Fear of Nothing

Making Things Easier for Visitors

2011-12-28T20:02:00.000-05:00

When people are coming to visit, hosts often worry about making a good impression on their visitors. The situation, though, is also an opportunity to save time for everyone involved by making things more convenient for the visitors.

The truth is, “a nice place to visit” has more to do with a place that is not a great challenge to figure out than with the finer details of decorations and entertainment. Paintings on the walls might be nice, but when visitors have to look for light switches, paintings don’t matter.

If the basic things aren’t taken care of, or if they require lengthy explanations, then obstacles and workarounds may become the focal point of a visit, occupying the time and attention of hosts and visitors alike. If you have time to prepare your place for visitors, start with the most basic things first. These are not the most glamorous things. Hospitality begins with toilet paper. If it is too late and guests have already arrived to a place that is not ready, take the time to let the guests help you identify and remedy the most pressing shortcomings.

If a visit goes more smoothly for the visitors, it will be easier on the hosts also. By taking care of your visitors, you are also taking care of yourself.

December is the busiest month for many people, and most of the time pressure that people face is unnecessary. During December I have been offering several ideas of simple ways to be less busy.

Don’t Get Things Out Early

2011-12-17T09:00:00.004-05:00

When you’re getting ready to work on a project, like baking a pie for a Christmas party, it seems as if you can save time by getting the materials out in advance. You know you need to bake the pie tomorrow, so you put the flour, pie pan, rolling pin, and all the other things you’ll need out on the table. Then, you think, when you’re ready to start on the pie, all you need to do is show up and start baking.

This doesn’t work nearly as well as it seems it should. It ends up taking more time when you try to save time this way.

When you take things out early, they can get moved, used for something different, or covered up by something else that was also taken out for something that isn’t happening yet. You can lose track of things. They might even get thrown away. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent five or ten minutes looking for something I need, only to realize, “Oh — I already put it out on the counter.” It actually takes less time to find things if they are put away where you expect to find them than if they are sitting out somewhere. Things can get dirty if they are sitting out, and then you have to clean them before you can get started.

It is helpful to take a look to make sure you have all the materials you will need. If you have run out of flour and the mixing spoon is broken, that is a problem you can solve more easily if you discover it more than half a day in advance. And, often it makes sense to get things out for the very next thing you will be doing, or something you will be starting on almost right away. Other than that, getting materials out in advance can turn into an unnecessary and unproductive waste of time.

Instead, prepare for something you are about to do by putting things away. If you have time to prepare, start by clearing the space you will be working in, and not just by sliding things out of the way, but by finishing the actions that are left hanging there. Then, when you start on the pie, or whatever project you’re getting ready to do, you’ll have space to work in, and you’ll have an easier time focusing on just the one thing you’re doing.

December is the busiest month for many people, and most of the time pressure that people face is unnecessary. During December I’ll be offering several ideas of simple ways to be less busy.

Deadlines: Don’t Wait Until the Last Minute

2011-12-08T14:20:00.001-05:00

Time pressure and deadlines go together, particularly as a deadline approaches. If the last-minute efforts that go along with wrestling with deadlines are a source of stress, you can make your life easier by changing the way you think of deadlines.

Keep deadlines at arm’s length. Finish a report or a repair the day before it is due. Send an email message an hour before it is needed. Mail checks a week in advance.
Keep deadlines separate. If two deadlines come close together, make sure you know which one is first and what your priorities are. Either deliver both results well ahead of the deadlines, or get one out of the way so that you can focus on the other.
Lower your standards early. When you realize that your plans are unrealistic, don’t lower your sights just a little. Reduce your expectations enough that you can realistically complete something with time to spare. A deadline says, “Don‘t get it right, but make sure you get it done!”
Give up early. For an all-or-nothing deadline, like preparing a contest entry or food to take to a party, ask yourself if there is really time to produce something meaningful before the deadline. If the answer is no, don’t make the attempt. Jump ahead immediately to the next deadline.
Remember what’s important. Deadlines are external events, but in your mind, you can attach the deadline to a goal of your own creation, and that’s when they become stressful. Your personal goals can be changed and moved, so if you can’t meet a deadline in the way you originally planned, focus on meeting the need and the opportunity that the deadline represents. In other words, remember that the deadline is not about you.

In the holiday season, a lot of activity may be crammed into a short time with little room for compromise in the schedule, but what people really want is for you to show up. It’s fine to take on the challenge of creating the perfect holiday, but don’t let your visions and plans get in the way of showing up for the holidays.

December is the busiest month for many people, and most of the time pressure that people face is unnecessary. During December I’ll be offering several ideas of simple ways to be less busy.

Making Email Less Alarming

2011-12-03T11:58:00.001-05:00

After email becomes a habit, you can stop noticing how intrusive it is. Most email programs automatically check for new email every minute, and they sound an alarm whenever a new message comes in.

An alarm! Every minute! That’s appropriate, of course, if you’re receiving email messages about fires that you have to go put out. But if you’re not working at the fire house, you can easily take steps to make email less alarming. This can save you time and can make life noticeably less stressful.

Steps you might take to make email less alarming include:

Change the settings of the email program to turn off the alarm for new mail.
Reduce the frequency with which the email program checks for mail. If you have it check every five minutes instead of every minute, you have reduced the intrusiveness of email by 80 percent. Or how about once per hour?
Set the email program to not automatically check for mail. Mail will only come in when you manually check for it. This seemed like a radical suggestion when I first heard it, but then I tried it. Many people only read incoming mail when they have time anyway. If this is you, as long as you are only reading mail when you have time, why not wait till that moment to receive it? Some time management experts say you should check your business email only twice a day, around 1 hour before you leave for lunch, and around 1 hour before the end of the business day. This is the time of day, they say, when people expect responses. I wouldn’t go that far, but you feel more like you’re in control when email messages don’t show up until you’re ready to read them.
In a corporate office, typically you don’t have this kind of control over the email settings. Chances are, though, you can stop the flow of email at will just by closing the email application.

December is the busiest month for many people, and most of the time pressure that people face is unnecessary. During December I’ll be offering several ideas of simple ways to be less busy.

The Psychology of Busy

2011-12-02T09:51:00.003-05:00

Chris Brogan today writes, “You’re Not As Busy As You Think.” “Busy,” Brogan suggests, could be a psychological pattern of avoiding some things (“all the tasks I can’t seem to master in life, like paying bills on time”) or seeking other things in ways that may not be so practical and may not even be consciously acknowledged (visibility and feedback are two things we may spend time seeking without any particular purpose in mind).

In economic theory, the way to be less busy is to drop work on low-priority objectives. This requires recognizing the low-priority objectives in your work, which is not always easily done. Brogan suggests that you look at the things you do over and over again, and “Ask yourself quite honestly what purpose this activity serves.”

December is the busiest month for many people, and most of the time pressure that people face is unnecessary. During December I’ll be offering several ideas of simple ways to be less busy.

Open Thread and Request for Stories, Questions, and Photos

2011-11-17T21:30:00.000-05:00

I am happy to see comments on my blog, and I am adding this “Open Thread” post to make it easier to discuss issues that aren’t so specifically related to the topic of a specific post.

Here, feel free to bring up any subject related the book Fear of Nothing or its topics of clutter, time pressure, hassles, suspense, and present-moment action or anything that seems related or relevant. Ask questions or send stories and (links to) photos that you would like me to discuss in a post on this blog. Request topics that I may have overlooked.

This blog is as public as can be, so don’t post anything you wouldn’t want grandma to see. Use a secret identity if that helps. If need be, there are other ways to contact me. It is easy to find me on Twitter, and information about me can be found at my web site rickaster.com.

Today Is “One Day”

2011-11-11T10:00:00.005-05:00

Today is One Day.

The day can be written is 11/11/11 or 11-11-11, in all ones, so if any day can stake a claim as being One Day, surely this is it.

I just thought I’d mention this in case there is anything you said you would do “one day,” that you still haven’t done. Today is the day!

Starting a New Chapter

2011-11-06T11:45:00.000-05:00

My new experience as a novelist has persuaded me that we have a greater capacity for change than we give ourselves credit for. If we are willing to apply a disciplined imagination to one specific change at a time, I believe we can make changes one after another, day after day, just as a novelist might write a new chapter in a novel every day.

Read about this in the Shamanic Economist blog: “Starting a New Chapter, Today.”

“Maybe Things Will Get Better Next Year”

2011-09-08T21:48:00.000-04:00

People who follow U.S. economic policy saw two threshold moments today.

This morning, it was a speech from the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, who for the first time suggested that the economy might improve faster if the causes of its problems could be addressed.

Then tonight, the president addressed Congress with a call-to-action speech on the economy. Even with all the advance billing the speech got, it was startling to see from a president who until today had seemed content to just muddle through.

The key, in both instances, is a switch from waiting to action. The attitude of “Maybe things will get better next year,” is not a particularly strong approach for anyone to take on any subject of importance. The action and change it implies is distant and indefinite. If you really want progress, you look for ways to take action today, and solve a problem or get something completed before you go to sleep tonight. The approach is, “I know five things I can do today that will make things better.” Things move faster if you focus on what you can do right now. Even if what you can do in a day is not much, it is still more than you do when you are just waiting.

Anyone who is looking for a job knows that “maybe next year” is not the right time to get started when something really matters. “Right away,” the refrain of the president’s speech, is the time, regardless of how long you may have been waiting.

Self-Storage and the Endowment Effect

2011-09-03T19:28:00.000-04:00

The BBC News Magazine story “The Self-Storage Craze” deconstructs the decision-making process that leads people to store possession they don’t use in storage lockers for months or years on end, at considerable cost.

Writers Tom de Castella and Kate Dailey go through some of the familiar mechanisms that make people save things they don’t like enough to have around the house: sentimental attachment, putting off the tough decisions about what to keep, a touch of confusion over the actual costs involved. But they also touched on one that I hadn’t really thought about.

But this is only part of the story, says Brian Knutson, an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University. The “endowment effect” is just as important.

This is the economic theory in which — by the mere fact of owning something we endow a possession with more value than its market price.

It might explain why people spend a huge sum putting an old sofa in storage for a year rather than using that money to buy a new one.

Add in the way people confuse the market value of a possession and its personal value, and we have people making decisions about their possessions that aren’t connected to what the things are worth.

Even if our things were worth as much as we imagined, it wouldn’t mean we had to keep them. A high market value is not a reason to keep something you don’t seem to use, but to sell it. If it turns out to be hard to sell, that is a likely sign that the market value is not as high as you thought. Of course, a low market value is not a reason to keep something either, if you are not actually benefiting from owning it.

The cost of storing your possessions is never more glaring than when you pay it month by month for the delineated space of a storage locker. The fact that so many people pay the high cost of self-storage for perfectly ordinary, replaceable items like furniture, video tapes, clothing, and magazines tells you that people aren’t always making the financially correct decisions about storage.

Letting Something Decay Is Not the Same As Wearing It Out

2011-08-16T21:43:00.000-04:00

Ask the average person what happens to most of their stuff, and they’ll tell you they use it up and wear it out. That actually doesn’t happen nearly as often as we think it does. One reason we think we wear out our stuff is that we give ourselves credit for wearing things out when we didn’t really. If we want to be more realistic about it, there is a difference to be seen between wearing something out through repeated use, and allowing it to decay through lack of use and the passage of time.

I experienced this distinction this summer with a pair of sandals. They actually fell apart while I was wearing them. Did I wear them out? It might seem so, but in fact, I wore them only a few dozen times, not nearly enough to wear them out. No, they were weakened not from heavy use, but from the passage of time and the effects of warm and cold weather. I had had them for ten years, long enough for the fabric and the glue to weaken to the point where, when I finally did try to use them, they crumbled quickly.

It often works out this way, that you save your stuff for a long time, only to be rewarded with a little bit of use. In economic terms, that is not a favorable exchange. It is better to throw something away than to store it for so long that its usefulness fades away, whether through decay, obsolescence, or some other reason.

Lessons From the Clutter of Divorce

2011-07-21T18:53:00.001-04:00

Today at Intent.com, the Forbes Sisters write about the emotional difficulties of the stuff that can be left behind after a divorce in “Divorce and Clutter Clearing: The Process of Letting Go.” The story about the wedding dress is especially relevant for anyone faced with cleaning up during or after a divorce, but it illustrates several other important points that are relevant to all of us.

First, part of the value of clutter is that it can lead you to the major emotional issues of your life. Of course, clutter gains this value only after you are willing to start seeing it. But then, by dealing with the clutter effectively, you can dispense with most of the emotional blocks that slow your life down.

Second, the idea of keeping something because it is valuable in a financial sense should serve as a red flag. The correct strategy for anything you own that is financially valuable, but that you are not able to use, is to put it in the hands of someone who may be able to use it, either by giving it away or by selling it. If you are postponing that inevitable action, it is only because you are resisting it, and you can discover something about yourself by examining that resistance.

Finally, “surround yourself with things that you love.” Your possessions create your surroundings, so choose your possessions well. Keep things that make you happy, that reinforce your sense of who you are, and that help you do the things you do. It is better not to own much more than that.

Under the Influence of a Balky Mouse

2011-07-02T10:01:00.000-04:00

I’ve been having problems with my computer mouse for the last two days. The mouse can no longer be entirely relied upon to click when I press the button or to unclick at the right time when I release it. This can cause obvious problems when I’m working on the computer, especially if I drag an item to the wrong place on the screen or select the wrong menu item because the mouse button is balking. Ideally, such a mouse should be replaced immediately, but to save myself the expense of a shopping trip, I’ve decided to live with the problem for two weeks while I order a new one and have it delivered.

You adapt quickly and unconsciously to the circumstances you are working in. Under the influence of a balky mouse, I find that I am doing more writing. I do writing mostly with the computer keyboard, without relying too much on the mouse, so my writing work isn’t deterred by a mouse that isn’t quite working.

At the same time, I find that I am neglecting my email and editing work, both of which rely heavily on the mouse. When I try to do things like email and editing with a mouse that isn’t quite working, I find the mouse button problem frustrating and I don’t tend to stay at it for more than a few minutes.

I am telling you this story not to urge you to fix your balky computer mouse if you have one, but as an illustration of how much a person’s way of working can be influenced by their circumstances. Yesterday and today, without meaning to, I find myself doing less of one kind of work and more of another just because of the inconvenience of one small equipment problem. If you look at your work and living environments as a whole, you could discover that your behavior is being shaped by dozens of minor hassles, some of them as small as the button on a computer mouse. If you want to change your behavior, then, you can do so by changing your environment.

This especially works if your level of action in a particular area is less than you want it to be. Perhaps there is work you know you need to do, but you are willing to address it only when you are clear-headed and full of energy. Look at the circumstances of the work you would like to do more of and ask where the hassles are.

Suppose, for example, you want to save money by doing more cooking at home, but when you it comes time to cook, you are too tired to do it. The real problem is not that you are tired — throughout history, tired people have cooked — but that there are too many obstacles surrounding the cooking process. Perhaps you could remove some of the obstacles by rearranging the pots and spoons so that you can find the ones you use most often without having to dig through them. Or it could be something as obvious as cleaning out the refrigerator, throwing away the food you are not actually likely to eat so that you can easily find the ingredients you are looking for. There can be mental obstacles too. For example, if you are always trying to outdo yourself every time you cook a meal, that is a difficult obstacle to overcome. Just thinking about what you will have to do to make your next meal a masterpiece will make you feel tired. Changing your mental approach to your work may be all you need to do to make it easier to do.

The one hassle that you could find in any area of work is clutter. If the materials you want to work with are surrounded by other things that you aren’t using, then just finding the right materials can become a hassle. If you generally aren’t delivering the level of action that you want to have in the important areas of your life or work, the first question to ask yourself is whether you have a pattern of clutter. You may need to take away much of the excess stuff in order to boost your level of action.

This same principle also works in reverse. If there is an action you want to take less of, see what you can do to make that action less convenient for yourself. Suppose, as an example, that you have decided you want to spend less time drinking beer. It might make sense to take the beer out of the refrigerator and put it on a shelf in the basement, or somewhere less convenient. A habit can’t be quite as automatic when you make the actions more complicated for yourself. While you’re at it, also rearrange things to direct yourself toward something you want to do more of. Perhaps you could replace the beer in the refrigerator with something healthier to drink, such as water.

I am taking advantage of my temporary computer mouse problem by catching up on my immediate backlog of writing work, and also by putting a greater emphasis on things I want to do that are away from the computer. Short-term hassles can work to your advantage by shaking up your routine and showing you other ways of approaching things. You don’t want to let hassles become permanent, though, because then they put a damper on your life. Take away the hassles, and it makes it easy to do more.

The Big Secret and What It Costs

2011-06-23T00:03:00.002-04:00

Bruce Muzik, speaking at TEDxSinCity on May 14, talked about “The Big Secret Nobody Wants to Tell.” I don’t think I’m giving too much away by explaining that “the big secret” does not mean what it sometimes means, when you’re afraid everyone but you knows what’s going on. This time, it’s the reverse. The big secret is any recurring conflict that permeates your life that you never get any help with because you never mention it, afraid of what might happen if people find out.

This state of living is more debilitating than people realize. It can ruin your mood and fill up your time in ways that defy rational explanation. It can seem that there is no way out. Stevie Nicks writes of a character with a big secret: “She rarely goes out/She spends every day/Waiting for the day/When everybody finds out.” People in this state lie awake at night wondering what to do. The suspense of waiting for people to uncover your big secret is as painful as any other long-term suspense. The solution, Bruce says, is to own up to it.

Bruce’s talk is a fast-paced 20 minutes, worth viewing if you can take the time.

