First this week a quick reminder that my new book MEDITATIONS FOR MORTALS: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts is now available for preorder in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand! It’s published in September or October, depending on where you live. Preorders make a really huge difference to authors, so there’s no better way to support my work than to preorder if you can.
The UK jacket is on the left, the US jacket on the right…
Meditations for Mortals is intended as a ‘retreat of the mind’: four weeks of digestible daily chapters – though of course you don’t have to read it that way – offering shifts in perspective and practical tools for embracing limitation and actually taking action on what matters most to you, in an increasingly distracting, anxiety-inducing world. (Some chapters are based on greatest hits from The Imperfectionist; there’s also a ton of new material.) The structure is designed to let the outlook I call ‘imperfectionism’ really sink into your bones, where it can make a concrete difference.
There are chapters on making good decisions when there’s always too much to do; shedding the illusion that life will truly begin as soon as you’ve got things ‘sorted out’; on the mysterious power of finishing things; grasping the sense in which other people’s emotions aren’t your problem… and many more. You can preorder in any format, wherever you buy books, but some options are here:
Thanks so much! Now on to this week’s newsletter. – Oliver
What would it mean to be done for the day?
When you finish writing a book and move to the part where you’re trying to spread the word about it, you swap one kind of battle with overwhelm for another. Instead of grappling with one big, daunting project, and wondering if you can pull it off, you’ve now got endless little tasks demanding your attention, and you wonder how you’ll possibly get through enough of them. All of which is to say that this has been a good moment to remind myself of a question I think almost everyone could do with asking themselves each morning: “What would it mean to be done for the day?”
As the psychotherapist David Maloney explains in this excellent video – all his videos are excellent, in my view – it’s vital to be able to “reach a point in the day when you feel finished.” Few of us arrive there regularly, he notes, but we can and should – not only because life’s more pleasant thatway, but also because you’ll be much more productive in the long term. When you end the day feeling like there’s vastly more you ought to have done, you’re telling your nervous system it can’t take a break; and you’re reinforcing an idea of your work as an oppressive and insatiable force. And all of that invites a counter-reaction of procrastination: due to fear, or defiance, or a mixture of both, it gets harder and harder to make yourself work.
I suspect all this is rather worse for we “knowledge workers”, who fiddle about with symbols on screens, than (say) a small-scale arable farmer. For the latter, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the potential work-to-be-done extends onwards into the future forever, or the fact that you’re a limited human who can only be expected to plough so many acres by nightfall. But if the crop you’re tending is emails, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the work is endless – and easy to imagine that some wildly impossible target, such as answering a hundred in an hour, might in fact be within your capacities.
What you realise, the moment you ask “what would it mean to be done for the day?”, is that the answer can’t possibly involve doing all the things that need doing – even though that’s the subconscious goal with which many of us approach life, driving ourselves crazy in the process. If there are a thousand things that need doing, you’re going to need to arrive at some definition of “finished” that doesn’t encompass them all. Maybe it’s two hours on your main current project, and three detailed emails you’ve been meaning to write, plus a couple of quicker tasks? Your definition of “done” may be very different, of course, depending on your work, energy levels, and existing commitments. But merely by asking the question you’ll be leaving behind the daily quest to do more than you can – which systematically prevents you taking satisfaction in whatever you do manage to accomplish.
If you’ve read too many productivity books, like me, you might think I’m recommending what’s been called a “must do” or “will do” list – ie., a short list containing only those tasks you’re truly committed to completing today. These are certainly preferable to open-ended to-do lists! But their focus is still on “what needs doing”: that is, on how much productivity red meat you plan to throw into the open jaws of the ever-hungry world, in order to maybe buy yourself an evening’s peace tonight.
By contrast, “being done for the day” turns the focus inwards: to what it would take to allow yourself to feel done. It’s about what you might reasonably expect of yourself today, given your actual situation and limitations, regardless of what might by some other definition “need” doing. If you’re caring for a three-year-old, or stuck in meetings, from 9am to 2pm today, the fact that the annual departmental review “needs” completingby 3pm is irrelevant. It’s not going to get written. So maybe “done for the day” will have to mean jotting down a few preliminary ideas for it instead.
Asking this question daily is a training in patience, because when you start getting serious about what you can reasonably expect from yourself, it’ll be painful how short the list is. For the first few days, you’ll probably fail to finish even that list! And so the days go by, and your lists get even shorter, until eventually you find yourself getting through them, and permitting yourself the feeling of doneness. At this point, you have the enjoyable sensation of exerting greater agency over your life: instead of demanding that the world send you a signal that it’s time to stop for the day – which it never will – you decide that henceforth that’s a determination you’ll be making. You’re in the driving seat. And being in the driving seat means, among other things, getting more done, with less psychodrama – even though, in order to get there, you had to be willing to aim to do much less each day.
Something in all this evokes the religious tradition of the Sabbath, in which you down tools not because the work is finished, but just because it’s Friday night or Sunday morning, and so it’s time to stop anyway. “Stopping anyway” – stopping in the knowledge that for finite humans, the work is never done – reorients you to the depth of the present moment. It helps you stop ceaselessly chasing the imaginary future point at which everything will have been handled, so that life can really begin. It’s a reminder that life has already really begun: that this it. And it permits you to sit back and receive life for an hour or two – to enjoy it confident in the knowledge that you did what you could today, and that when tomorrow rolls around, you’ll do what you can then, too.