just be able to keep all this stuff in their heads. If there was a real, one-size-fits-all solution by now, I think we’d all be using it, and there would be no more of this hand-wringing about systems. Certainly, there’d be fewer apps in the App Store with checkmark icons.

I love reading about people’s journeys to that happy medium, and sharing my discoveries. If we can avoid prescriptivist nonsense, and avoid tweaking our systems to the detriment of actual stuff we both need and want to do, we’ll be halfway there. To be honest, I think the only real solution is to find the people who don’t need lists or task managers and eat their brains to gain their powers.

At some point in the last year or so, I stopped moving. Inertia carried me for a while, but I came to rest, and that was a dangerous thing to do. When I moved to New York, the idea was to hit the ground running, and keep moving until I had achieved what I wanted. What I wanted was a good job doing exciting work, enough money to afford to pay my bills and rent a decent apartment in a safe neighborhood of Brooklyn or Queens with my partner, to be able to afford to go to a concert or two per month, and sock a little away for later.

Inside of two months, I thought I'd achieved at least part of that. I found a good job doing interesting work, and the potential to make decent money. It was a trap, and as co-workers flitted away by will or by force, and the work became duller, I realized I'd made a mistake. The mistake wasn't taking the job. The mistake was thinking that taking the job would mean I could stop moving for a while. When I came to my senses, I had the good fortune to be pushed back into motion, and now I'm getting up to speed.

There's one good thing that came from not moving. I was able to discover a direction for my professional life that I enjoyed. Though the work environment, and that particular job were not what I wanted, a lot of what I did in my job excited me, from email newsletter design to content curation, to website QA testing. It was a lucky break to get some experience in a new field that I really enjoyed and build some skills that can help wherever I go. ¹ During that year, and into my unemployment and new job, I've also found some direction to my writing.

Direction helps. Being in motion is a good plan, but it carries risks. Moving without any plan is just as dangerous as standing still. When you're moving on uncharted territory, you don't know what lurks ahead. A few years ago, I spent a whole year out of work because I had no concrete direction. The whole point of my job search was to Not Look Back, and not take another shitty telemarketing job ever again. So, I ran, panicked across the dangerous Serengeti for years, exposed and at risk. Had I not been convinced to take a Civil Service examination, I might never had the chance to catch my breath and get employed before the unemployment ran out.

I read a great piece in Fast Company about how to deal with anxiety.

When you tell yourself to “calm down” you have to make two hidden steps, moving both arousal and valence. But moving from anxiety to excitement is easier: your body can stay in an amped-up physiological state, but you re-appraise your anxiety as excitement.

— Feeling Anxious? Why Trying To “Keep Calm” Is A Terrible Idea | Fast Company

Anxiety is akin to moving without a direction, while excitement is knowing the direction to go. When you're anxious, the only thing you want is to stop being anxious. To get some place, any place, that's safe. When you're excited, you have a goal and you want to achieve it. You have direction. Goals and direction, however, should be flexible. If you're focused on one specific thing above all else, you miss out on other great opportunities that can make your life more interesting. It also gives you an option for when plans change and you've been cut off from the direction you wanted to go.

I’m on the cusp of accomplishing something I probably haven’t done since my elementary school days: filling a notebook. Back in November, I decided to experiment with the Bullet Journal, mostly just as a capture method for personal productivity. The idea of a record of my days would be a bonus. So, I picked up a pocket Moleskine, and a fancy pen quiver so I would never be with my notebook and without a writing implement, and began the slow journey of learning how to keep a notebook.

The hardest thing to wrap my head around has been the idea that “nothing doesn’t go in here”. It still isn’t fully baked into me, but I know that in the earliest days of my notebook habit, I would write down data points like the number of steps I took in a day, or what I had for lunch that, while have value, are things I already have a system for. It also became a way to track my work tasks, but now, not so much.

What my notebook has become is a way for me to capture thoughts, either in snippets or long-form. The more I use my notebook, even in the “wrong” way, has trained my brain to use it more often anyway. It might not be a complete portrait of my day, but it’s still a great aid to memory, and when I settle down to journal in Day One at the end of the day, I have reference, and something that will last long after all the stuff in Day One has become unreadable due to the march of technology. (Oh well.)

Though what excites me most about filling up this notebook getting the next one. Since a pocket Moleskine and a Quiver takes up a lot of space in my pants pocket, I’m moving to carrying around pocket notebooks (Doane Paper, if you’re curious) in a Hellbrand cover, and keeping a larger notebook in my bag or on my desk to fill in at the end of the day. I’ll be doing my long-form journaling in Day One for the foreseeable future, but incorporating something analog into my life has helped a lot.

Now, I just need to overcome years of terrible penmanship.