Many people are surprised to realize that everyone’s big secret is something different. It can also be surprising how non-secret some people’s “big secrets” are. If someone who shakes the floor with every step tells you, “I’m afraid people think I look fat,” try not to respond with, “Well, duh.” The other side of this, of course, is that your own big secret may not be a big deal to very many people.

Some people imagine that owning up to a secret will require a long story, but it doesn’t. It takes only one sentence to say that things are not what they seem. This is an example, from my own life:

I’m afraid my voice isn’t pretty enough for me to succeed as a singer.

The simple declarative statement can take various forms and still be enough to give away the secret. Everything beyond that, then, is just details. If the truth seems too hard to explain, then explain the deception: “I try to create the impression that _________, but actually _________.”

Authenticity, after all, is not about going around setting the record straight. As Bruce points out, that can never really be done in an absolute sense. As part of the same point, he suggests that nearly everyone is trying to obscure their true nature.

But I’d like you to consider this. A professor of psychology at University of Massachusetts named Robert Feldman is an expert in deception, and his research shows that when two people meet each other for the first time they lie on average three times every ten minutes. So if at times we’re lying 18 times an hour, I invite you to consider that perhaps we’re all liars to some degree, and we all have secrets, and the best we can do is not to try to stop lying. The best we can do, if we are all liars, is to tell the truth about where we lie, and openly, honestly, take responsibility for what we’ve done.

It’s also about taking responsibility for what we’re trying to do. If the main thing you’re expressing in life is a matter of obscuring who you really are, it takes away some of the ability to express what you’re trying to do in life. That makes life unnecessarily complicated, and the complexity we experience is the ultimate cost of having a big secret. Give up the secret and you can begin to express simply and directly what you are trying to do — and then, it turns out that what you are trying to do is not really so complicated.

Joey Fatone’s Big Sale

2011-06-12T21:02:00.000-04:00

Former *Nsync singer Joey Fatone knew he had a problem. From the story in CNNMoney:

“I have too much shit,” is what Joey Fatone said when asked why he’s holding a massive estate sale this weekend.

The former member of *Nsync — one of the most famous boy bands of all time — is selling off the entire contents of his Orlando, Fla. home.

Joey is, of course, doing the right thing. Once you realize you have too much stuff, it doesn’t make any sense to just live with the problem. If the heart of the issue is that you bought much more than you needed, then never used most of it, the obvious solution is to sell the excess. Joey is not really selling everything he owns, in spite of what the news story suggests — he and his family have already picked out the things they want to keep and taken them out of the house. Whatever was left got lined up for probably the biggest tag sale in town this weekend.

Clutter is especially problematic for anyone who, like Joey, is traveling for work half of the time. It’s hard to make the case that you will ever use the excess stuff at home when you’re not even there that often. Any traveler knows that you have to travel light, and the same idea applies, if not in quite the same proportions, at home.

“Obviously, I Also Want _________”

2011-05-29T13:41:00.000-04:00

We don’t really want most of the things we think we want. This is one of the biggest problems with goal setting and time management systems. You can work for years toward a big goal you select, such as your “dream home,” when it isn’t what you really want.

Most of our goals come from ideas that were planted in minds by cultural and commercial influences. We know that not all our goals are really our own by the way we react when we achieve our biggest goals. Sometimes, so be sure, achieving a goal is a life-changing experience, filling us with such a glow or so changing our view of ourselves or our place in the world that we know it is a step forward. Other times, though, a big achievement is an excuse to throw a party, but not much more than that. Our daily lives don’t really change, and especially, the feeling we bring to our daily lives doesn’t change. Or worse, achieving a big goal can be a big let-down, possibly even throwing us into a depression for weeks as we say, “Is this all there is?”

It isn’t that useful, though, to realize a goal isn’t really what you wanted after you have already achieved it. You could set a new goal, but how do you know the new goal won’t really be what you want either? Some success coaches actually encourage people to get out of the blah feeling that often follows the achievement of a goal by having people set a new, bigger goal immediately. Success, they say, is a journey, not a destination. That’s not actually true — if success is not an outcome, then it does not mean anything at all — but what else can we expect them to tell us? That the system they teach often just doesn’t work, and they don’t know why?

The dream house is perhaps the most potent example of a goal people work toward that isn’t really their own. The idea that there a special kind of house, just for you, that will make your life complete is so firmly planted in people’s minds that The Secret used it as its biggest example of a big goal, bigger than health, romance, or money. During the same period, success coaches encouraged people to visualize their ideal house and the means to pay forward, then to go ahead and convert that vision into reality.

To be sure, the right house does make all the difference in some people’s lives, and for many more, it is a reasonable and realistic goal that will make daily life go more smoothly. But for at least as many people, the quest for a dream house is a mistake. I remember, many years ago, helping a friend put the finishing touches on his dream house. He could afford to have it built only if he did part of the construction work, like installing the wall panels and painting the walls, himself. Far from excited, he was exhausted looking at the work that was ahead of him. “What I really want,” he told me at the end of the day, “is a hot bath and some clean clothes.” I also know of people who have reacted to their dream home by sitting in the basement watching television, oblivious to their new physical surroundings, or by selling the house and moving again just two or three years later.

We could save ourselves years of wasted effort and heartache if we could test our goals in advance. I’ve tried to test my larger goals using visualization. If I can visualize a completed goal in vivid detail, I can hope to see in advance my reaction to completing the goal. This is a worthwhile exercise for large goals, but it is far from foolproof. Visualizations don’t tend to match the details of real life, so that the imaginary version of a goal can be far better than it will be in real life. For example, if you visualize a trip to Alaska, you might well neglect to visualize the giant mosquitoes that dominate much of the landscape for much of the summer. Visualizations also aren’t a reliable way to measure your emotional reaction to an imaginary situation. The visualization might be showing you the reaction you think you should have rather than the reaction you actually would have. Also, this kind of visualization take a lot of time, so you can’t use it for every big goal, and you certainly can’t use it to test all the little goals that you spend most of your time working on.

I recently found a much quicker way to get a measure of the things you think you want. It’s the fill-in-the-blank statement, “Obviously, I also want _________.” If someone asks you to think big and then say what you hope to do in life, or in the next year, you’re likely to answer first with some of your more personal and distinctive goals. These are the kind of goals that make you an interesting person. Someone might say, “I would like to paint a set of paintings for all the tarot cards and get my own tarot deck printed.” Someone else might say, “I would like to convert my pickup truck to use giant tires so it can drive in mud.” After a few of these, if pressed to continue, you might say, “Obviously, I also want . . .” and continue with a list of goals that don’t seem interesting at all. For example, someone might say, “Obviously, I also want my own TV show, a swimming pool, and a million dollars.”

If you have a few minutes, try this exercise yourself. On a sheet of paper, write the heading, “I Want:” and list two or three things you wish you could do, be, or have. Then write the heading, “Obviously, I Also Want:” and list several other things you wish for, especially things that seem so obvious and predictable that you would ordinarily hesitate to mention them. Write that list now, or at least imagine it.

Now, here’s what it means. The focus here is not on the first list, but the second. Any wish you can express with the adverbs “obviously” and “also” is not likely to be something you really want. It’s a desire that was planted in your mind by your surroundings. Saying “obviously” with a wish is almost like saying, “I think anyone would want this.” And why would they want it? Because you are imagining that their surroundings would imprint this desire on them the same way your surroundings imprinted it on you.

It doesn’t matter whether that’s true or not. I’ve heard people say, “I think anyone would want” about some things that actually hold meaning for relatively few people, such as, “I think anyone would want to drive in a Formula One race,” or “I think anyone would want to live in Venice.” These statements nevertheless tell you something about the person who says them. This is a person who feels pressured toward goals that aren’t really that interesting to them. If you are able to say, “obviously” about any goal or wish you express, there is a very strong chance that it is something you feel compelled to attempt rather than something you really want.

There is a similar kind of power in the word “also.” The goals you really want are so interesting to you that you cannot help but imagine that they are interesting to the people around you. And indeed they are, if only because they are part of your adventure of life. If you are particularly eager to do something, it is not an “also.”

Certainly you will achieve many of the goals and wishes from the “Obviously, I also want” list. It is important, though, not to turn these goals into your big goals in life. If you will have to work long hours over a period of years toward a big goal, make sure it isn’t the kind of goal that you would describe using the words “obviously” and “also.”

Planning When the Future Is Unknown

2011-05-22T08:36:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, as every day, we saw examples of the difficulty of planning. The big events of the day turned out not to be the ones that were loudly predicted the day before. Predictions are based on guesses and hidden assumptions and often turn out to be wrong. The future is unknown, so how can you ever plan anything?

The farther a plan reaches, the more unlikely it is that reality will follow the plan. These are 7 tips for reducing the risks of planning by reducing its scale:

Plan small. Instead of trying to plan the whole future of everything, plan just one thing, or just a few.
Plan from what you know. Don’t put much stock in plans based on rumors and guesses.
Plan for the near future. It is easier to plan for today than for tomorrow, so plan for today first.
Plan actions. Results come from actions, so plan actions. Planning without action creates all the risk that is inherent in planning, but without any possibility of reward.
Plan your own actions. It is hard enough to plan for yourself, harder still to plan for other people. For the same reason, don’t put much reliance on other people’s plans for you.
Change plans often. Be prepared to reconsider your plans when the predictions and assumptions they are built on turn out to be incorrect. This is something that is sure to happen on a daily basis, so be ready for a change of plans around any corner.
Don’t take plans too seriously. A year from now, most of your plans will be forgotten, but people will remember some of your actions and results. Put the emphasis on action rather than planning, and you will get more results.

Despite what you may have heard, it is not a good idea to “stick to” a plan. Imagine having a plan glued to your forehead, and you’ll immediately see the problems with this approach. The people who tell you over and over again to “stick to the plan” are people whose whole lives are one long series of “Oh, no, my plans are falling apart again.” Instead of struggling to follow one flawed plan after another, what they need to do is make smaller plans, more often, at least until they learn how planning works. Sticking to a plan should not be confused with perseverance. Perseverance is about continuing to take action, but the longer you stick to a plan after it has failed, the harder it is to take action.

Planning is a necessary part of life, but planning is also necessarily risky. You reduce the risk of planning when you can plan closer to where you are right now, using plans that are quick, simple, and obvious. It is the big plans, the plans that people labor over for weeks, that represent the most risk. It is awkward when those plans fail, and more than that, most of the work that goes into the big plans turns out to be a waste of time when events don’t go as planned. Today is a new day. Make a new plan.

Packing Peanuts

2011-05-05T18:23:00.000-04:00

I had to admit it: the packing peanuts were starting to pile up.

About once a month I send or receive a shipment padded with packing peanuts. When I receive a box with styrofoam packing peanuts, I save them for the boxes I’ll be sending out.

I was doing spring cleaning last night in the warehouse (which is just one corner of the basement here), and I was surprised at how many styrofoam packing peanuts I had. Of course, I shouldn’t really have been surprised. I used up about 1 1/2 bags of packing peanuts over the course of the past year — it proves I really do use them. But I got two new bags of packing peanuts along with the printer I bought online in December, and apparently several more with other purchases over the course of the year. Meanwhile, some of the other bags of packing peanuts had just been sitting there for years.

When you save supplies for reuse, it is a classic formula for clutter. Usually, one of two things happen: you use the supplies faster than you collect them, or you collect them faster than you use them. In the former case, you run out sometimes and have to buy more. In the latter case, the supplies tend to pile up, but as soon as you realize that this is the pattern, you don’t need to keep more than a small supply, because more will be coming in.

I have never bought packing peanuts. Rationally, I decided, I should keep half a bag, enough for maybe four months. By then, chances are, I’ll have gotten more.

But what would I do with the other nine bags I had? I don’t know anyone who uses packing peanuts on a daily basis, so I looked up the web site of the local UPS Store. Sure enough, the page had a prominent “Packing Peanuts Recycler” logo. When I walked into the store this afternoon, the clerk was busy packing up something for the previous customer (using packing peanuts, naturally), but looked up long enough to ask if I was just dropping off packing peanuts. “You can just leave them at the end of the counter,” she told me. It took two or three minutes to carry them from my car to the store. What would have been a seven-year supply for me might be used up there by the end of the weekend.

Giving away the packing peanuts was easy. The hard part was realizing that I needed to take a new look at them. That is the way it usually is with clutter. It is one of the reasons I like the idea of spring cleaning. It’s a systematic way to take a look at everything at least once a year, and to realize that some of it no longer belongs.

Spring Cleaning at Fukushima Daiichi

2011-04-18T21:45:00.001-04:00

There is no surer sign of spring than a cherry tree in bloom. Cherry blossoms are a tradition here in Pennsylvania, where I took this photo a few days ago. Pennsylvania’s flowering cherry trees originated in Japan, where the cherry blossom tradition goes back at least 1,700 years.

This week in Japan, the blossoms have probably extended as far north as Fukushima. The arrival of spring there this year is a bittersweet and surreal moment. For the first time in the city’s history, no one can see the cherry blossoms. No one is doing any spring cleaning. No one is there at all. The city had to be evacuated because of the unfolding nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, and residents heard over the weekend that they may not be returning home until next year.

The situation at Fukushima Daiichi was triggered by an earthquake and the resulting tsunami and power outage, but it became a disaster because of clutter. A series of releases of radiation has forced workers to evacuate the plant for hours at a time. Each evacuation of a few hours is a setback of a few days in the work needed to get the reactors under control again. The dangerous radiation came from nuclear waste stored in the top levels of the same buildings — the junk in the attic, if you will. These were pools of water filled with all the spent nuclear fuel from the reactor’s 50-year history, filled beyond their designed capacity, according to engineers. No one gave the nuclear waste pools much thought until the power went out, the water started to evaporate, and the nuclear waste heated up and became volatile and dangerous.

Spent nuclear fuel has to be stored on site in a pool for an initial few years of cooling off, but then, ideally, it should be taken away and stored somewhere away from danger. In other words, a nuclear power plant has to clean out its attic sometimes too. But that apparently was never done at Fukushima Daiichi, nor indeed at most of the world’s nuclear power stations. Spring cleaning at Fukushima Daiichi, which may actually extend into the summer and fall, will include an effort to remove the spent nuclear fuel so that its radiation will no longer threaten the city, the world, and the workers struggling to get the reactors under control.

I am sure this episode will prompt a new look at security policies for spent nuclear fuel worldwide. But, of course, the nuclear power industry is not the only place where potentially harmful things are stored away and forgotten. The story there might prompt you to take a look in your own attic. There is no spent nuclear fuel there, I trust, but you might find things that no longer serve any useful purpose and could potentially do harm, or might add to the damage in a disaster or other upheaval.

Look for the obvious risky materials: pesticides and other poisons, aging lead-acid batteries and other heavy metals, solvents and other flammable liquids. But also consider smaller and less obvious risks: journals that you wouldn’t want people to read, costumes or furnishings that are no longer consistent with your personal style, glass items that might shatter eventually from the heating and cooling that happens in an attic, or from an earthquake. Most of all, look for things that, realistically, you are never going to use again. Those aren’t really worth keeping around even if they don’t seem to present any significant risk. Risks are evaluated by weighing them against the likely reward, so when there is no reward, even a tiny risk is not justified.

You can’t really prepare for a disaster, but you can reduce your risks, and one of the simplest ways you can do so is by taking unneeded and potentially harmful things away.

A Comfortable Workspace

2011-03-08T15:50:00.000-05:00

Your space should make you feel comfortable — and your workspace should make you feel good about working.

This is the subject of the latest post from Paul Nordquist, “Make yourself comfortable.” Paul is writing for songwriters, but the same ideas matter for everyone. Fix the hassles and obstacles that get in your way when you try to do the things you want to do, and you’ll end up getting more of the results you want.

Dealing With Your “Stuff,” Without Making It Incredibly Complicated

2011-02-13T10:19:00.002-05:00

Many people feel overwhelmed on a regular basis. It’s a familiar pattern all of us have seen and most have experienced at least once. Unfortunately, when people try to address overwhelm, they often talk about it as if they’re stumbling around in the dark, as if there isn’t a simple, obvious way to get a handle on the situation — as if it’s the most complicated thing in the world. Then, just addressing the overwhelm can be overwhelming. This is what makes people exclaim, “I can’t deal with it!” It is the reason why escape is so many people’s main strategy for coping with life. Fortunately, overwhelm isn’t really this complicated.

A few days ago I received a promotional message from a researcher who knows something about lifestyle. The message is all about this pattern of overwhelm. I want to share the key point of his advice for someone who feels overwhelmed:

I KNOW (and this is from personal experience and trial and error), that the answer is to deal with your STUFF, your BAGGAGE, your HISTORY . . .

This is good advice, if you take it at face value. But unfortunately, the writer doesn’t mean any of it literally.

When he says “stuff,” he doesn’t actually mean “stuff.” As he goes on to explain,

by “stuff”, I mean all the unresolved emotions, hurts, limiting beliefs, physical pain, and so forth . . .

Similarly, by “baggage,” he doesn’t mean your actual baggage. By “history,” he doesn’t mean the things hanging around from your past that aren’t relevant to your life today.

Rather, he’s using all these words as a metaphor for your thoughts — specifically, for the thoughts about past experiences that get you to worry about the future instead of focusing on what you can do in the present.

Of course, this metaphor isn’t anything new. Lots of people say “stuff” to refer to the stories that can be found behind negative emotions. And there is some validity in this way of looking at life. After all, the whole premise of psychotherapy is that you can feel better and become more effective in life by changing the meaning of experiences from your past. Psychotherapy may have a spotty track record, but there is no denying that it has had its success stories.

The reason I protest is that it isn’t necessary to jump immediately to the abstract side of things. Overwhelm, when you experience it, is a real, present problem, so to deal with it, do you have to immediately go off looking for something so abstract, so complex, so distant that it can be described only using metaphors?

