Happy New Year!
So it's a new year officially, and with it comes the idea of making resolutions, which can often induce nausea, stress, unfair comparison and a whole litany of other unhelpful feelings. Here I am outlying some of my thoughts on meeting the new you of the new year in a more kind and realistic manner.
Productivity Trap
Your reward for becoming more productive is more work, not more free time! This idea is one I have always intuited but didn’t have a clear idea until I came across Oliver Burkeman’s work ‘Four thousand weeks: Time management for mortals’. Basically we’re being fed a lie from higher ups of in our neoliberal western society, if we’re good little worker bees we’ll be rewarded with more time and prestige. Ultimately this is a fallacy, we’ll only end up with burnout and helping someone else’s bottom line (call me cynical). A few decades ago we didn’t have the dizziness of choice, and limitations (like art) made life easier in some ways. On one’s deathbed I dare say we won’t remember all those emails sent and clothes ironed, but those times ‘doing nothing’ or ‘messing about’. There is of course a time and place to get things done for a healthy life, but there’s a line! A balanced diet of admin, creativity, exercise and human connection is what I loosely suggest.
P.s. seriously don’t buy the snake oil from 4am millionaires/billionaires,
a) they often came from privilege of money and circumstance which makes anything seem attainable
b) they have a serious support network of staff to allow them to ‘get up at 4am’ focused
c) they sure as hell aren’t going to write a memoir on how behind their corporate dominance they left a trail of interpersonal asceticism and relational/attachment ruptures to their alienated loved ones.
Getting back on the horse
I have been privileged in my training and with clients/peers to see the power of the human spirit when it comes to being dealt a bad hand or dealing with an addiction. What made my jaw drop consistently is not any fancy psychological theory, cutting edge medicine or fancy framework, it was the deeply assured fruits of knowing:
It’s not falling off the horse that matters;
we are the sum of all the times we get back on
Did it take you a thousand times to kick a bad way of being? Did it take you years to find the right partner? Did it take you double the time to finish the course? I know it’s a pain but fair play, done is done and done is good enough! The why can come after.
I often give myself a hard time when I fall off my running routine, creative practice or my admin, but I just come back with a vengeance
tell myself you’re going to just run for 20 mins (at any quality)
sit down with a guitar or notebook and just freeform spew stream of consciousness
Set a 30 min timer and whack out as many boring tasks as I can then leave it.
The existential pizza
I love pizza, I am cursed and blessed that our practice is surrounded by good pizza on South William Street like Mani or Bambino but despite loving new pizza experiences I am a bit bare bones, I think more than a couple of toppings makes it too busy and ultimately incohesive like a bad book. You may want to fight me on this, but I will maintain our goals should be like my pizza bias! Try do less but more effectively, indeed the formidable Andrew Huberman makes a loose rule of thumb to focus on 1-5 goals in our routine. Five is excellent, three is good, one is still ok, just be open to not overdoing it and the truth that we’re not godly beings!
Accountability and Collaboration
As the saying goes, no man is an island or it takes a village and while we can and should rightly take credit for our hard work, remember it’s in a social eco-system. One of the most life changing things my clients and I have come to learn is that collaborating, consulting, reaching out and/or delegating are game changing practices that cost virtually no money, training or exhaustive systems. There’s a nefarious western and maybe capitalist script underlying society that we must ‘pull ourselves up by our bootstraps’ and be completely individualistic and self-sufficient, this IS a MYTH. The whole reason we have our infrastructure, society, art and apex status as a species is because our assets as a collective. To go fast go alone, to go far go together.
Habit Chaining
If you have bad habits but they’re consistent, then great!....seriously! Instead of wasting excessive energy trying to change a bad habit, try tacking on a good habit to piggyback on the consistency of the bad habit. If your habits are neutral or good then that’s cool, too! I’ll give some examples from my life
I practice 3 mins mindfulness after each run I do or after each end of my therapy day
I practice diaphragmatic breathing on long drives or when I arrive to a place for work
I often elect to have social gatherings early in the morning on days I am not working to help with my sleep cycle
Resources
Whilst this has leaned into opinion and existential philosophy I also would like to share some black and white resources my clients find helpful
Productivity Trap
SMART Goals
Eisenhower Matrix
Habit chaining
Atomic Habits
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