Don't invite your thoughts to tea
In the return of an occasional series, here are four ideas I've recently found useful/enlightening, and which I didn't want to ignore just because they don't seem suited to a full-length edition of The Imperfectionist. I also wanted to let you know about a new two-part event I'm offering over one weekend in March, Designing Your System for Creativity, focused on building (or refining) your personal practice for getting creative work done amid life's seemingly endless demands. There's more here; and if you buy a ticket by the end of this weekend, the code IMPERFECT23 will reduce the price from £47 to £37. Thanks!
Don't invite your thoughts to tea. You presumably don't need me to point out that it's your thoughts – anxious thoughts, perfectionistic thoughts, self-critical thoughts, and more – that all too often sabotage your plans and peace of mind. But getting rid of thoughts is pretty much a non-starter; indeed, the very attempt is likely to make matters worse, setting off a futile inner struggle against your own mind. Even "accepting" or "letting go of" thoughts can be a tall order, once you're in their grip. That's why I love the metaphor of not inviting them to tea, explained in Christian Dillo's book The Path of Aliveness, where he presents it as one of the basic aspects of meditation (though it seems more widely applicable to me). "Thoughts don't tend to knock, they just show up in the house," Dillo writes. "The host's job is not to barricade the door but instead just not serve any tea." Maybe I can't exactly let go of my counterproductive thoughts – but I can resist the temptation to indulge them, metaphorically inviting them to sprawl on the sofa for hours at a time, with a nice hot drink and a generous slice of cake. (I'm reminded of Elizabeth Gilbert's stance on the place of fear in creative work: you can't kick it out of the car, but you don't need to let it anywhere near the driver's seat.) There's much to be said for meeting unwanted thoughts with this sort of affable tolerance – declining to pick a fight with them, while at the same time being firm that if they insist on staying, they'll be waiting in the hallway, while you get on with the important stuff.
"I'm fully committed." This phrase, which comes via Jordan Raynor, may win the prize in the long-running quest to find the right form of words for saying no to a request for your time – without leaving any wiggle room, but also without being needlessly unpleasant to the asker. Of course, now I've mentioned it here, I'll be self-conscious about using it, but never mind. Just look at how elegant it is! "I'm sorry, but I'm fully committed" brooks no objection: it's stronger than merely saying you have lots on your plate at the moment, which leaves open the possibility of adding something more. But it takes responsibility for the situation, too; it's not that the other person's request is low in value, just that my schedule happens to be full. Finally, it's so obviously true: who isn't "fully committed", in some sense? There's no need for the subtle self-aggrandisement of claiming you're "really busy at the moment". You're just fully committed – a fact that the asker will probably recognise as being true about their life as well. (If you want some alternative scripts, there are a whole lot of them here.)
How to handle a backlog. Sometimes you should walk away from a backlog altogether (for example, by deleting an unmanageable quantity of un-dealt-with email). Other times, you may be mistaken in regarding something as a backlog at all (your to-read pile, for example, is best understood as a river, not a bucket). But if you do have a backlog to contend with, these are the steps to follow, with partial credit here to Mark Forster: first and above all, isolate the backlog. Shift the old emails into a separate folder, leaving your inbox empty; or create a folder on your desktop for the projects you're deeming part of the backlog; or just contain them on a separate to-do list – whatever's appropriate. After that, your top priority is not to clear out the backlog, but to prevent a new one accumulating, by attending to new incoming items (emails, tasks, whatever) in a steady and regular way. Only once you're in the swing of that should you turn to the backlog itself, making it a modest priority to chip away at it gradually – by, say, dealing with 10 emails per day. You'll probably feel you can't afford this approach, because the backlogged items are too urgent. But if that were a useful thought – if you had the bandwidth to deal in a timely fashion with everything urgent – the backlog wouldn't have arisen to begin with! This approach won't solve the non-negotiable truth that you can't do more than you can do. But it will confine the problem to those items you're already behind on, rather than permitting the deadening spirit of the backlog to spread to the rest of your work and your life. And that's not nothing.
A good time or a good story. "Almost every experiencein life can be categorised as a good time or a good story." This observation, of uncertain origin, has the ring of a saying that everyone's heard a thousand times over. But I only heard it recently, so perhaps it's new to you, too. Unequivocally bad things do happen, obviously. But this phrase is an immensely helpful reminder that the vast majority of what gets us roiled up will seem unimportant – and maybe actively amusing – given even a brief passage of time. It almost never really matters that you missed a train, or blurted out something embarrassing, or messed up a dinner you were cooking, or that some idiot was rude to you, or that you forgot it was dress-up day at school. And yes, I know you can think of exceptions! But the point, surely, is to become aware of all the instances that aren't exceptions – and preferably to do so while they're still in the process of unfolding.