It’s really not the right place to start. Instead, why not deal with the literal “stuff” that makes you feel overwhelmed?

Start, that is, with the material possessions that surround you. Look specifically at the ones that don’t have to be there because you don’t actually use them. Most people find that it’s impossible to feel overwhelmed unless there are a large number of material things around them to anchor that feeling. Reduce the material possessions, and you take away the feeling of overwhelm. The average American uses about 10 percent of their personal possessions — yes, that’s the average — so you can reduce your material possessions by quite a lot without giving up anything you actually do.

One of the quickest ways to feel less overwhelmed is to throw away a couple of projects that, realistically, you will never get to. Better yet, if you can, give the materials to someone who would do something constructive with them.

If you feel like you’re carrying too much “baggage,” start by looking at what you actually carry with you. If you’re carrying bags, what’s in those bags? If you drive around with stuff in your car, how much of that do you need to have with you everywhere you drive? Do you really need to carry all those keys in your key chain or all those cards in your wallet?

If it’s your history that bothers you, a good place to start might be the old stuff in the attic that you maybe shouldn’t be keeping because it doesn’t feel good when you look at it.

You will probably come around to dealing with the abstractions, such as the feelings you have about the past, but that is easier to do when the material things are taken care of.

Let go of the material things that tie you to the past, and you may find that you are letting go of the feelings that go with them at the same time. But even when you don’t get that instant feeling of relief, the hurts and confusion of the past tend to fade away when there isn’t any material object in your life for them to attach to.

The figurative “stuff” that people deal with can be important, but don’t make it so important that you forget to deal with the literal “stuff” of your life — your material possessions. This is especially important if you’re feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelm might feel complicated, but addressing it doesn’t have to be.

Dwight Twilley on What to Do When You’re Snowed In

2011-02-10T16:48:00.001-05:00

One of my musical heroes, Dwight Twilley, is taking the current extreme weather in stride, based on his last two tweets:

Tulsa Oklahoma has had more Snow this Winter than History has ever recorded!

Snowed in and locked in the Recording Studio. Album "Soundtrack" is shaping up nicely. Stay warm!!!

Instead of spending his time fretting about the worst winter weather his town has ever seen, Dwight is taking the opportunity to focus on the new album he is recording. This is, of course, what his fans would hope he would do.

You wouldn’t plan your work around the idea of being snowed in — I hope not, anyway — but when the weather keeps you in, it just makes sense to focus on the work at hand. When I was snowed in a week ago, it gave me a chance to convert one of my old books to a current file format so that I can begin updating it. That was a tedious task, but it became easier to focus on just because there was nowhere else I could go, and now, I am that much closer to releasing an updated edition of my book.

Every moment presents some kind of opportunity, even when the weather or some other circumstance takes away what you wanted to be doing. When that happens, take a few minutes, if necessary, to bemoan the things you can’t do — but then turn your attention to the things you can do.

Erasing a Web Site From Your Personal History

2011-02-09T09:55:00.001-05:00

Erasing your personal history is a well-known shamanic technique that can help you change your habits and get a new perspective on life. Erasing a web site from your browsing history is a simple exercise you can do that will show you how this works.

But first, what is your browsing history? Popular web browsers remember the pages you’ve visited in case you want to go back. If you start to type a web address, the browser will suggest web sites you might be thinking of, based on the web sites you have visited in the past. This is meant as a shortcut. By selecting a web site from the list that pops up, you can save some typing.

This shortcut, though, has its dark side. The browser often suggests the site you want, but it also lists sites that you don’t want to visit, that you don’t even want to think about. It will suggest sites you used to visit regularly, but that aren’t what they used to be, or that no longer interest you because you’ve changed. It will suggest sites that you know would be a big waste of time. It may even suggest sites that you have visited only by mistake.

You see what a problem this can be as soon as you try to change your browsing habits. It can seem as if the browser is resisting the change, trying to get you to stay in the same old pattern, suggesting that you go back to your old ways. If you ignore the browser’s suggestion of a web site for long enough, it will no long come up so often — but there is a faster way to change the web site suggestions your browser makes.

You can tell the browser to stop suggesting specific web sites — to forget that you ever visited that site. You can literally erase the web site from your browsing history.

In Firefox, you can delete an entire web site from your history in about 20 seconds. Find a page from the site in your browsing history. Then right-click or control-click it, and select “Forget About This Site” from the popup menu. The browser erases the site from its records. Mozilla provides a help page with more complete instructions.

After you erase a web site from your history, you can type new web addresses without fear that the browser will distract you with that old site that you no longer visit. This might seem like too small a detail to matter, but if you try it once, with the site that bothers you the most, you’ll find that it does matter. It will seem as if the world just got a little bit simpler. You’ll breathe a little bit easier.

That, in general, is what erasing personal history is about. You make the past stop intruding on what you’re trying to do now. Then you can be more conscious in your actions, make better decisions, and get results faster, with less resistance.

If you wish, take five minutes and go through your browsing history, erasing sites you wouldn’t want to go back to. While you’re at it, also delete sites or pages that might reflect poorly on you, or that you wouldn’t want the people around you to be thinking about. But don’t take too much time on the details of this — if your browsing history contains a lot of bad news, you can erase whole time periods at once.

Don’t Put Off Taking Action, Change Direction Instead

2011-01-02T14:39:00.000-05:00

If you made new year’s resolutions on New Year’s Day and haven’t yet started on them, a day later, it may be that you picked the wrong thing to change. The same consideration applies any time you take on a goal, and a day or more goes by with no action toward the goal itself. It makes sense to look at the obstacles that are getting in your way and pick one of those as the focal point of your efforts.

If you didn’t start on your new year’s resolution because you were tired and didn’t feel like it, make it your goal to improve your health so that you have more energy to put into your goals. You might do this, for example, by exercising, eating better food, meditation, breathing, and visualization.
If there was too much going on for you to focus on the goal you chose, choose instead to improve your mental focus so that you are not so easily distracted from the things you want to do. Meditation, breathing, and visualization can help with this also, as can removing clutter from your immediate surroundings and reducing the demands of your daily routine.
If you don’t have enough money to tackle your new year’s resolution effectively, then take on the goal of increasing your income or becoming more conscious about your spending.
If a goal seems meaningless when you look at it just one day later, you may need to build momentum by working on and completing much smaller goals, one after another.

Don’t think of obstacles as points of failure, but as guideposts. Whatever obstacles you might have encountered, they point you toward the most immediate improvements that you can make in your life. Pick just one obstacle, the one that seems the most important or the one that you are most eager to address right now, and make solving that particular problem your new year’s resolution. Addressing the obstacles that come up immediately when you take on a goal will help you not just with that one goal, but with all the goals you might take on later.

Whatever you do, don’t put off taking action just because you’ve come upon an obstacle. Change direction if you must, but get going — and keep going.

Action, Not Lists

2011-01-01T17:22:00.000-05:00

Today is New Year’s Day, the energy of a fresh start is in the air . . . and people are writing lists of new and different things they want to do this year.

Now, I like lists, but there is a problem with lists of things to do that refer to an extended period of time, such as a year or a month. These lists tend to sit around, untended, for days at a time — and while they’re waiting, the energy drains out of them. People come back to these lists after a few days and don’t find any of the New Year’s Day feeling in them.

If you want to write a list for the new year, I can suggest a more successful kind of list. Write a list of things you will do today, or, if it’s late in the day, a list for tomorrow. Better yet, actually take action right now on the things you want to do this year, and write them on your list only after you’ve taken some kind of substantial action on them. That way, instead of just a wish list, you are writing a list that has some momentum behind it. But even then, write down only the things you will be doing in the next day or so.

After all, if you cannot take action today, on a holiday when much of the routine of daily life pulls back to give you a chance to do something new, when will you be able to take action? What day will be better than today? Will you actually have more time on an average Monday morning? In the words of the famous question: If not now, when? And so, if you cannot take action on your plans for the new year today, it is probably better to drop those plans, rather than carry them along through the year pretending that some day you will do something.

I do realize that there are other reasons why people find it easy to imagine a “new year new life” on New Year’s Day, but not so easy to get started on it right away. I will address a few of those tomorrow.

What It Means to Go Too Far

2010-12-18T11:45:00.000-05:00

If you have too many possessions or too many things to do, you know how easy it is to go too far. In principle, possessions and things to do are good to have, but you can end up with too many of them without knowing where they all came from. In the Shamanic Economist blog today, I write about what it means to go too far:

Going Too Far: Getting Past Minimizing and Maximizing

This idea applies especially in the area of personal possessions. Before the industrial age, when material possessions were rare and hard to come by, it was good to have as many material possessions as you could obtain. If many people have too many possessions now, it is because this is not such an easy pattern to break, even though, in a mass-production world, it no longer makes sense as a strategy.

If it is easy to go too far in gathering material possessions, it is also possible to go too far in removing them. You know you’ve gone too far in decluttering if you discover that you threw away several things yesterday that you need to have tomorrow. This is one of the reasons why I recommend a step-by-step, incremental approach to decluttering, not an all-out attack. Take away the 10 percent of your possessions that you are least likely to use or enjoy — or even 1 percent. Then you can repeat this five days later. Soon enough, you’ll have the possessions you actually use, and not too much more.

There is another area where people commonly go too far in decluttering that I must mention, and that is putting too much effort into maintaining the value of the possessions you no longer want. If it takes three hours to clean and give away a toaster oven, that is probably too much effort for the value it creates — unless, of course, the person who receives it is in desperate need of it. Similarly, if it takes weeks to sell a car for $350, that too is probably a disproportionate effort, if you could instead drive the car to a scrapyard and get $40 for it. As another example, having materials recycled may be a waste of fuel and time if you have to drive the materials to another county or ship them across the country to accomplish that. If you have many other things to do, then you often have to take the quick way out, and throw things away.

New Proof of the Power of Sleep

2010-12-15T10:10:00.000-05:00

We have all observed that people look better after a full night of sleep. Now a research team has measured this scientifically. At BBC News: Beauty sleep concept is not a myth, says study.

The idea of people needing “beauty sleep” has acquired some scientific backing, according to a Swedish study. . . .

The authors wrote in their paper published in the British Medical Journal: “Sleep deprived people are perceived as less attractive, less healthy and more tired compared with when they are well rested.”

People under time pressure often imagine they can create more time for themselves by staying up late or getting up early. This may work to a slight extent or to get through a crisis situation, but when people try to do it as a lifestyle, the costs of a shorter night quickly overwhelm the gains of a longer day. From Fear of Nothing:

Moderate sleep deficit is known to cause irritability, diminished alertness, bad test scores, weight gain, and accidents. Increasing levels of sleep deprivation lead to impaired judgement, emotional instability, paranoid thoughts, hallucinations, and falling asleep involuntarily.

And sleep loss isn’t pretty, either. When it seems as if you always have too much to do, the right approach is not to cut back on sleep, but on the to-do list.

The Hassles of Law of Attraction

2010-11-30T20:06:00.000-05:00

If you’ve heard anything about Law of Attraction, you’ve surely heard that what you focus on matters. You tend to get results you intend in the areas that you focus on. The areas you forget about, you tend to neglect, and your results are those of entropy rather than intention.

It is not just a matter of focus. Emotion matters also. When you feel strongly about something, it lends clarity and intensity to your thoughts, and this gives the thoughts more power. Thus, The Secret advises, “Feel good,” and Tony Robbins, “Live with passion.”

Clarity and intensity are useful in creating a state of energetic focus called coherence. Repetition also adds to coherence. Highly coherent thoughts are more likely to inform the decisions you make. Highly coherent thoughts also have a greater ability to influence quantum events, according to researchers.

If Law of Attraction does not work well for most people, it is because most people do not have this kind of high degree of coherence in their thoughts very much of the time, and when they do, the thoughts are not related to anything they want.

Think about it this way. What events in life pop up with emotional intensity, clarity of thought, and frequent repetition? These are, more often than not, the hassles of everyday life, the moments that make us say, “Oh, no, not this again.” At the highest level of coherence, these hassles create what I call, if you will pardon the expression, our “Oh, shit” moments. It is the rare person whose dreams and lofty ambitions occur with the kind of undeniable clarity that seems to occur automatically in those moments of sudden realization that make us say, “Oh, shit.”

To offer a mundane example, I had one of these moments on Friday when I arrived at the post office only to realize that the package I needed to mail was not along with me. In a flash, I knew that my last several minutes of effort had gone to waste.

Ultimately, we want to try to create that same kind of clarity of thought for the things we dream about and work toward. At first, though, it may be just as useful to reduce the hassles in our lives. According to the way this is described in discussions of Law of Attraction, this focus on hassles creates more hassles. Hassles can take on a kind of momentum in your life. Whatever you can do to reduce the hold that hassles have on you gives you more time to focus on positive things and constructive actions.

The book Fear of Nothing focuses on clutter and to-do lists because those are two of the most universal and unavoidable forms that hassles can take. Clutter is there for you to see every time you walk in the door or get up from the television. The to-do list confronts you every time you ask, “What do I need to do now?” Reduce clutter by getting rid of possessions you aren’t so likely to use, and shrink the to-do list by striking off tasks that, realistically, you will never get to. Also take a look at the hassles that occur the most often in your life or that cause you the most aggravation. Realize that hassles are not an unavoidable feature of life. Perhaps every one of the hassles you face has a solution. If the situation itself cannot easily be avoided, perhaps you can find a way to approach it with less emotional intensity.

Law of Attraction won’t do anything for you when your highly coherent thoughts are the ones that say, “Oh, no, not this again.” If you live a life that is full of hassles, it is accurate to say that Law of Attraction “doesn’t work.” Reduce the influence of hassles in your life, and you may then start to find that Law of Attraction “does work.”

Gratitude for Desperados

2010-11-18T19:06:00.002-05:00

In concerts this year, the Eagles are playing “Desperado” as their final song. It seems fitting. The song’s warning about the perils of seeking peace of mind in material things comes at a time when a lot of people are struggling, working harder than ideally they should, to control their material surroundings.

Where does this struggle come from? The song explains it this way: “Now it seems to me some fine things have been laid upon your table, but you only want the ones that you can’t get.” If you focus on what you could have while forgetting what you do have, it can make life difficult.

This happens in the most mundane sense when we go shopping for things we’ve forgotten we already have. It’s hard to stop and take a good look at everything we have because it’s a reminder of how much we haven’t done. But if we get to the point of forgetting what we have, we lose all the benefit of having it.

The Thanksgiving holiday is coming up in the United States, and it suggests a solution to this problem. Start by getting yourself in a thankful state of mind. Feel grateful, or as grateful as you can manage, to have the things you have. Then, in that state of mind, go looking through the things, preparing to rediscover things that are of value to you.

To be sure, you’ll also find a lot of things that are no longer relevant to your life. But if you’re feeling the emotion of gratitude, you won’t get bogged down in the clutter. You can focus more on the valuable things you have, which are the more important possessions to remind yourself of. Knowing what you have is an important first step toward getting life under control.

Later, when you’re feeling more like a desperado again, fed up with the struggle and complexity of life, it may be a good time to circle back and haul away the junk that you saw in between the valuable stuff. In that moment, in one of the ironies of emotion, the previous experience of viewing your possessions with gratitude makes it easier to let go, even as the current feeling of frustration, exasperation, or desperation makes it easier to take action.

Patience in a World of Illusion

2010-10-22T16:18:00.006-04:00

Progress doesn’t always come in neat, straight lines. It can be messy and look like a mistake when you come across it, but it doesn’t have to be criticized just because it hasn’t yet come together in a way that makes sense on the surface.

This is one of the threads that runs through the book Walking Through Illusion by Betsy Otter Thompson. This book imagines Jesus almost in the role of a self-improvement coach telling the life stories of the people around him. In every story, there is always something out of place or happening out of sequence. It seems easy to point to where the problem is — indeed, they are all familiar, everyday problems on the surface — but in each case, Walking Through Illusion suggests a gentler, less stressful way of looking at it.

Imagine, for example, a person who claims to know all about something and talks about it at length, but turns out to have no actual personal experience in the subject. A phony expert, you might say. Your view of the situation may be even more harsh if you are the person behaving this way, and constantly afraid of being found out. Yet, it could just be a case of rhetoric preceding reality. People are drawn to a subject or specialty because their heart calls them to it, but at the same time, fear may hold them back. This is part of the story of Mark in Walking Through Illusion. For years, he had talked about the importance of horsemanship, and he spoke so convincingly about it no one realized he had never ridden even a mule.

Then he was a preacher without any mastery. To become a master, he had to stop talking as if he were an expert and get on a horse to become one. After he’d conquered this challenge, he thought he’d lived a miracle since judgment about it had tyrannized him for years.

The mastering technique was the same regardless of the mastery and involved the following principle: if you think up an idea, it exists. If you live an idea, it’s yours.

We usually talk about “seeing through” an illusion, but there is more to be learned by seeing the illusions of life from the inside, as part of the action of life. Doing so takes patience, of course, but this same patience is the key to unraveling the painful situations we find ourselves in. This is a process illustrated in one story after another in Walking Through Illusion.

Work and Resentment, or How to Manifest a Million Dollars

2010-10-16T10:30:00.002-04:00

Most people feel some degree of resentment about the work they have to do. This is an emotional pattern that not only affects the way people approach work, but also their approach to money, to-do lists, and clutter.

How to Manifest a Million Dollars

Manifesting can be a powerful concept, but when you present it to people, it becomes a caricature almost immediately. In the United States, ask people what they would like to manifest, and the most common answer, almost a consensus, is “I want to manifest a million dollars.”

