The power of immediacy

If you’re stuck in a rut, and you feel like you’ve stopped making progress on things that matter, it could be that you need more immediacy in your life.

To explain what I mean, I suppose I’ll have to tell you about the other day when I deleted, or threw in the recycling, about 300 articles I’d saved to read later; roughly 70 web pages I’d bookmarked; a three-inch-high stack of supposedly vitally important printouts; plus more task lists and old project plans than I care to think about.

All gone – and at time of writing, I haven’t regretted it for a moment, because it worked.

Recently, as anyone paying close attention to the delivery schedule of this newsletter might have noticed, I’ve been in a creative fallow period. These freak me out far less than they used to, because by now I understand that something essential is happening, outside my conscious awareness. Still, as a self-employed writer, it remains a little unnerving to feel oneself doing basically nothing at all for days on end. My inner critic starts harrumphing about how teachers and nurses and bricklayers don’t have that luxury (which is true, but epically irrelevant). At first, I fight to get back in the saddle as quickly as possible. But it’s generally only after I admit defeat, giving in to the apparent stagnation, that it reveals itself not to have been stagnation at all.

This time, the mass deletion mentioned above was the sign that something was shifting. It was once I got rid of all the stuff I’d been collecting (including a teetering to-read pile of books, which I didn’t literally throw out, because I’m not a psychopath, but did integrate into our main bookshelves) that motivation and inspiration began to flow. It was as if I’d been assuming that what I needed was to collect sufficient resources to create momentum, when what I’d really needed was to clear enough space for momentum to arrive.

In collecting all those articles and bookmarks, I’d been engaging in what the Substacker Harjas Sandhu, in an insightful post, calls “hoarding-type scrolling”. The hallmark of this behaviour, he writes, is “saving good posts for later instead of reading them now… I feel like a squirrel looking for fat nuts to stash in my little tree hole. The strangest part of it all? I have more saved content than I could possibly consume in the entire next year… thousands of hours of thought-provoking pieces to read and videos that might actually change how I see the world.”

The most obvious problem here, of course, is that you far less frequently get around to actually reading or watching – and thus letting yourself be changed by – the ideas you encounter. But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.

I don’t think this attitude of hoarding-as-a-substitute-for-engaging is limited to scrolling online, either. Project plans, to-do lists, bucket lists and suchlike can all end up serving a similar function. They become places to collect things you want to do later, but the collecting stands in for the doing. This was certainly true of the lists I threw out. A minority of the listed items were specific, time-sensitive tasks it was important I didn’t forget, and I did retain a short list of those. But the majority were broad plans or aspirations that were unlikely to slip my mind (“redesign newsletter template”, “language learning with [my son]??”, “buy a tent”) and that, in any case, I’d got no closer to implementing by virtue of writing them down.

On the contrary: by hoarding such thoughts, stowing them safely on a nice big list, I’m almost certain I’d made it less likely I’d take the plunge and do them.

This makes sense, because I think the reason we engage in all this hoarding behaviour is that it’s a more comfortable alternative to the uncomfortable intensity of actually living. To take an action is to risk that it might fail, or that it might succeed; that it might lead to big changes, or no changes at all. And it means using up a chunk of your finite time, and maybe also money, instead of just continuing to add to the list of things you potentially could do — which stretches off into the infinite future, where mortality doesn’t apply.

After my big clearout, I knew I’d need to avoid accumulating a brand new backlog of lists, or stacks of unread posts. (That would merely be making a fresh start, and I don’t believe in those.) So these days I’m trying to cultivate a strong bias toward either acting on the sense of inspiration and aliveness when it arises, or letting it go, rather than hoarding it for later. My new scrolling rule is that if I encounter an interesting post, I’ll either read it there and then, making a note of any thoughts it triggers, or I’ll move on. (As an alternative, I still recommend treating your to-read pile like a river, but you could think of this as not creating the river in the first place.)

It’s hard to be quite so strictly “immediatist” about to-dos. Sometimes you’re in the wrong location to carry out a task; or absorbed in one project when a thought occurs about another; or you’re waiting for someone else to do something. But I’ve been surprised how much immediacy it’s still possible to cultivate. I’m simply not going to forget my major work goals. And I don’t need to make a note to, say, contact my friend Nick; I either just need to contact him, or accept that, for now, I won’t be doing so. I can buy a tent, or wait for the inspiration or necessity to revisit me sometime later. And so on.

To some, this might look like a repudiation of self-discipline – the discipline of making yourself grind through backlogs, or comply with detailed schedules. And yet it turns out it’s a real discipline in itself to resist the urge to flinch from the present moment, to stay with what’s immediate, to do things or not do them, rather than adding them to a mental list for later.

Perhaps it’ll come as no surprise to learn that I’ve actually completed far more of the things I’d previously added to my lists since throwing out the lists. Or that I’ve read more mind-shifting pieces of writing since I stopped collecting them. Because what I’m doing now, however falteringly, isn’t storing up plans for acting later, but letting the actions happen here and now.