I have an fascination with the vast and bizarre world of "productivity", somewhat incongruous with most of my other interests and beliefs, and entirely so with the spirit in which this blog was conceived. But it's a part of me, so here I am writing about it. It probably has to do with the obsessive side of my personality, but I could happily spend as much time experimenting with various "hacks" - things like keyboard shortcuts, filing systems, note taking apps and software, databases - as I could doing the things those systems are supposed to help you get done. Meta-productivity, if you like: how you can get things done, rather than actually doing them.
Recently I've been trying this little trick to help me concentrate on various tasks, from the banal to the significant, taking them one at a time, as follows. I pick Thing 1 to do. I do Thing 1 and at some point before finishing Thing 1 I pick Thing 2 - the next thing to do. I tell myself, sometimes out loud, "when I've finished Thing 1, I'll move on to Thing 2". As I'm doing Thing 2, I pick Thing 3, and so on. It's like working your way through a To-do list that never has more than two unticked items at any one time. It's surprisingly effective. One effect it's had is helping me focus more on the thing I'm doing: it's as if, having settled in advance on what to do next, the mind acknowledges that it doesn't need to think any further forward than that, and expends no more energy on looking for Distraction, or ruminating on the uncountable number of other things I could or should be doing too. Thing 2 follows Thing 1, and becomes Thing 1, which leads to Thing 2, which becomes Thing 1 again. A perfect circle.
| Gurdjieff: Did things |
The key is that the "Things" have to immediately follow one another, with no space for distraction in between. I am very easily distracted. So to use a very simple example, if Thing 1 is, say, cleaning the kitchen, Thing 2 might be something like watering the plants. As soon as I've finished cleaning the kitchen, I can water the plants. While watering the plants, I choose Thing 3, which needs to be something that can immediately follow that, allowing minimal possible opportunity for distraction. in between. Things can be broken down into parts as small as necessary to achieve this: if between Thing 2 and Thing 3 I need to walk from one room to another, "walk from the kitchen into the bedroom" becomes, momentarily, Thing 2. (Or Thing 2.5, if you like).
This might sound a little insane. Never mind. I'm finding it a very satisfying way of being. I'm not very good at it yet - what I want is to be able to apply the same technique to more complex tasks that take hours, perhaps even more than a day, moving from one thing to the next in a state of flow. It's a pale version of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" and an even paler version of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky's "self-remembering" but perhaps just colourful enough to be a platform for leapfrogging into more optimal states of consciousness. The ideal would be to remain in a state like this permanently: always aware, always deliberate, always - dare I say it - "productive".
Related posts
How to Put Things in Your Brain
Book of the Week(end) - Not Working by Josh Cohen
Pale Corridors of Routine
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