There is a hidden problem embedded in this formulation. The problem becomes obvious as soon as you replace the word “manifest” with its synonym, “make.” Then you’re saying, “I want to make a million dollars.” You immediately remember that there are hundreds of well-known ways to make a million dollars. If you haven’t done any of them, the reason is that they require work. When people say, “I want to manifest a million dollars,” what they’re really saying is, “I want to make a million dollars, but I don’t want to have to work.” The greater challenge in this in not the million dollars, but the part about not working.

Not working means a deprivation of working, or a lack of work, and manifesting techniques, at least the ones that people hear about, won’t create deprivation. Use them one way, and they’ll create work for you to do. Use them another way, and they won’t create work for you to do. But there isn’t a way to apply the manifesting techniques to create an absence of work.

Apply the manifesting techniques well, with a high degree of skill, and they’ll present lots of ways for you to make a million dollars. If you’re stuck trying to manifest a million dollars, it’s likely because you’re overlooking these results, not even noticing them, simply because of the amount of work that they require. It might even be effortless work, but if you have to do a particular thing for people to give you money, then it’s going to look like work, and it’s going to bring up whatever emotional resistance you have on the subject of work.

Resistance and Resentment

Resistance doesn’t mean avoiding something. The people who resist work the most end up working the hardest, which of course, makes them resist work even more. It’s a vicious cycle that can only be broken by changing the emotions that keep the cycle going.

Resistance is an easy subject to examine because it’s one of the staples of pop psychology. Wayne Dyer’s first bestselling book, Your Erroneous Zones, examined resistance with the questions:

What is your pattern of inaction, or failure to take action where it is needed?
What are the neurotic payoffs you get as a result of your pattern of inaction?
What thoughts do you have that lead to the payoffs?
What thoughts could you use instead?

Applying the first question in the list to the issue at hand, there are several patterns that come up, which may involve doubt, fear, fatigue, confusion, and other emotions. The overwhelming emotion connected to work, though, the one that everyone seems to have at some point, is resentment. It’s the emotion related to why me thoughts: Why do I have to work all the time? Why do people expect so much from me? Why do people hold my work to such high standards? Why do I always have to clean up after other people’s mistakes?

You may have three to five automatic thoughts along these lines that get repeated every day, whenever you’re working on anything. Listen for them echoing around your head whenever work gets unreasonably difficult — or do so right now as you imagine how much work it would take for you to make a million dollars, or whatever financial benchmark you imagine for yourself. For example, if you are selling pies for $18 each, you can make one million dollars (in revenue) by making and selling 55,555 pies. Or, if you are a writer getting paid 4¢ a word, you can make one million dollars by writing 25 million words. Doesn’t that seem like a lot of work? What do you think? As you think about these work scenarios, or any other money-manifesting scenario you care to imagine, can you hear any familiar, automatic thoughts?

Using the pop-psychology version of psychoanalysis, it’s easy to imagine how this pattern of resenting work could have been created. It’s virtually guaranteed that at some point early in your life or career, when you were 5, 10, 15, or 20 years old, someone gave you a difficult or even impossible task to do just to get rid of you for a few hours. When I was young, I remember being sent to clean a piano without any tools, supplies, or techniques. There was no feather duster or furniture polish or anything else that would have served to remove the dust from the ornate scrollwork and other crevices that were part of the design of this particular piano. I worked on the piano with everything I could think of, and I did take away most of the dust, but when I gave up in frustration after two hours, the piano was still covered in dust. Of course, no one seriously expected me to get the dust off of the piano. They gave me that task on that particular day because they knew it was something I wouldn’t be able to do.

Everyone has had experiences along these lines. It’s rational to feel resentment under these circumstances. It’s not rational, and not constructive, to take an experience like that and apply it to all the work that comes your way. But it’s natural enough to do exactly that.

Erasing Resentment

Once you identify the automatic thoughts that create the emotion of resentment around work (or any other subject), it is easy enough to answer them or replace them with rational thoughts. You can choose thoughts that redirect your emotions and energies in a more productive direction, one that doesn’t create so much resistance. These more constructive thoughts might include:

Work is taking action, and taking action is the purpose of life. People expect a lot from me because they can see I have it in me. The world is lucky to have my skills and energy available, because there are problems I can solve that most people can’t. Taking action, in the form of work, is an opportunity for me to express my true nature. I may be remembered for the work I did, but no one will remember the work I didn’t do. It’s only natural if people appreciate what I do and want to give me money.

Just thinking different thoughts such as these for a minute can create a noticeable change in the way you feel about work. If you condition these thoughts over a period of at least five days, using conditioning techniques, you can change your whole attitude about work.

That’s not to say that this will happen quickly or automatically. I’ve presented this problem and solution in a quick, superficial way, without covering the specific techniques that may be required. If you are familiar with the techniques for changing your patterns of thinking, you can go ahead and apply those techniques to this subject. If not, there are a wide range of techniques that you can discover, for example, in the self-improvement section of any bookstore.

After you take away the resentment surrounding work, you are likely to discover other emotions, such as fear and doubt, that hold you back and keep you from doing the work that would move your life forward. You may also simply have bad habits. Perhaps you try to work at a pace that is physically too fast for you, then get fatigued, and in a state a fatigue, make poor decisions. Whatever the pattern is, you can discover it and address it in a similar way.

Resistance Is Not Laziness or Procrastination

Many people think resistance is a sign or aspect of laziness or procrastination, but in fact, the common forms of emotional resistance are not related to laziness or procrastination. Everyone is lazy sometimes and procrastinates sometimes, but as life problems, laziness and procrastination are really quite rare. If you find some tasks easy to do, but other tasks that require a similar scale of physical effort are hard, that is nothing to do with laziness. Laziness is not selective in this manner. When you are lazy, everything that involves getting up and moving seems about equally hard. On the other hand, if you chronically have trouble getting enough work done to keep your life moving, you can’t just dismiss that as laziness. You have to find out what the real issue is.

Similarly, it’s common to come upon something you want to do and put it off till later in the day, or till tomorrow. That might very well reflect a pattern of procrastination. But if there are many things you want to do that you have been putting off not for a day or two, but for weeks, that is not merely procrastination, and again, you have to find out what the real issue is so you can address it. Often, the real issue is a form of resistance. If the subject is work, then there is good chance that the real issue involves resentment, rather than laziness or procrastination.

The Resistance in To-Do Lists and Clutter

Part of the reason people have to-do lists is because of the emotional resistance to work. Part of the way this works is obvious: people write tasks on to-do lists instead of taking action immediately. Later, people leave tasks on the to-do list instead of completing them, and to-do lists grow longer. Similarly, stuff piles up because you are resisting the work you planned to do with it. You can end up with a long to-do list and cluttered material surroundings. The clutter and to-do list can then embody your resentment about work, so that you are literally surrounded by your resentment in physical form. This part of the pattern is not so easy to discover and overcome.

The book Fear of Nothing provides a series of actions to overcome the clutter and to-do list, but as you apply that approach, you may find that the same resentment that created the to-do list and clutter also slows you down when you go to clean them up. It’s just your own to-do list and your own clutter, which you created out of your own decisions, but you find that you face the same general resentment of work when you confront the effort that will be required to get your stuff in order.

This is especially likely if you have just been through a full day of work that you already resented. You spend eight hours or longer correcting other people’s problems that they shouldn’t have created in the first place, then maybe you make supper for people who don’t appreciate it because they’re wrapped up in their own problems, and you walk the dog even though it wasn’t your idea to have a dog, and now it’s 10:30 and you have one hour you can do something with before you have to go to bed. Whether you will seize the moment and move your life forward or waste away the hour on trivialities depends a great deal on the emotions you bring in that moment.

The primary emotion that creates clutter and to-do lists is not resentment, but fear, as I describe in the early chapters of Fear of Nothing. You can address the fear by addressing the clutter. However, if resentment is also an obstacle, you may find that you make faster progress after addressing the resentment surrounding work, even if you can shift it in only a small way at first. If you can just shift the pattern of thoughts and feelings you experience at 10:30 p.m. from I shouldn’t have to do all this work to I shouldn’t have to do all this work, but this is my moment, my chance to do something for myself, there is a much better chance that you’ll use that hour constructively. One hour may not seem like much, but one hour a day is more time than most people give themselves, and it is enough time to turn the circumstances of your life upside down in less than a year.

Associations Between Money and Work

I need to circle back to the challenge of manifesting a million dollars, because there is another psychological trick, or obstacle, involved in that. In studies, people associate money with work so strongly that as soon as they are being paid, what they are doing becomes “work.” Then they enjoy it less, put in less effort, and produce smaller results. As long as this is your pattern, there is nothing you can do to “manifest” a million dollars. You will start to resist any activity that brings in money long before the millionth dollar comes in, regardless of how easy and effortless the activity actually is. Therefore, before you can attempt to manifest a million dollars, or any form of financial prosperity that involves money, you may need to change your ideas about money and work.

One common association between money and work is the thought When I am paid for my work, I make sure I put in the minimum effort necessary to get by. You might change this to Whatever I am doing, I do it in the way that provides the strongest expression of who I am and what I can do. You might also adopt thoughts along these lines: Being paid for something is a sign that I am doing it well, not a sign that I have to start worrying about how well I am doing. I do the things I do because they are things I do well, and the money follows naturally. I don’t need to minimize my efforts so that I can conserve my energy all day long — instead, I want to use my energy in the best ways I can find over the course of the day, so that I get all the physical exercise I need, and when I go to bed, I am tired from the day’s activities, and I fall asleep easily and sleep well.

Whatever you want to accomplish, if you have this pattern of resentment and emotional resistance to work, it will slow you down. This is an emotional pattern that is easy to develop and hard to avoid, but if you become aware of it, you can address it and change it. Then, work is easier to do, and it becomes something you can enjoy. You can experience whatever work you decide to do as going smoothly and easily, without that resistance to slow you down.

Levi’s Studies the Costs of Owning Jeans

2010-10-08T10:10:00.001-04:00

Most of the costs of owning things come after you purchase them. In Fear of Nothing and the Clutter Calculator I emphasize the cost of the space taken up by the possessions you keep because this is the simplest cost to look at. For many items, though, the greatest cost is the cost of cleaning. This is true, for example, of clothing that you wear regularly, such as socks, underwear, and especially, blue jeans.

Levi’s did a product life cycle study of their blue jeans and found that, on average, most of the energy use of blue jeans happens at home, which basically means, in the laundry.

Our life cycle assessment helped us find out the facts about the climate change, water use and energy impact of each of these products.

To our surprise we learned that 58% of the energy and 45% of the water used during the lifetime of a pair of Levi’s ® jeans occurs during the consumer use phase.

The same general conclusion would apply to other jeans. What is more, if you use your jeans more heavily than the average, these percents are higher. They could easily be 90 percent if you wear jeans till they start to shred.

Levi’s is continuing to study this issue, in particular to find the best way to air-dry jeans after washing them. In the meantime, though, it has issued this simplified guidance for reducing the energy impact of jeans (which largely includes the climate impact): “Wash in cold, line dry when possible and donate used clothes to Goodwill®.” You may also be able to reduce your costs and energy impact by:

Washing less often. Clothes typically take more wear from being washed once than from being worn for one day. (That’s if your activities for the day are more like driving a car and reading blogs than pruning peach trees or repairing your car.) You can make jeans last more than twice as long by washing them only when they need it, compared to automatically washing after every day of wear. At the same time, you reduce the energy cost of wearing the jeans by more than half.
Waiting longer before replacing. If you wash jeans less often, remember also to buy them less often. If your jeans lasted 1 1/2 years, they may last 3 1/2 years with less frequent washing, so reduce your frequency of purchases accordingly.
Buying used. If people are donating perfectly good clothing to Goodwill and other thrift shops, it stands to reason that people are also buying perfectly good clothing at thrift shops. If you have a bit of style flexibility and can spend some extra shopping time, you can pay 80 percent less for standard clothing items like jeans and sweatshirts. This is not just a matter of saving money. By buying a used item, you eliminate the energy impact that would have gone into manufacturing a new item.
Recycling. When clothing needs more than a minute of mending, it’s typically thrown away, but there ought to be a use for the fabric. Levi’s made a point about the potential for recycling clothing by donating 200,000 recycled jeans to the California Academy of Sciences for use in insulation. It used similar insulation in its own headquarters when it was rebuilt this year. Cotton insulation has sound absorption properties that other forms of insulation don’t have, so I hope this kind of recycling can become more common.

The world is starting to recognize that the cost of owning a consumer product can be greater than the cost of manufacturing it. Sometimes this information comes from careful scientific studies, such as the one that Levi’s commissioned. With a better awareness of the costs, people will be able to make better decisions about what to buy and how long to keep it.

The Exterminator Appointment

2010-10-01T14:29:00.000-04:00

There were bugs hiding somewhere in the house. An appointment was made with an exterminator. And then they called me.

“You’ll want to be out of the house for about five hours after the exterminator is there,” I said. “And you can’t have any piles of anything on the floor. That would keep the insecticides from working — they wouldn’t reach the floor. It would give the bugs a place to hide.” A minute later, I was saying, “You’re going to need my help.”

That’s how I came to spend most of the last two days helping get a house ready for an exterminator. There was nothing glamorous about the work. I was laundering bedding and clothes. Putting things in boxes. Carrying out trash bags. You get the idea.

It mostly wasn’t my task to throw things away, but I saw that just the thought of hidden insect larvae made those decisions easier. The “sentimental value” of a bed cover that grandma made doesn’t cancel out even a small amount of “ick.” The floors were cleared, and the house was transformed in time for the exterminator appointment. Today, everyone is recovering from sore muscles.

Every house will eventually find itself with insects or small mammals, and anywhere stuff is stored away in an attic, basement, or closet, there is a chance that this has already occurred. This point was brought home yesterday when I discovered large amounts of rat droppings in a pile of boxes and bags where Christmas decorations had been sitting for ages. On further inspection, there was no mistaking it: a rat colony had occupied that corner of the house for an extended period of time about 15 years ago. We were cleaning up because of bugs, but there had been rats too, another problem just as serious that had come and gone, undetected.

That wasn’t bad luck — that’s the kind of thing that happens when you store stuff away. You don’t have to wait till you suspect a problem. Pick any day, and go through things that have been stored for more than two or three years, and there is a high chance that you’ll find signs of small animal activity. If you find only dust, you can sweep the dust away and count yourself lucky — but check again before too much time goes by.

Of course, it’s better not to store things away if there isn’t a very good reason for it. It’s the idea that you’re preserving the value of things that makes you put them in a box and keep them, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes, in the end, you’re just creating more work for an exterminator.

The Changing Nature of Work, and Home

2010-08-30T14:04:00.000-04:00

In his 2001 book The Future of Success, Robert Reich devotes most of a chapter to reasons why work is taking over our lives. If our financial fortunes have declined, we may have to choose between working longer hours and reducing our standard of living. Or, if we are prized, highly paid workers, the financial rewards for working more are higher than they ever been. In the meantime, for all workers, the sense of certainty about future income is less than it was a generation ago. If you have a job now, you might not have one at the end of the year. Or, if you have highly marketable skills, those skills might fade or become less important or less distinctive in just a few years. You have to make money while you can. Even if you are making plenty of money, you might have to maintain a fast pace of work just to keep your career on the fast track or keep up with your field.

At the same time, communication devices and channels make it easy for work to spill out of its usual place and time slot. Phone calls and e-mail go with you, if you choose, and you might very well choose to stay connected in order to not miss a chance to do some work, knowing how uncertain the future is.

I experienced most of these effects myself this year, spending most of my waking hours on a rewrite of a book — that effort in addition to a full-time work schedule during a significant part of that time. The book I was working on was a computer book that had not been updated in 13 years, almost forever in computer terms, so it was almost like writing a new book. Once I committed to completing the new edition, I wanted to set everything else aside, or as much as I could, and finish the book, to remove the financial uncertainty (and, yes, the emotional suspense) that goes with having a large project that’s not yet complete and not yet making any money. Of course, I wanted to deliver the book before I would have to update it again. I wanted to keep up my reputation as an author in this field, and that’s a reputation that could fade in just a few years if my books aren’t kept up to date. At the same time, I wanted to avoid the lifestyle compromises I might have to face if I couldn’t make up some of the income I’m not receiving in my banking work during that industry’s ongoing decline. The notepad app on my mobile phone made it possible for me to keep at my writing project even when I found myself at inconvenient places — the afternoon when I was waiting in line for a driver’s license photo, for example. This means that most of the effects from Reich’s book that drive people to work long hours applied to me this year.

As you can imagine, whole areas of my life just fell away. When I emerged from this large-scale work effort a few days ago and took a new look at my possessions — somewhat scattered about my house, because I hadn’t taken the usual time to keep them organized — they didn’t look nearly as relevant to my life as they had seven months earlier.

I had already noticed that I wasn’t wearing all the clothing I owned. During my seven-month book-writing spree, I wore the same 30 or so things over and over again. If the rest of my clothing had disappeared, it almost wouldn’t have mattered.

This change in perspective makes it easier to throw away things that, last year, I was still holding on to. Yesterday I discovered my boxes of blank audio cassettes and said, “What on Earth was I saving these for?” Of course, that’s easier to say now that audio cassettes are one year farther out of style, but the important thing is that I’m bringing a new perspective to my stuff, and aligning it more accurately with what I’m likely to be doing.

I know people who have gone all-out in their careers for a few years at a time. When you are working 11 hours a day, you can get by with surprisingly few possessions, and surprisingly little in the way of a home. It makes a certain kind of sense, if you’re going into that pattern for an extended period of time, to pretty much stop buying stuff, and postpone the process of setting up a home until you have time to actually do it.

