In the return of an occasional series – marking this newsletter’s return from a brief, uhh, unplanned spring vacation – here are three unrelated ideas (or perhaps really they’re not so unrelated?) that made something click for me recently:

Are you living two hours in the future?

These days I’m pretty good at avoiding the trap that’s been called “onedayism” – the tendency to live as if the really important part of life won’t truly begin until you’ve reached some far-off milestone, like finding a long-term partner, or achieving financial security, or until you’ve fixed your problem with procrastination, or once world events don’t seem so apocalyptic. (You have to find meaning, accomplishment and joy in the midst of all that, not solely once it’s all been “sorted out”.) Yet as I’ve relaxed my grip on that sort of unconscious postponement, I’ve found it’s still easy to make the same error, just on a much shorter timescale: to proceed through the day as if my generally sane and interesting and enjoyable life can resume just as soon as I’ve got this task out of the way, cleared this batch of email, or made it through to this evening. But of course you can miss your whole life in this manner, ceaselessly focused on a point a few hours in the future, no less surely than with the longer-timescale version.

The answer definitely isn’t to beat yourself up for not yet having perfectly mastered the art of being present. (That, you might notice, is just another version of the same mistake.) But you can remind yourself to unclench a bit, to soften, to fall back into what’s really going on, here and now, and to see there’s no reason why you can’t find this very experience juicy and alive. I like how the entrepreneur Shane Melaugh puts it: “Your life plays out over your entire lifetime.” Which always includes now.

None of this is about attaining some kind of pristine, static, passive state of Presence In The Moment, as it sometimes gets presented in spiritual circles. You still get to pursue goals and ambitions and exciting future states; you can still look forward to the end of the day. It’s just that you get to experience all that as something that’s unfolding now, in a present moment that gets to count just as much as any moment that might coming in future.

The power of a closed list

It strikes me that most of the task-management systems that actually work – perhaps even all of them – do so because they’re some version of a “closed list”. A closed list is just any list that has a fixed number of entries, as opposed to an endlessly increasing number of entries. If you have a practice of picking three “must dos” for the day, that’s a closed list. If you use a Kanban system, with a fixed number of tasks in progress at any one time, that’s a closed list too. The 3/3/3 technique is basically a closed list. And in Four Thousand Weeks I outlined another closed-list approach to managing your workflow: first, make one big “open list” of everything that’s on your plate, even if it’s 500 items long; then make a second, closed list, with (say) ten slots on it. Feed ten items from the open list over to the closed list, to fill up the slots. These are what you’ll focus on for now. And the rule is that you don’t get to add any more until you’ve freed up at least one slot by completing something on the list.

As always, when it comes to genuinely useful productivity techniques, the specifics matter less than the underlying principle, which is that closed-list methods begin by having you face up to your limited capacities, then encourage you to ask what might be the best use of those capacities today – instead of asking “what needs to be done?”, then desperately trying to figure out some way to cram it all in. (This never ends well, because “what needs to be done” is an effectively infinite supply.) This approach sometimes gets summarised as “do less”, or “focus on fewer things”, but I think that subtly misses the point. Really, all that’s happening is that you’re making explicit what was already the case: that your time and energy are the key bottlenecks in your life, and thus choices are always being made. You can either make them unconsciously, which fuels anxiety, or consciously, for example with a closed list – which feels empowering and grounding, and like you’re finally getting some purchase on your life.

One hundred per cent alive

In the previous edition of this newsletter I wrote about “aliveness” as the somewhat mysterious thing that lies at the heart of a sane and meaningful life (and that’s so obviously lacking from interactions with AI). That term doesn’t quite nail it – perhaps because no term ever could. But something important fell into place when I encountered this line from the Zen priest Shohaku Okamura’s book Living by Vow, brought to my attention by another great teacher, Shinshu Roberts:

That’s a useful reminder in the context of interactions with others, since it’s notoriously easy to go through the world subconsciously assuming that nobody else is quite so fully alive as oneself. (“Always remember there’s a person in there,” as Eugene Gendlin liked to say.) But it’s useful on an individual level, too, as a reminder that this thing called aliveness is accessible, at least in principle, in any emotional state or set of external circumstances. It doesn’t require you to be happy, or free from pain; you can find it amid grief, or even in boredom, overwhelm or exhaustion. I don’t know about you, but I find this an extraordinarily helpful pointer for more fully inhabiting whatever I’m experiencing, for finding the life in it, and then figuring out what step needs taking next.