Reich, in his book, has a chapter about what the expansion of work is doing to families. The biggest change he points to is that married couples are having fewer children. Looking at the houses some of them live in, you can see a related change there, with more houses that go unoccupied for most of the day. If work expands, personal possessions become less important, and home is no longer much of a gathering place. It’s no surprise that people are starting to cut back on the stuff they keep, and often, on the size of their homes.

The McMansion Is Dead

2010-08-19T23:33:00.000-04:00

The McMansion is dead.

It doesn’t mean very much if I say that, but this is a CNBC writer saying it: “Death of the ‘McMansion’: Era of Huge Homes Is Over.” CNBC was right at the heart of the culture of financial excess that gave rise to so many oversized, poorly designed, often poorly constructed houses all over the United States and elsewhere, so when they say that trend is over, it means something.

In barely three years, home buyers’ preference for ideal home size has fallen from a median over 3,000 square feet to perhaps 2,500 square feet. Instead of angling for the biggest house they can get, the latest trend is buyers looking for houses that are environmentally friendly or energy-efficient.

This is also a sign that the age of stuff is winding down. It is too much to ask a family of four to legitimately fill up a 4,000 square foot house. If the closets are filled, it’s with clothes that their owners no longer wear. Maybe a use can be assigned to each of the rooms, but the list would inevitably include a few rooms that no one ever looks at.

For years, people looked for a house big enough to hold all their stuff, including a lot of stuff that really didn’t matter. But now people are realizing that more space is not the ultimate solution to stuff. Having stuff you never use weakens your focus and sense of purpose in life even if you have a place to put everything. After you narrow down your possessions to things that possibly matter in your life, a McMansion can look rather empty. Go farther (assuming you can find the time) and you can discover the meaning of your possessions, and then you can make them fit in any available space — any house or any apartment, possibly even a car if you are moving a long distance and want to make the move as effortless as possible.

Stuff moves and changes more easily than we had come to think. People are rediscovering this, and it’s good news for people who worried they had outgrown their house, or who realize they need to move to a smaller place for financial reasons or to reduce their commuting time.

What will happen to the millions of houses that are 5,000 square feet or larger? Some experts worry that many will go vacant, creating new high-crime neighborhoods. More likely, though, these buildings will be put to use by people doing some kind of work that can make use of the space. There are stories, for example, of people farming a large suburban lot and using half of the house as a kind of barn. Where a business use is not practical, a large house can be reconfigured slightly so that some rooms don’t have to be heated or cooled, making the house practical to operate even if it is not fully occupied.

An equally interesting question is, what will happen to all the stuff? I can only hope that a lot of it can be resold or recycled. On average, less than half of the stuff that people buy and take home is actually used. Perhaps some of this stuff can be put someplace where it can belatedly be put to use.

The House Question

2010-08-14T20:32:00.001-04:00

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported License.

Photo: mcclouds

“Life’s too short to clean your own house,” was the headline on the brochure I got in the mail. In the parody you see to the left, I took this idea to the logical next step.

You see, there is a grain of truth in the original advertisement. If you can’t clean your house, it isn’t because cleaning is such hard work. It’s because you don’t have time. What this really means is that you’re not spending much time in the rooms of your house. Maybe you’re there, but you’re not really there — you’re on the phone, watching TV, checking on what your friends are doing online, or whatever, but too busy to really experience the room you’re in.

It makes sense that you might not want the burden of cleaning rooms that you’re not really using. But it may make just as much sense not to have those rooms if you rarely have time to use them. That is, not having a house might make your life easier. This helps to explain why it is suddenly such a big trend for people to sell their houses and move to much smaller places. It takes an enormous amount of time to pay for and take care of a house, and if you can save three or four hours a day by not having a house, it is certainly something to consider. (For more on this trend and its economic consequences, see my other blog, The Shamanic Economist.)

But that’s not the only possible answer. If you’re not using a room in your house, or barely using it, then the room is essentially a warehouse, a store room that happens to be part of your house. Rooms are basically all the same empty, so if you aren’t using a room, it has to be because of the things that are in it. It makes sense, then, to go into the room and look at it as a warehouse. Ask yourself: “What are these things that we’re storing here? What’s the story behind how these things got to be here? Does the story make sense? If we aren’t using them, does it really make sense to have them? What else could we do with the things? What else could we do with the space?”

Often I’ve talked to people who are convinced they’ve outgrown their house and need to move to a bigger place. When I ask how they’re using the rooms they have now, though, it usually turns out that they’re only using half of them regularly. For every room, there is a story about how it is used, but the quality of the story doesn’t tell you much. You have to ask, how many hours per year does that story really happen? Some rooms are used for their intended purpose only about 20 or 30 hours per year — and that’s not really often enough to make the room necessary.

In the end, it’s always about the stuff. What stuff do you use in the story you have about the room, but not in real life? What stuff can you take away, so that you can use the room again? Or can you take away everything in the room? That‘s probably the case if no one has looked at the stuff in the room for more than a year, but don’t just assume that — evaluate the stuff and ask what its real value is. If the stuff is really no longer part of your life, don’t be afraid to empty out the room and leave it empty until you figure out what you can use it for.

Then again, sometimes not having a house is the right answer, at least temporarily or during transitional periods. The Four-Hour Workweek suggests strategies for renting out your house for periods of time while you go do other things. Not having a house makes it easy to go out more — visit friends, go to concerts, eat in restaurants, travel. This is a subject I’ll write more about in a future post. Of course, to live in a little apartment or a room in someone else’s house, or to keep your things in storage while you travel, you have to scale back your possessions. Having no more possessions than you can actually use will help to relieve the pressure on your time, regardless of what you eventually decide about your house.

Scientific Evidence to Explain Why To-Do Lists Fail

2010-04-16T12:12:00.005-04:00

A new scientific study lends credence to the idea that to-do lists don’t work. The study suggests that, when it comes to taking action and creating results, humans have two-track minds.

The study, “Divided Representation of Concurrent Goals in the Human Frontal Lobes,” summarized in the Ars Technica story “In multitasking, more than two tasks do not compute,” used brain scans to observe brain activity while people did two or more things at once, and when they switched tasks or were interrupted. The resulting picture is of a brain that has two areas for guiding tasks. They can work together, for focus on a single task, but more often they split up, with one focusing on one task, the other one focusing on a second task.

The interesting thing is what happens when you introduce a third simultaneous task or an interruption. Then both of the two areas of the brain start switching among all the tasks. This can create the subjective experience of pursuing three tasks at once, but the “pursuit” part is largely an illusion. People make lots of mental errors in this situation, leading to mistakes, but more importantly, they start taking meaningless actions that don’t move them toward the objective of each task.

In other words, when we think we’re working on three tasks at once, we’re really not. We’re just going around in circles, taking largely ineffective actions. We don’t realize how ineffective our actions are because our brains aren’t able to effectively supervise our actions and progress in more than two tasks at one time.

To illustrate this, imagine the task of doing an accounting exercise on a sheet of paper. An effective action could be adding up a column of numbers and writing the result. Ineffective actions, the quality of action we tend to do when we are trying to do three or more things at once, could include shifting the paper around, putting the pen down and picking it up again, or drawing lines and boxes on the sheet of paper. Actions such as these make us believe we are continuing to work on the accounting task, but in fact, they don’t move us any closer to answering the accounting question we are working on.

To my mind, this means that it doesn’t matter so much whether you’re working on one task at a time or two. Taking on a second task might make you slightly more productive, or less, but not enough to care about. But add a third task, and your pace of work will tend to fall by 30 percent or more, perhaps as much as 80 percent — a productivity disaster if you’re trying to get a list of things done today. Add a fourth and fifth task, and it will tend to make things worse, but not much worse — at three tasks, your brain is already scrambling.

Now, let me relate this finding to the way people typically approach a to-do list, or any time management system. The to-do list gives you a list of tasks to do. The to-do list itself is a task. If you’re working quietly at your desk with no interruptions, doing only one task from the to-do list at a time, this ought to work fine. You can keep track of the to-do list in one area of the brain, while you focus on the specific task you’re doing with a second area of the brain. You work productively on one task after another, without losing track of the list.

So far, so good. Throw in any interruption at all, though, and the train goes off the tracks. You might flounder unproductively through the three tasks, until another interruption gives you four tasks, and so on. You might set aside the task you were working on, but that means essentially having to start it all over again later, with the work you did before the interruption largely wasted. Or you might set aside the to-do list — and if you get to the end of the day and realize that you forgot your to-do list way back around 10 a.m., this helps to explain how that can happen.

The “right” approach, according to time management systems, is to set aside both the to-do list and the task and handle the interruption — then return to the to-do list after the interruption is over. But this too is unproductive. Every time you have an interruption, the work you were doing for the previous ten or twenty minutes, or since you began that task, is lost. As a last-ditch effort to save the time-management paradigm, many people lock themselves in their offices for four hours a day with telephone and e-mail turned off and a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door — but this too creates problems more serious than the ones it solves.

To-do lists don’t work. Time management systems aren’t an improvement because they still tell you what to do at a particular time or in a particular sequence. All efforts at time management share the same problem — the human brain cannot effectively track what to do, the current priority, and the latest interruption all at once.

The solution, in my opinion, is not to throw away the to-do list, but to make it much shorter. Working from a to-do list may be unproductive, but we still have to keep up with the demands of the situation. But it is important to keep the to-do list as short as possible so that the whole day doesn’t get bogged down in the unproductive churn of the to-do list. The ideal to-do list is one you can complete before lunch, so that you can spend your afternoon doing your real work.

Having a shorter to-do list means doing more things immediately; staying well ahead of deadlines; rejecting marginal tasks from the outset; doing some tasks at a lower level of control so that they can be finished quickly; trusting others to do some tasks; leaving well enough alone. For managers, it means a strict rule against assigning any task at all to a worker who is already overloaded. Managers can do a lot to avoid the effects of worker overload by rejecting more tasks, tasks that ultimately won’t get done anyway, at the outset.

Most of all, though, it means having a smaller backlog of work to be done. It’s the backlog of work that forces you to add the task of managing your work from minute to minute, and it is that task that allows interruptions to throw you off. The book Fear of Nothing lays out the process for getting out of the backlog and into the more powerful, more productive position of working directly from goals and inspirations most of the time. The irony of this is that if you give yourself less to do, you will get more done.

This is something we’ve seen for years — the most successful and productive people are rarely the people who have the longest to-do lists. And now there is a scientific explanation for why that might be so.

Graptitude and the Clutter-to-Riches Story

2010-04-10T09:58:00.000-04:00

I coined a new word, “graptitude,” in a dream a few moments ago. It’s the word “gratitude” with the “p” transposed from “grasp” or “grip,” and it refers to the practice of feeling grateful for the objects in your immediate physical surroundings — the things that are close enough that you can touch them or pick them up in your hands.

This is an idea you might have picked up from The Secret or from the mass of movies and writing that surrounded that work, with the talk about an “attitude of gratitude” and the vision boards made up of pictures that represented a person’s future material surroundings. In keeping with the mystical approach of The Secret, though, it made no attempt to name most of the things it talked about. Graptitude was just one of dozens of ideas that would fall under the rubric of Low of Attraction.

And graptitude is one of the simplest demonstrations of Law of Attraction. If you feel good about the physical objects that are around you already, it becomes easier for you to collect the material possessions you really want. This works, as countless rags-to-riches stories attest, even if the physical objects you see when you start out aren’t your own possessions. It works even if the things around you don’t have any worldly value. It works because feeling good about material things makes it easier to own material things, including the things you ideally would like to own.

Well, okay, but what if the story you want to create is not a rags-to-riches story, but a clutter-to-riches story? The situation that most of us face is not that we hardly own anything, but that we own a great many things that we don’t use. Do you really want to feel graptitude when you are surrounded every day by junk that gets in your way? And even if it would help, is it possible to feel good about “all this junk”?

The simple answer to both questions is yes. If you feel good about the junk and clutter that’s in your life, you will replace it faster with the possessions you imagine for yourself. And it is easy to feel good about the worst possessions if you realize that they are not permanent, that they will not simply sit inertly forever, but that they are in motion, like the rest of the universe.

Feeling good about clutter doesn’t lead you to collect more of it — it makes it easier to move it out and replace it with something better. This is easy to see when you recognize how much difference there is between feeling good and clinging. If you feel attached to possessions you don’t use, that’s not a form of love. Just the opposite. It’s fear — fear of what will happen to you if you let go. It’s the “fear of nothing,” the fear of being left without any material possessions at all. In Law of Attraction terms, that is the opposite of what you want. You feel bad and focus your emotions on material deprivation, and that makes it hard to get anything you want. You get what you want faster if feel good about the clutter that currently stands in the way, and this is easier to do if you see the clutter in motion. It’s easy to applaud a bag of junk that’s on its way out to the trash. And when you see the universal process of change in all your stuff — when you know that it is all on its way out eventually — then it is also possible to applaud it as it is now, even if it is not yet being carried out in a bag or a box. That will happen soon enough. In the meantime, every possession you have is evidence of your ability to attract — an ability that, in the bigger picture, includes attracting the big things you are hoping for.

Picture this. A magician promises to pull a deck of cards out of an empty hat. You watch him to see how he will do it. He reaches into the empty hat and pulls out a map of the London Underground and presents the map to you. You unfold it and look at it. It’s the genuine article — you see the words “Tube map” is the corner, and there’s the River Thames running through the middle of everything — but it’s hardly a deck of cards. So how do you respond? Do you respond angrily, saying, “You’re no magician! This isn’t a deck of cards, it’s just a map!” Or do you chuckle at the joke, and hand the map back to the magician so he can turn it into a deck of cards?

Obviously, it makes more sense to play along with the magician. When you say, “This is only a map of the London Underground,” it is a mock protest. You are not actually disappointed. The map might not be what was promised, but it is still proof of the magician’s abilities, and the deck of cards will appear soon enough.

You can see your own clutter in the same way. If it is not exactly what you wanted, it nevertheless serves as a place-holder, a temporary token of your ability to have material things. All that works out fine if you let it. The problem with clutter arises only when you hold on to things too long, after they have outlived their usefulness in your life. You do this not from graptitude, not because you really like and enjoy the things, but out of fear. Set the fear aside and keep things flowing, and you too can have your version of the clutter-to-riches story.

Why It’s So Hard to Use Up What You Have

2010-04-06T08:51:00.000-04:00

A month ago in the Happiness Project blog, Gretchen Rubin wrote about her challenges with her resolution to “Use up what you have”:

And sometimes I find myself saving things instead of using them, even when that makes no sense. I buy new white t-shirts, then “save” them. I don’t use the lovely stationery my sister gave me for Christmas, I’m “saving” it. But not using things is the same as wasting them. I want to put things to work and use them up.

The difficulty with this, of course, is a matter of scale. If you have an ordinary amount of possessions, it is already more than you can possibly use up.

There are so many possessions, and so little time. If you’re focusing on wearing your new white T-shirts (one of Gretchen’s examples) that could mean your travel souvenir T-shirts are staying in the closet (that’s an example from my own wardrobe). Or, if you are focused on using all your power tools (wouldn’t it be nice to use each one at least once this year?), you may not have time to watch all the movies that are stacked up on a shelf near the television. Acquiring possessions has become so easy that life is literally not long enough for you to fully use them all — even if, like me, you have a very ordinary amount of possessions and plan to live for another 100 years.

This difficulty is especially apparent when it comes to clothing. If you have 50 shirts that are suitable for the season — not a large number by the current American standards for a wardrobe — it’s probably not realistic to plan to wear each of them at least once over the course of the season. A season, after all, is only 91 days. But imagine that you were to systematically wear all your clothing, perhaps by rotating it in the closet so that everything comes to the front eventually. Then, you would find that you would never wear out any of it, or wear it often enough to tire of it, even if you did not buy any more clothing for the next 10 or 20 years.

The same is true of many ordinary supplies, even if it is not always so obvious. If you now do most of your writing on a computer keyboard, you will probably find it impossible to use up the ink in a handful of ball-point pens, and it may take decades to go through what used to be a small stack of Post-It Notes. I have only recently come to realize how long shampoo lasts. I don’t have particularly long hair and don’t wash it every day, so a liter bottle of shampoo could last for a year or two.

It still is, as Gretchen puts it, “so satisfying” to completely use something you own. Looking at the inverse condition, if you do not use what you own, it becomes almost impossible to feel prosperous — and the resulting feeling of lack is a big part of what drives people to go shopping and buy more things they don’t have time to use. Focusing on using what you have can be a starting point for feeling the prosperity that you already have in a material sense, and turning the corner on clutter. You can use up or wear out some of your possessions — and when you can’t use them up, you can at least experience the value that is available in them, within the limits of the time you can put into each activity. This shifts your focus from future action — which is really where your focus is in shopping — to present action, and it is when you focus on the present that you have the chance to move your life forward.

Earth Hour

2010-03-27T19:31:00.001-04:00

Earth Hour is happening right now — tonight at 8:30 local time. It’s a collective action that probably 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population is participating in — shutting off their lights for one hour. It’s a way to save money on electricity and a chance to look at the night sky (weather permitting, of course).

Turning off the lights would seem to interfere with your usual activities, but since it’s only for an hour, it won’t really. If you’re like most people, there are so many things you have in mind to do that it won’t be any trouble at all to come up with an hour’s worth of things to do that don’t require lights in the evening.

To participate in Earth Hour, just turn out the lights for an hour starting at 8:30 p.m. local time. To see what this looks like in cities around the world, take a look at the pictures at the Earth Hour web site http://www.earthhour.org.

“It’s Never About the Clutter”

2010-03-13T12:11:00.076-05:00

A few days ago I had the chance to pick up and look at a book purporting to use ideas from personal organization to help people lose weight. This was a book that was released to great fanfare a few years ago, but it never caught on, and flipping through the pages, it was easy to see why.

People these days are in a hurry. They want their problems simplified, and are rightly skeptical when someone suggests making a problem more complicated than it is already. Here was a book that encourages you, if you want to lose weight, to first get all the clutter out of your house before you try to lose weight — but even that wasn’t the starting point. “It’s never about the clutter,” the author said. Don’t even look at the clutter, he was saying, because first you need to discover the underlying issues that created the clutter.

Fortunately, there is no need to make life so complicated. If anyone needs to lose weight and get rid of clutter, I have good news: decluttering can be good exercise. In general, as soon as you realize what is important to you in life, go right to it. You don’t have to make a plan or write it in your schedule. Just get started. Maybe you’ll find that you do need to uncover the issues that led to the clutter in your life, but if so, the simplest way to find them is in the clutter itself. If your issue is, “It’s so hard for me to decide what to do with this stuff from college,” or something like that, you’ll never figure that out by sitting in a chair and thinking, but you’ll discover it quickly if you start going through the clutter piece by piece.

The big issues in your life, the places where you are stuck in some way, are all represented in your personal possessions. In that sense, it is more accurate to say, “It’s never not about the clutter.” You can’t change your clutter without changing your life at the same time, so if you have clutter, and it bothers you, you don’t have to look for a way to approach the problem. The place to start is with the clutter.

Planning Is Guessing

2010-03-10T03:27:00.001-05:00

The new book Rework might be about managing in big business, but what the authors have to say about planning applies just as well in any part of life. The authors don’t use the word suspense in the essay “Planning Is Guessing,” but they don’t have to:

When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. . . . you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up opportunities that come along. Sometimes you need to say, “We’re going in a new direction because that’s what makes sense today.”

To find out more about the book, and download the PDF excerpt that contains the complete “Planning Is Guessing” essay, go to:

http://37signals.com/rework/

Abundance Thinking vs. Fear of Nothing

2010-03-07T16:58:00.012-05:00

Louise Hay’s new post “Clearing Your Clutter” is a nice summary of the major issues people face in addressing clutter: it’s easier to add than to take away; the energetic basis of clutter; the influence of thinking from the Great Depression (which affects all of us, whether we realize it or not).

Hay explains the issues surrounding clutter, but doesn’t offer an answer for it, beyond paying attention and remember to feel a sense of prosperity. It is a difficult answer because, if you’re like most people, spending time around clutter is enough to take away all your feelings of prosperity. How can you feel the wealth of the universe when you are stuck in the debris of your life?

This is why I suggest to people to address clutter only a few minutes at a time at first. You can get a few things taken care of before the focus on clutter drains away your feeling of abundance. But there is more to it than this.

Just recognizing that clutter can be one of the main reasons you feel a sense of scarcity is an important distinction. Being around clutter drains your energy and makes you feel like you cannot do much and do not have much to offer, all the more so if it is your own clutter. If you want to have energy and live a successful life, much of the clutter has to go. Understanding that the main challenge you are facing is not your internal contradictions, but your surroundings, can help you stay focused on the solution. It can shift your focus from the question, “Why do I have so much trouble making decisions?” which is a wretched question for anyone to be facing, to “What can I do with the energy I have today to make a difference in my surroundings?” a much more empowering question.

Eventually, you come to understand the tricks in your mind that surround the fear of nothing, which is the fear of scarcity, irrelevance, abandonment, and all related energies — and includes the fear of empty closet space. You can then move from managing your possessions out of this fear by managing them out of a sense of abundance and empowerment. But you must not wait until the fear is gone and you feel empowered to get started. The fear is contained in the clutter. You have to remove the clutter to remove the fear. The persistent inaction you offer in the face of clutter (along with other tasks and challenges) is the reason you feel disempowered. Start to take action and you will start to be — and feel — more powerful.

The End of Closets Stuffed Full of Clothes

2010-03-04T11:31:00.001-05:00

Last year’s biggest fashion trend, from my vantage point at least, was wearing the clothes of the year before. Most people, suffering from the financial pressure of a recession, didn’t buy any new clothes — but that doesn’t make it a fashion trend. What made it a fashion trend was that people who did buy new clothes mostly weren’t wearing them, preferring instead to follow the trend by wearing their slightly older clothes.

And this year? Simon Doonan, writing in the New York Observer, says this is “The End of Trends”: “Nobody is keeping score. All bets are off. Anything goes, even scrunch boots.”

People are showing up in public wearing any clothing they happen to have — or that they see their friends wearing. What this means to me is that there is no longer any excuse for stuffing your closet full of new clothes in an effort to be fashionable. You can be fashionable just by pulling out something that was forgotten in the back of the closet.

In economic theory, the reason for the declining pace of fashion trends is easy to see. Fabric and thread are far more durable than they were in the last century when our current idea of a fashion trend really got going. Clothing lasts eight times as long as it did a century ago. We have raised our standards accordingly, so that something that is the slightest bit frayed may be considered worn out, but even so, it is no longer really possible to wear clothing out. Most people this year are still mostly wearing clothing from 2007 and 2008, and most of it has years to go before it would start to look shabby. The economic imperative to buy new clothing is gone. New fashion ideas have to stand or fall on their own merits, not just competing with other fashion ideas, but with everything else people might spend money on.

And what that means is that anything is “in” if it makes you look good. And since this year’s fashion ideas aren’t really better than last year’s, it is amazingly hard for any new fashion trend to sweep away everything that came before.

So you can wear the clothing you have — or, if it doesn’t look right on you, take it away and make room for the clothing that does. Either way, it doesn’t take a closet stuffed full of clothes to make it happen.

How Big Is Hoarding?

2010-03-01T12:23:00.000-05:00

Hoarding, holding on to possessions that do not advance a person’s life or that would be more valuable elsewhere, can have a huge impact on the life of an individual or a household — but how big is it in the world outside? It is bigger than you would think. Hoarding is so widespread that it can move the world’s largest national economy. As I wrote in my Shamanic Economist blog today, hoarding by businesses was so big in the fourth quarter of 2009 that it gave the worst recession in recent U.S. history the appearance of a recovery for that quarter.

Economic recovery sounds like a good thing, but it is a tragedy when thousands of businesses are spending billions of dollars on things that they can only store for later, and ultimately throw away at additional expense. Yet in the United States, we are all part of a culture of hoarding. It is part of the pre-industrial mindset that comes to us from the 19th century, and most of the time, we are not even aware of the ways the hoarding mentality colors our thinking. What is needed is a shift in emphasis from preserving the value of things, as important as that is, to maximizing our ability to work, which is ultimately what will deliver our success.

We can all be part of the solution by making this shift in our individual lives. If you are thinking of buying something that you realistically may never have the chance to use, let it pass. Focus instead on acquiring the things you need for what you are doing right now — the things that will improve your ability to deliver immediate results. Clear away clutter and give yourself more room to work. Shorten your to-do list so that you can take more immediate action. This all sounds terribly mundane until you start doing it, and then you realize: the shift in emphasis from things to action is a shift potentially big enough to change everything.

Picking Up After a Failed New Year’s Resolution

2010-01-18T15:15:00.000-05:00

January is half over. The year is 1/24 gone. Enough time has gone by for me to forget my new year’s resolution (embarrassing, but true). Others have given up — life is too busy and will power is not enough to accomplish the transformations they were hoping for.

There is still plenty of time, though, to create a new vision for the new year. The way to do it is to change your sense of identity, raise your standards, and make real decisions. If you have half an hour to watch a video, Tony Robbins can walk you through this far better than I could:

“New Year, New Life”

Choosing a New Year’s Resolution

2009-12-31T18:28:00.000-05:00

Today is a day when some people are worrying about making the right new year’s resolution. My suggestion is to pick a new year’s resolution that points to the kind of action that you can take every day and the kind of result that will make a lasting change in your life. I would also suggest that the way you make a new year’s resolution is important. Give it serious thought. Make it consistent with the way you’re living your life and where you’re going.

When you choose a new year’s resolution thoughtfully, you get an advantage that most people who make resolutions don’t have. You get the power of decision. Most resolutions, and most of the decisions people make, are really just spontaneous emotional reactions. There may be some emotional power behind these resolutions, but it fades away as soon as your emotions change. That’s the reason most new year’s resolutions fail. But if you think carefully about something and make a decision, there is a much better chance it will lead to something. In fact, people who make thoughtful decisions more often tend to be more successful in life. If you’re trying to pick a new year’s resolution, use that situation as an opportunity to make a real decision. Just by approaching it that way, regardless of the specific resolution you choose, you’re practicing the pattern of decision-making that will tend to make your life a success.

Snow Day

2009-12-20T14:06:00.003-05:00

It’s probably the biggest snowstorm of the winter here, with 10 to 15 inches recorded in the local area. I was snowed in yesterday as the snow fell, and I am staying home again today, with no special reason to brave the roads, many still covered with packed snow.

Two snow days in a row gives me a chance to get some things done. But does this mean I can catch up on everything that has been piling up? Not likely!

The snow day, of course, is just another version of the rainy day I write about in Fear of Nothing. We save things to do as if we will have a chance to do them on a rainy day, but usually, all this really means is that we will not be doing them. We are so connected to the world today that free time is surprisingly scarce.

Today, with the snow, a party and a recording session were canceled, freeing up a pretty good block of time. On the other hand, today is a perfect day to shovel snow and take photographs, and by the time I am done with that, my block of free time won’t look nearly so big. I may have two or three hours to do something with.

A couple of hours is not insignificant, but this is after the biggest storm of the year. If you wait for free time to move your life forward, you are living your life in slow motion. Instead of waiting for a rainy day, or a snow day, make the right decisions as you go along. Skip over insignificant things so you can concentrate on actions that really matter. That way, you can move your life forward every day.

Clearing the Dining Room

2009-11-12T09:31:00.000-05:00

The dining room, after clearing most of the stuff away

Many houses have a room that serves as a clutter magnet. The room’s original purpose, whatever it was, has been buried under all the stuff that no one knows what to do with. Whatever people have, if they don’t know where to put it, this room is where it is most likely to end up. Most often, the room in question is the dining room.

And that’s what it was in my house. From the day I moved in, the dining room was just a place to plop things down. I did not even own a dining table, so the idea of using the dining room for dining seemed remote. Still, I didn’t like the idea of a room just filled with miscellaneous stuff. I was sure I would want to use the room for something, so I decided to clear it all out.

The dining room, easy to clean while empty

The writing desk went in a corner of my bedroom. The shipping supplies, on a table in the basement. The cameras, in a cabinet upstairs. The office supplies, in the office, or in a box in the basement. And so on. By the time I had figured out the right place to put everything, I had a completely empty room.

If you are used to cleaning around clutter, you may be amazed how quickly you can clean a room that’s empty. It took weeks to get everything out of the dining room and organize it in the other rooms of the house. Cleaning the empty room took 15 minutes. As Don Aslett has pointed out, most of the time you spend cleaning a room is spent maneuvering around the furniture and moving things to clean under them and behind them. When a room is empty, you’re just cleaning, and it goes quickly.

Using the empty space to organize the tools

I don’t yet have a specific plan for the dining room. In the meantime, it hasn’t been any trouble at all to find ways to use the space. One of my long-neglected projects is to organize my tools and hardware, and that’s become easy to do with this much space to collect them and sort them out. The tools look a lot smaller now that they’re grouped into categories. I’ll be storing them away accordingly, in several smaller boxes, where, for the first time, they will all be easy for me to find. After that project is done, I’m sure I will have something else I can do with the same space.

Space is valuable, and there are two ways to prove that that’s true: by the money you pay for the space, and by the things you accomplish when you have the space to do them. If you have a room that has become a clutter magnet, you might do what I did: empty it out, and then see what valuable things you can do in that space.

“I Don’t Know What I’m Going to Do Today”

2009-11-06T10:39:00.001-05:00

In my last post, I suggested that when you get to the point of saying, “I finally got caught up!” you use the extra leverage of that situation to get caught up in other areas of your life. If you take that approach, you may soon get to the point where you wonder whether there is anything more for you to do — where you look at your schedule and say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do today.”

It is not that there is nothing to do, but the few things on your list look like they might take you only a few hours to complete. What do you do then?

First, I’ll tell you what not to do, because this is what I used to do. Do not take your two or three hours of work and try to stretch it out so that it fills the entire day. I used to do this all the time, and then I would look back a week later and find that most of those things still weren’t done.

This happens for at least three reasons. First, when you intentionally decide to slow yourself down to less than a comfortable working pace, you lose energy. You lose focus. It is hard to really accomplish anything. Second, some things turn out to be more complicated than they looked at first. Third, the world is always giving you more things to do. You never know when something might come along that requires an action on your part. Some days give you three or four days of things to do.

And today could be a day just like that, even if it starts out looking like your to-do list is getting frighteningly thin. The best approach, then, when you think you have only a few things to do, is to do all the things you know you need to do, and do them quickly. I’m not saying to rush, of course — I almost never recommend that — but set about the things you mean to do as if it is important to get them done soon.

If it is 8 a.m. and you have just three hours of things left to do, see if you can get them done by 11 a.m. After all, there is a good chance that by 11, you will have something else to do, something you don’t know about yet.

And if you get everything done? In modern life, that hardly ever happens, but if it does, it is still no cause for alarm. Here are some things you can do if it seems that there is nothing left of your to-do list:

Relax. Take a deep breath. Look around you. Stretch.
Double-check. Are the things you just completed really finished, or are there a few final touches you would want to add? Is there a follow-through action that would be helpful at this point? Or is there one more thing you meant to do that you forgot about along the way?
Check your surroundings. Is everything clean, restocked, organized, ready for action?
How are you doing? Are you personally in need of exercise, meditation, or some kind of activity that helps keep you going — perhaps something you might have neglected when things got busy?
Check with the important people in your life. You appreciate it when they come to your assistance during your busy times. Is there something you can assist them with right now? And if not, is there something you could do right now if you had the right kind of help?
Think ahead. What is your next deadline? What can you do now to prepare for it?
Consider your priorities. What do you want your life to be? What more can you do now to turn your life into the kind of life you want to be living, or to change the world around you into the kind of world you want to be living in?

There is always more to do, and the moments after you finish your to-do list are often the times when you can make the biggest changes in your life, by doing some of the things you thought you’d never get to do. These are the moments when you are the most powerful, because you have the time to create something new and the time to do the things you really want to do.

“I Finally Got Caught Up!”

2009-10-23T12:45:00.002-04:00

I finally got caught up.

I’m talking about my online media list. There used to be a long list of magazines, newsletters, movies, and podcasts for me to look at and listen to on the Internet. As of late this morning, I got through them all. I also caught up on my e-mail — at least, I read every message that has come in.

But the fact that it took me so long to get to this point tells me something is off.

In order to catch up with online media, it took an extended minor illness, which made me feel like sitting still and watching the screen more than I usually would, followed by a few unusually quiet weeks in the office.

And even if I caught up on my online viewing, I still have 14 hours of audio programs at my desk to listen to.

If you catch up on something only when almost everything else in your schedule settles down, it tells you you’re resisting the tasks you give yourself in that category. Almost always, that is because you are giving yourself too many of those things to do.

In my case, I love to keep up with what my friends in technology, personal development, and music are doing. That’s where most of my media list comes from. But I don’t love sitting at my desk or at the television watching Internet movies for hours on end. That’s where the resistance comes from.

I need to take this resistance into account so that I can give myself a realistic volume of movies to watch. I need to pick fewer movies to watch and fewer podcasts to listen to. In some cases, I may need to turn off a movie after the first few minutes when it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

How much is the right amount? To determine the ideal amount of an activity, you would have to take into account all the costs and benefits involved in comparison to your resources and objectives. But you know you have too much in your queue if you usually don’t get through most of the list before the end of the day. You also know you have too much if, as in my case, it takes an extraordinary sequence of events to get you caught up.

When you get to the point where you can say, “I finally got caught up!” it is not the time to go looking for more. This afternoon, for example, is not the time for me to scour the Internet for more movies to watch. Rather, this kind of moment is a perfect opportunity to get caught up in another area, or work ahead on something that’s coming. In my case, it was an opportunity to rake the leaves, a task that was easier to do because I got to it before this afternoon’s rain.

When you get caught up in something, and use that moment to get caught up in something else, you can start to change your expectations. “Caught up” isn’t something that should happen only after a series of lucky breaks or at the end of months of diligent effort, but is something that ideally you ought to be able to say at the end of any ordinary day.

Bob Doyle Video on Limiting Beliefs

2009-10-14T13:40:00.007-04:00

A difficulty many people have in breaking free of their to-do lists and clutter is the seeming conflict between that challenge and the law of attraction. The law of attraction seems to say, “Don’t pay any attention to your to-do list or your clutter, because if you do, it will just expand on you.” Yet that strategy does not work either. People try to pretend that the clutter and to-do list do not exist, and what happens? The clutter still gets deeper, and the to-do list continues to get longer.

The way out of this has to do with understanding limiting beliefs. You have beliefs about yourself that tend to keep you in the same place in life. These limiting beliefs are obstacles, and most of them eventually take on physical form by showing up on your to-do list or in your clutter. Pretty soon, the clutter and the things to do seem like they are the obstacles you face, but the real obstacles are the limiting beliefs behind them.

I recommend this short video from Bob Doyle as a useful discussion of all this. Doyle’s main focus is wealth, but if you watch his video (at the link below) while thinking about any frustration you have in connection with your to-do list or possessions, you can see how changes in this area can lead directly to a cascade of changes in all areas of your life. The to-do list and clutter are actually valuable to you, as they help you identify most of the energetic obstacles you face. As you address the to-do list and the clutter, you remove the energetic obstacles that go with them. It is easy to see that everything you hope to accomplish in life will advance faster as these obstacles are removed.

Watch this video: The Law of Attraction and Limiting Beliefs

“I Lost All My Files!”

2009-09-01T12:22:00.001-04:00

It was a day like today when my computer went kablooey.

Around this time last year, the power went out, and the computer whirred to a stop. The next time I tried to start up the computer, it destroyed my user account. The computer literally wouldn’t boot up until the user account, which contained all my personal files, was removed. I had to save my files, but how? It took more than a day of trial and error before I managed to create a new account and save all but five of the files from the old account.

That was lucky. Those episodes don’t always turn out so well. On other occasions, I’ve lost days of work and months of e-mail messages. And there is always a chance of losing everything that’s on a computer or any other device where you have files. At least five times a year, I hear from someone who says, “I lost all my files! What can I do?” It seems to happen to everyone eventually: a broken hard drive, a misplaced CD, a stolen laptop, or a phone that won’t turn on. And then an important file that could so easily have been copied and secured the day before is gone forever. Or, in the worst case, all the files are gone.

When this happens, it isn’t just bad luck. It’s a sign. The cost of keeping files safe is measured in minutes and pennies. When we neglect it, it is because there are so many other things around and so much going on that we lose track of the things that are valuable.

It is basically the same thing if you are losing track of your important obligations and objectives in any area of life. Are there tomatoes rotting in the garden because you can’t find time to pick them? Bills paid late because you forgot? Missed a party because by the time you got everything else done and got over there, it was over?

Don’t ignore the signs. Signs like these are trying to tell you that you need to do something more to keep your life under control. It’s not necessarily just about your files, though certainly, if you lose some files, make sure you have a backup of whatever files you have left. (In fact, if you want to stop reading right now for a minute while you make a backup of something, I’ll understand.) But then, what other really important possessions have you lost track of? What other important things, things that need to be done, keep getting put off?

And then, most importantly, what’s getting in the way? What things that don’t matter so much are taking you away from the things that really do matter?

The way the world around us works, it’s hard not to fill your life up with trivia, trivia that distracts you from what you’re really trying to do. You’re doing about as well as everyone else if, in a year, you use about 10 percent of your possessions and complete about 10 percent of your to-do list. What that means is that there is enormous potential to cut back. And you only have to cut back a little to restore sanity to your life. Give yourself 10 minutes a day to make backups of your files, pay the bills on time, and generally keep things under control — and if that’s not enough, 10 minutes more. That may be all it takes to feel secure again about where you are. Considering what you get out of it, it’s not much time to spend. And in the long run, you will actually save time by avoiding the inconvenience of calamities like lost files.

“I Don’t Know What to Do”

2009-08-20T17:51:00.004-04:00

“I don’t know what to do.”

This is the biggest thing keeping people from improving their lives. They don’t know what to do because they don’t know what they really want to do. Often people just muddle along until things get so bad that they know they have to change something — and more importantly, then they have a pretty good idea of what kind of change they want to make.

But you don’t have to sit around waiting for something to happen to give you that kind of clarity. The next time you feel bored with life, instead of checking to see what’s on television, check to see what’s on . . .

. . . your to-do list. Whether you have a written list or just some vague ideas of what you might do someday, the to-do list is all you need to find out why life has ground to a halt.

Before anyone complains, I must hasten to add that I’m not going to ask you to do anything that’s on your to-do list. If life seems dull or oppressive, it is safe to conclude that nothing on your to-do list inspires you. Maybe you have days when you clean out the garage, because that’t the only thing on the to-do list that you feel like you can really do. And after that’s done, then what?

I hope it’s obvious that I don’t think the answer is flipping aimlessly through the television channels, looking for something to eat, or texting your friends about how nothing happens in your life. You need to find out why your life is the way it is — why it seems empty. And you can find that answer in the to-do list.

That’s because, after you’ve done all the things you can do easily and confidently today, your to-do list turns into a “not happening” list — a list of reasons why your life is not moving forward. For everything on your list, there is a reason why you don’t feel like doing it, wouldn’t do it well, or can’t do it yet. Much of what’s on the list may be a hassle, unfair, or overwhelming. For everything that’s on the list, ask yourself, “Do I really have to do this? Do I really want to do it? And if so, why couldn’t I do it right now?” And for each question, look for the simple, obvious answers.

Then, ask yourself, “ What do I really wish I could do? And why can’t I do that right now?”

Look at this long enough, and you’ll start to find patterns. Eventually you’ll notice some kind of false assumption that has you doing, or trying to do, the wrong things. Everyone will find different answers, but these are some examples of what you might find:

You’re doing the things you’re supposed to do, instead of doing things that actually help you.
You give yourself too many things to do, then find yourself overwhelmed by your basic responsibilities, which are getting neglected.
You spend all your time on the things that seem most urgent, but never get around to the things you most want to do.

There are certain responsibilities that you are committed to meeting, but beyond that, it is more important to have a to-do list that inspires you to take action than it is to have one that focuses on the “right” actions in some theoretical sense. You get more done if you set out to do something you care about, or something that drives you, than if you assign yourself tasks that you will find a way to put off until tomorrow.

If your to-do list is too vague to give you the answers, you can find the same answers by going through your possessions. For every possession you have that you aren’t using, ask yourself why you have it, what you expect to do with it, and why you couldn’t do that right now.

Keep at this, and you’ll find out soon enough what you really want to do with your life and how you can go about doing it. You don’t have to sit around and wait for things to happen, and you certainly don’t have until things get really awful, as people often do, to realize what your life is about. You can actively look for that answer. And often, the quickest way to find it is by looking through your to-do list.

How Long Does It Take to Create Lasting Change?

2009-08-10T07:00:00.007-04:00

“Hey, let’s build a garage this weekend.”

I don’t know if that’s quite the way it started, but people driving to work this morning might notice a new garage in town, one that wasn’t there on Friday. On Friday after work, I saw two people working with a pile of lumber. On Saturday, you could hear a lot of cutting and pounding, and by the end of the day, the new garage had taken shape. Now that it has been built, it is likely to still be there 120 years from now.

For any lasting change, you can trace it back to the one day it got started. We tend to think of big changes as taking a long time to happen, but that’s not always the case. It only took a weekend to put together a garage, and I can think of similar examples from my own life.

I wrote the first draft of my book Fear of Nothing in one month.
I bought my car on a five-hour shopping trip — and I am still driving it 12 years later.
On one day, I moved into the house where I live now.
A few months before that, it was a ten-minute meeting at which I learned that I had to move out of my former house.
It took an afternoon to create and design the Fear of Nothing blog.

Most of these examples might seem prosaic, but that’s the point. It doesn’t take inspiration or magic to create change that matters. Lasting change comes out of perfectly ordinary actions on perfectly ordinary days. Take a few moments and think of similar examples from your own life. Or take two or three minutes and write them down.

✎

For each occurrence on your list, think of the before and after. Pick out the pivotal day and compare where you were at the beginning of the day with where you were at the end of the day.

Now think of what you might be able to do today (or tomorrow if the day is effectively over as you are reading this). Think of things you could do that would create some kind of lasting change. Could you do any of these things?

Learn how to use something
Learn the answer to a question that you’ve been thinking about or need to know
Fix something that’s broken
Figure out where to put something
Meet someone new
Get rid of something you aren’t likely to use again

You’ll probably think of dozens of things you could do. Most of them might seem insignificant, but any one of them is enough to keep tomorrow from being a repeat of today.

Most likely, you’ve already made some lasting changes today. Make a point of remembering every change you make for the rest of the day today and tomorrow.

Creating lasting change can become a habit, and it starts with this question: “What changes have I made already today?” Soon you will be asking, “What else can I change today?” When you make progress every day, it makes more of a difference in the long run than planning or even self-discipline. You can change your life a little bit at a time, and if you do it day after day, it adds up, before long, to a different life.

Takin’ Care of Business

2009-07-19T17:03:00.001-04:00

One of the most enviable qualities you can have in tough economic times is the ability to find comfort in your work. If just doing the work you do can make you feel better, that sure beats sitting around worrying about the economy or wishing you could go shopping the way you used to.

Finding comfort in your work is a difficult idea to explain when most people experience work as one big hassle. Just getting to work is an exasperating process for most of us, so how can work bring you back to a feeling of relaxation, comfort, and confidence?

Then I realized that there is an old song that explains all this. It’s a song by Randy Bachman called “Takin’ Care of Business.” You have probably heard this song; a recent survey decided it was one of the 10 songs that rock bands play most often, and it’s easy to understand why. First, it’s not that hard to play, and second, it talks about about the envy people have for the way rock musicians get paid to do something they enjoy. (Click the link to hear the song performed by Czech band Minulý Století.)

You’re probably not a rock musician, but you can put yourself in the same position in almost any kind of work just by taking on the attitude that you’re some kind of rock star at what you do. Try it. I think you’ll see what I mean.

Why To-Do Lists Don’t Work

2009-06-18T15:42:00.004-04:00

Why don’t to-do lists work? I know this is a question people are thinking about, because I saw it in a news headline this week. But the story didn’t have the answer.

People try to make this a complicated subject, but it really isn’t so complicated. No system, no mechanism, no way of thinking will allow you to do more things than you have time to do. A to-do list is just a list of ideas you had. What do you expect it to do?

When people say their to-do lists don’t work, all it means is that, no matter what they do, many of the things on the list don’t get done. They didn’t get done because there wasn’t that much time. There is no magic in a to-do list that allows you to stretch time.

The only power a to-do list has is the power to channel your thinking. A to-do list prompts you to think in linear terms for an hour or two so you can do one task after another. But this works only if you keep the list short. How short? Ideally, just enough for an hour or two. A to-do list should be so short that you usually finish it the day you write it. If it always seems to be longer than that, you have made it too long. You are not being critical enough about the tasks you add to the list.

A long to-list doesn’t channel your thinking — it forces you to think in terms of branches, of one possibility versus another. It doesn’t help you focus. Just the opposite — it makes focusing impossible. The longer a to-do is, the harder it is to think just about the task you are actually doing right now.

A to-do list works only if you write down only the tasks you will actually do. Every time you add a task that you end up not doing, it is a distraction, a point of confusion, a waste of time and energy.

Of course, you cannot predict exactly which tasks you will do and which you will not do, but if your to-do lists have been giving you problems, it is safe to say that you could guess better than you have been. Is the task similar to ones that you have failed to complete in the past? Does your gut feeling tell you that you don’t have time? Is it something you dread the thought of doing? If you can answer yes to any of these three questions, do not write the task down. Either do it the moment you think of it, or forget about it. Make a real decision.

Making a to-do list work is as simple as that. Write down only the tasks that you will actually do, and your to-do list will work like a charm. Write down twice as many tasks, the way most people do it, and your to-do list will come back to bite you. If you give yourself too many things to do, none of the complex time management systems you hear about will help. But if you are asking yourself what you can actually do, then most of the time, you won’t even need a list.

Your Backyard Paradise Is Closer Than You Think

2009-06-08T08:35:00.020-04:00

I borrowed the title and picture from the cover of Home & Decor Magazine, which arrived in the mail today, to try to put a different slant on the point I made in my previous post. The magazine cover picture does look almost like a vacation spot — compare it, for example, to the Fear of Nothing cover painting. And I know people who have spent their vacation money on something like this to make their back yard look like a vacation. And after doing that, they went away on a vacation anyway. Because the back yard, however nice it looked, was still no substitute for a vacation.

Giving your back yard the look of a vacation is not enough to make you feel like you’re on vacation. The feeling you get from your back yard has a lot to do with what is inside the house. If a house is filled with hassles, the back yard is not far enough away to escape from them. How many of the possessions in your house are things that you are more than happy to get away from when you get a chance? Perhaps nearly all of them?

If you want home to be more like a vacation, you have to set it up that way. Set it up with the kind of possessions you would have on vacation. The stuff you like most, with less of the stuff that bothers you or gets in the way. When you reduce the clutter in the house, the house starts to look and feel a little more like a vacation house. And instead of the energy of the clutter spilling over into the back yard, the energy of the back yard begins to spill over into the house.

It becomes easier to notice and appreciate whatever is in the back yard. And it won’t so much matter whether it’s a forest or a desert, a neatly trimmed lawn or a meadow. Whatever is there gives you a chance to experience the elements of nature and make them a part of your daily life.

And so, if you’re looking for a backyard paradise, don’t start by ordering a swimming pool and a deck. Start by taking the clutter out of the house. That’s what really makes it work.

Connecting a Home to Its Surroundings

2009-05-29T21:01:00.009-04:00

Did you pick a home for the pleasant scenery surrounding it, only to be too busy with what you’re doing inside the house to notice or appreciate the surrounding landscape? Does it sometimes seem as if there is nothing to connect the inside and outside when the door is closed? The energy of the world around you naturally tends to connect to the inside of your house unless you do something to block it, and usually when this happens, it is because:

the television is on most of the time during the day, and
the house is filled with more stuff than it naturally holds.

Accordingly, the secrets to making the connection to the world outside are:

Turn the television off for most of the daytime.
Take away some of the clutter from the house.

You’ll find that the house seems more spacious, because you’re connecting to the energy of the space outside, and more luxurious, especially if you can pick up the energy of trees, water, or boulders nearby. People do this almost automatically when they’re selling a house, to make the house seem more valuable, but why not get the same benefits while you’re living in the house?

Even if it seems as if you’re too busy to appreciate your surroundings, it is really only that the energy is blocked. You can enjoy the feeling of the land where you live while you are busy washing the dishes, making a list of phone calls, or doing whatever it is you have to do — provided that the energy of the world outside isn’t blocked by what’s inside.

Find New Meaning in Spring Cleaning

2009-04-09T23:30:00.003-04:00

Spring cleaning is a time to clean everything you own. It’s something that is traditionally done in spring so you can clean with the windows open and not breathe quite so much dust and fumes as you go along. But spring cleaning can mean much more than this.

Cleaning is work, but that’s not what makes some of us dread spring cleaning. It’s the idea of “everything you own” that makes spring cleaning difficult. You can’t clean everything you own without looking at everything you own — and that brings up a whole range of questions. Probably for most of the things you have, the last time you saw them was the last time you cleaned them, so why do you have them — do you have them just to clean them? Or, why do you have so little time to do the things you ought to be doing with them? How did it happen and what does it mean that you have so many things and so little time? Time is so short that few of us honestly clean everything we have every spring. If we do not have time to clean our things, what are the chances that we will ever find time to use them? Just thinking of questions such as these, you might well ask, “Can’t I just put it all off till next spring?” After all, life is busy enough without have to clean everything too.

Whenever you feel overwhelmed by life and it seems as if you always have to do more faster, it is a good idea to stop and ask where that feeling comes from. The surprising answer is that the feeling comes primarily from the arrangement of material possessions around you. Your own stuff is the main thing that makes life overwhelming! When you feel overwhelmed, you imagine yourself having to do an enormous list of things, but no one could possibly make you do so many things. Having too many things to do is not a state of the world you live in. Having too many things to do is, most of the time, the simple result of having too many things. The world does make it frightfully easy to accumulate more and more possessions, but if you do so, you will eventually feel overwhelmed.

And spring cleaning, believe it or not, holds the answer. As you are going through your possessions and cleaning them, you will also find, if you are looking for it, the direction of your life. This sounds like a big statement, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Whatever you want for your life is reflected, one way or another, in the things you own. And your emotional reactions to the things you have, as you go through them, point you toward the things you want the most in life.

You are not really happy to have all of the things you own. You find some things that, if you are honest, it would make your life simpler and sweeter if you did not have them. If you are like most people, you will eventually discover that this is more than half of your possessions. As you find these items in your spring cleaning, pull them out and set them aside. Go through them at the end of the day, and decide to give away or sell those that are valuable enough. Then throw the rest away. As soon as you throw these things away, life will seem a little less overwhelming, and this is not an illusion. With a few of your excess possessions gone, everything in life really is easier.

There are also, if you are paying attention, possessions that you really, really wish you could do more with. It pains you, perhaps, that another year has gone by and this item is still sitting in its box or on a shelf, neglected, unused. It represents a part of your life that somehow you keep putting off for another day. You want to hold on to it for an extra second just to be connected to it. Pick out ten or twenty of these items as you go along, and take them directly to a prominent place where you can look at them at the end of the day.

Look at these possessions, the items that represent the life you wish you had, a life that keeps getting postponed and forgotten, and ask yourself: what could your life be if you would only allow it to happen? Fall asleep thinking about these possessions, and about what you could be doing with your life.

The next morning, you will wake up with a clearer idea of what you want your life to be. You may not know exactly what you want to go and do, but you will have a more active sense of what you want to do more of and what you want to do less of in life. Look at your possessions again, and you will find that many of them represent the things you want to have less of. Take these possessions away too.

Doing this will not add much extra effort to your spring cleaning — it may even save you some work if you can throw some things away instead of cleaning them — but it allows you to use the spring cleaning process to refine your material possessions so that they are more in line with the direction of your life. By taking away some possessions that clash with what you want, while you put more of your attention on the possessions that best represent what you really want, you are letting your material possessions become a better expression of the meaning of your life. In other words, you are letting the meaning of your life take material form around you. And all it takes to accomplish this is to approach spring cleaning while holding in your mind the question I mentioned about the direction of your life. At the same time you find the dust and dirt, you can, in a sense, find the meaning of your life. And that added possibility gives the process of spring cleaning far more significance than just the task of cleaning.

I recommend clutter as the starting point for anyone seeking to improve or understand their lives. Read all about this in my book Fear of Nothing. If you try this approach and discover something meaningful or create an immediate change in your life, or if you have such a story from your past, please share it by clicking the Comments link below.

The No Rainy Days List

2009-04-03T17:54:00.010-04:00

Today I am introducing the new No Rainy Days List. It is a list for anyone who agrees with the idea that life can’t wait for a rainy day — that it has to happen today. As a short way of saying this, I like to say that there are “no rainy days.” The following excerpt from the very beginning of Fear of Nothing explains more about what this means.

There are no rainy days anymore.

In an earlier age, a rainy day actually meant something. “Rainy day” was almost synonymous with bad news — you could till, plant, and tend your fields in fair weather, but rain would interrupt your plans and send you indoors.

As a farmer in the agricultural age, you needed to be out in the fields. You could not afford to waste a sunny day. If there was work that could be done indoors, you would set it aside and save it for a rainy day. When the rainy day arrived, you would have something constructive to do. The rain might keep you away from your most important work, but you could still make good use of your time. You might sharpen tools and patch the holes in your boots. When you were done, you would sit and wait for the rainy day to end.

This way of relating to the weather was a universal experience at one time, but now, just a few generations later, it is a scenario that most of us have never experienced. A thousand innovations arrived — railroads, telephones, shopping malls — that took away the significance of rain. Rainfall might dampen our spirits, but it can’t wash away our to-do lists. For most of the things we want to do, rainy weather makes no difference at all.

In the information age there are no rainy days to fill, yet we manage our lives as if there were. We still save things to do on the next rainy day. There are old cars to fix, thank-you notes to write, tax forms to fill out, flowers to plant, baby clothes to try to give away — not today, but “someday.”

What is someday? It is not a day on the calendar. It is certainly not today — today there is not a moment to spare! It could not be tomorrow either, or the next day, or any day next week. No ordinary day will make the time available for us to do any of the things we have saved up. Still we insist that we must do all these things someday. Someday must be quite an extraordinary day. Of course, someday is a myth. You could wait for the rest of your life and someday would never come. Someday is the rainy day of another age. Once, people waited for a rainy day to end. Now it is the opposite: people are waiting for a rainy day to come. Then they will finally do the things they have been saving. But of course, the rainy day never arrives. There are no rainy days anymore.

You give yourself most of the power of present-moment action just by deciding to take it — deciding that instead of giving yourself more things to do on a rainy day, or someday, you are focusing mainly on what you can do today. And when you state a decision like that to the world, you gain some of the world’s energy. This is extra energy you can put to use in the things you are doing. I created the No Rainy Days list as a way for you to declare this specific intention:

I'm not going to wait for a rainy day. I'm going to take action today on the things that my life is about.

You can add your name to the No Rainy Days list by signing the online “petition” at:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/norainydays

Or, if you prefer, click the comments link below to add a comment to this post. In your comment, if you wish, say something about why taking action today is important to you.

Of course, it also works to say something like this out loud. You can say, “I’m not going to wait for a rainy day. I’m going to ____________ right now,” filling in the blank with whatever is the most important thing for you to do right now.

Get Your Whole Life Organized in 10 Minutes!

2009-04-01T01:23:00.003-04:00

It’s the first day of a new month, and time to finally get organized. And not by the same old techniques like making lists or spring cleaning that have never worked in the past, either. With these quick tips from Michele Connolly of GetOrganizedWizard.com, you can get your whole life organized in just ten minutes!

Start your stopwatch and click here!

The Clothing Swap

2009-03-16T16:45:00.005-04:00

You want to breathe some new life into your wardrobe, but you can’t spend much money and you have too much clothing already: that’s exactly the situation that calls for a clothing swap.

A clothing swap is an event, basically a party, where people exchange the clothing they don’t want for something fresh and interesting. It can be a small event held in someone’s home or a much bigger deal in a nightclub or other public place. It doesn’t work as a medium-sized event, though, because you have to either make sure that everyone is about the same size or have at least 100 people in attendance representing all popular sizes. Most clothing swaps are strictly for women, and some are for infants and toddlers or for teenage girls, but there are also clothing swaps that invite everyone to attend.

Clothing swaps have been around for years, but have become a big thing this year. Spring cleaning is an excuse for some of the clothing swaps being planned for the coming weeks.

These are some of the strategies that can make a clothing swap successful:

A party atmosphere, with music, food, and drink.
A large changing room — don’t try to use the bathroom for this.
A special-event currency makes it easier for people to trade their clothing for a different size or style, and helps to ensure that no money changes hands (which could really put a damper on the event). On the other hand, some events have other ways of organizing the swapping that don’t require any bookkeeping at all.
There is always a huge pile of clothing left over afterward that can be taken to a local charity.

If you attend a clothing swap:

Take clothing that is nearly new or particularly flashy or glamorous. If clothing is worn out, just throw it away. Make sure everything is clean.
Don’t take any of your favorite clothes, but take the nicest stuff you have that you never seem to wear, or that doesn’t really fit you.
Take accessories, especially belts and scarves. Shoes too.
Make sure you don’t misplace the clothes and shoes you wear to the event.
Be prepared to tell stories about the clothing you’re swapping — where it comes from or where it’s been. The stories you get are part of the appeal of clothing at a clothing swap.
Try things on. Even if you’re not paying money, it doesn’t help to take home clothes that don’t fit.

One of the biggest clothing swap organizers is The Clothing Exchange, which hosts events in Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne, Australia, charging $18–$25 for admission. Another organization with a similar approach is Clothing Swap, Inc., which has had more than 150 clothing swap events in northern California, and which emphasizes the environmentally friendly aspect of exchanging clothing. If you’re in an area served by Craigslist, look for clothing swaps in the Groups category. Another site, Meetup.com, has a page specifically for finding a local Clothing Swap Meetup Group, especially in the United States, United Kingdom, India, and Australia.

Seeing how a clothing swap works can forever change the way you look at shopping, as it makes what you take out of your closet just as important as what you put in. Shopping might be about getting more, but swapping is about trading up, and at the end of the day, that is a way of looking at your life that can help you make whatever improvements you want to make.

The Groundhog Day Effect

2009-02-02T09:13:00.005-05:00

The movie Groundhog Day depicts a man forced to live the same day over and over again. Life seems like that sometimes, when today does not seem much like a new day, just the day after yesterday. The feeling that every day is just another version of the same thing is what I call the Groundhog Day effect. It’s a problem because when you start to expect more of the same, it becomes hard to find or create anything new.

In reality, every day is different, with different actions and different situations. You cannot escape the Groundhog Day effect by trying very hard to do something different, because you’re already doing something new and different every day. It just doesn’t feel like it. The way to escape the Groundhog Day effect is to put more of your energy into the things that make every day different.

That sounds easier than it is. To make it work, you have to become aware of the things that make every day the same. These are not the areas of action in your life, but the areas of inaction. That dull gray feeling that makes every day the same is the feeling of suspense as you wait for yourself to finally take action on a whole list of things.

These are all the things that make you say “someday”: “Someday I’ll get a new job,” “Someday I want to go to Hawaii,” and so on. It’s good to have ideas about what you might do in the future, but if you have too many of them and put too much of your energy and attention on them, you can completely lose track of the way life is going on before your eyes. You might even resent your current circumstances, like the character in Groundhog Day, and imagine that your life won’t really start until your circumstances improve.

The answer is not to wait for your life to get better. It didn’t work in the movie and it doesn’t work in real life either. Life changes when you change, and to make sure you’re really changing and not just kidding yourself, you need to start by making material changes that you can observe and verify.

That’s why Fear of Nothing starts with your material possessions. You probably actually use less than 10 percent of your possessions — the others just hang around day after day, making you say “someday” all the time. They have so little to do with your day to day life that you forget they are there. You stop seeing them. You might have to take photographs of your rooms to realize how much stuff they hold. Yet even if you look right at your possessions and don’t see them, they still make your life the same from one day to the next. By taking away the possessions you are least likely to use, you make your life a little more active, a little less stale. Do a little of this every day, and you can change your life day by day in a way that quickly adds up to the kind of profound change that affects everything you do.

Don’t wait for your life to turn into something more interesting. When you take the attitude that it’s up to you to make it happen, you become more alert to opportunities to do that. You will be surprised at how much difference you can make and how quickly you can change your circumstances. Take that approach for just one day, and the next day can’t just be a repeat of that. A repeat of what? Repeat the pattern of action and change, and life becomes an adventure in which you can’t predict what will come your way next.

Not Missing Out on Inauguration Day

2009-01-18T10:03:00.005-05:00

The United States will inaugurate a new president in two days, and at least one in 50 people in the country is personally involved in the event, going to Washington to be part of it, going to an observance elsewhere, or helping the rest of us keep up with the events. It is a ritual built up around an oath of office that, in a pinch, could be done by four people in less than a minute, yet millions of people will be spending most of the day on it. And others worry that they may be missing out.

It would hardly be practical to squeeze more than 5 million of us into the District of Columbia, yet we will try. And for the rest of us, rather than feeling left out, it is a good opportunity to do something completely different.

We all have ideas of things we might do someday, if we only had the time. If I only had a few hours in a row with hardly anyone interrupting me, I could _______. I’m sure something immediately comes to mind that you can fill in the blank with. Yet for most of us, these chances don’t come up often, only a few times a year. If you can take advantage of this opportunity to make any kind of change in your life, even just a change in your surroundings, there is no reason to feel that you are missing out. It is more like you are getting a head start on everyone else.

A Good Time to Throw Things Away

2009-01-07T13:20:00.005-05:00

You throw things away every day, but this month and perhaps this entire year are an especially good time to throw things away.

One reason is low fuel prices. Fuel prices are half of what they were recently and near their lowest levels in five years. They may not stay at these low levels for long, so it’s good to take advantage of the current low prices. Fuel is the main material cost of throwing things away — imagine how much fuel it takes to drive one of those big garbage trucks full of garbage. Throw things away now, and they can get hauled away at the current low fuel prices. It won’t cost any less to throw things away in the future, so if you have things to throw away, you may as well throw them away now.

The pressures of the current economic situation may provide other reasons to throw things away now. A slower economy makes more time available, especially if the company you work for has eliminated overtime for the rest of the year. Take a few of those extra hours to go through your possessions and pick out the good stuff. Turbulent economic times are also times when you want to be at your best, which includes being ready to respond when things happen. That makes it especially important to have the right set of possessions, and not to be bogged down in possessions that just take up space and get in your way.

In a scary economy, you don’t want to waste anything — and two of your most valuable and expensive resources are space and time. There has never been a better time to take control of your space and your time, and that’s a process that, for most of us, starts with throwing things away.

When Spring Comes 3 Months Early

2008-12-28T08:55:00.003-05:00

The weather today is a perfect example of why it doesn’t always make sense to plan ahead. The temperature is already (before 9 a.m.) higher than the high temperature that was forecast a day in advance, and if the sun comes out, we could have May-like weather and a record high temperature. It’s not the weather anyone could have planned on, but here it is, and it’s a great day to do something outside, or get an early start on spring cleaning.

That’s possible, of course, only because I didn’t fill up my schedule for today with lots of things that I absolutely had to get done. Keep your schedule loose and flexible, and you can take advantage of the opportunities that pop up . . . even a spring day at the end of December.

No Snow Days

2008-12-21T23:08:00.005-05:00

When I say, “There are no rainy days anymore,” I mean it doesn’t make sense to set aside tasks to do on days when you aren’t so busy. The things that interrupt our schedules are not frequent enough or disruptive enough to throw us off. That means, if you know you can’t do something today, it’s safe to assume you won’t be able to do it tomorrow either.

Today for me is a case in point. Heavy sleet overnight, still sticking to the roads at sunset, strongly encouraged me not to venture out of the house today. No matter. I spent the day at my desk doing office work. If I have to stay in tomorrow too I will still have plenty to do. If I were snowed in for a week I would finish all the work I have in mind to do at my desk, but I could easily create more by working ahead on one project or another. If I had saved something to do during a snow day, I would never get to it.

Much of the difficulty of life comes from saving things to do later. That is the one habit I want people to break. Simply do what you can today, and when tomorrow comes, do what you can do then. And when you come upon something that makes you say, “not today or tomorrow, but maybe someday,” at least be aware that “maybe someday” almost always means “never.”

E-Mail Bankruptcy and an Attitude of Boldness

2008-12-06T13:28:00.006-05:00

Do a blog search for bankruptcy, and most of the stories you will find will have to do with e-mail bankruptcy. This colorful term doesn’t mean what it meant just three years ago. Then, it would probably refer to abandoning an e-mail account because you were receiving too many irrelevant e-mail messages. Now it refers to erasing your e-mail inbox because you have more legitimate e-mail messages that you can realistically read.

Wired offers a how-to in its archive, from Lawrence Lessig. In brief:

Collect the email addresses of everyone you haven’t replied to.
Write a polite note explaining your predicament.
Ask for a resend of anything particularly pressing.

I should note that that is the polite, businesslike way of doing it. The process has become so common this year that you might just get a text message from someone saying, “I’m declaring e-mail bankruptcy.” If you get that message, it means they want you to write to them again if there is something you want them to pay attention to.

With 5,000 messages in your in-box and no time to read them, e-mail bankruptcy might be your only option. The proactive approach, though, is to adjust your comfort zone so that you respond before even 500 messages pile up — and to approach e-mail with a new kind of boldness that lets you quickly delete messages that, while they might be mildly interesting, really aren’t important to you.

This is the kind of boldness I write about in chapter 10 of Fear of Nothing. It comes from knowing what you want in life — or at least acting as if you will know pretty soon. The trivia of life, whether it takes the form of TV shows, gossip, or e-mail, won’t distract you nearly as much if you approach life with the attitude of boldness that comes from believing you have a purpose. You’ll be able to keep up with your e-mail by disposing of most of it quickly, and you’ll be able to keep up with your life by focusing on the best opportunities you can think of, and not giving a second thought to the lesser opportunities that pass you by.

Material Abundance and Feeling Abundant

2008-11-27T12:17:00.002-05:00

The Thanksgiving holiday is a good excuse to reflect on the material abundance of our time. The ordinary person in 2008 has five times the material possessions of 50 years ago, and orders of magnitude more than the kings and queens of five centuries ago.

The relative material success of our time comes as a surprise to many people just because they don’t feel so prosperous. In strictly material terms, though, we are astonishingly prosperous compared to any other period in history.

The great irony of this situation is that often, we keep so many material possessions just because we do not feel abundant. We keep things we don’t use and realistically won’t ever use because it makes us feel like we have more. These things, though, turn into clutter, an obstacle that gets in our way and keeps us from doing whatever it is we are trying to do. Material possessions that are supposed to help us do things, instead keep us from getting things done.

It is not so hard to turn this irony around. Today, think about the value of the things you have. Look at how much you have and start to add up how much you could do with the things you have. Take it all in. The feeling you get when you realize how many possibilities you have will make it easier to have fewer possessions — and to get more done. With a feeling of abundance, it is easier to keep the possessions you use and take away ones you don’t really want.

Commercial Clutter

2008-10-18T18:26:00.005-04:00

This post originally appeared in The Commercial-Free Mind, March 2004.

Yamayama

Many people don’t realize how many useless thoughts they have running through their heads until they try to meditate. Meditation instructors say stray thoughts are the greatest obstacle in teaching Americans to meditate. Most of us, when we try to sit quietly and not think about anything in particular, find ourselves confronted with a rapid-fire sequence of thoughts, perhaps something like:

How can I keep Fluffy from eating Waffle’s food? Laura looked so goofy in that plaid jacket! I hope I can find my library card. When was the last time I checked the mail? What if I can’t get that stain off the dashboard in the car? Why can’t I be rich so I wouldn’t have to work?

One meditator coined the word “yamayama” for the imaginary noise of these incessant thoughts. When such uncomfortable ideas demand attention, meditation is not the relaxing exercise it is supposed to be. It is hardly a surprise that most people who try to meditate find it stressful and feel a strong urge to give up the attempt.

Of course, meditation is not the cause of yamayama. Needless thoughts run through your mind all day, and they become obvious anytime you get quiet enough. To make matters worse, most people think mostly the same thoughts day after day. Meditation is one technique people have used to quiet those thoughts to some extent, but you can start to control the thoughts as soon as you know where you come from.

Yamayama Now on Sale!

If you examine the style and substance of the random thoughts that clutter your mind, you will find that they have a striking similarity to television commercials. Indeed, one description that’s been given for mental clutter is that it is like five televisions at once, all playing different commercials. Television commercials and their commercial agenda are the source of the most recognizable form of mental clutter.

This commercial clutter is more than a distraction that makes it hard to sit still. Commercials, after all, are based on the idea that your life is not good enough. Make that the theme of a stream of random thoughts, and it can make you upset with your life and unhappy with yourself. When your thoughts echo the ideas you’ve picked up from commercials, they break up your flow and can give you the feeling that you’re not getting anywhere.

Living the Questionable Life

Of all the ideas in the commercial agenda, it’s the questions that don’t have simple, obvious answers that have the most impact in the long run. The impulse to find an answer makes these questions seem more important than they are; it’s part of the reason they stick with you. But if you don’t prioritize the questions in your life, you can end up spending time thinking about questions like, “How do you know how fresh your beer really is?” If this sounds like a reasonable question, you soon start to make up your own variations of it.

Commercial questions can lead you to start questioning everything in your life. Commercials are designed to break down your confidence, to make you feel uncertain so that you’re no longer sure you don’t need the product they’re trying to sell. But as soon as they persuade you that everything in your life is questionable, you have questions about everything running through your brain. Most of the questions are just alternate versions of questions from commercials.

These sound like reasonable questions, but you can trace them back to the commercial messages where, in all likelihood, they originated:

Which tastes better?
Where do I want to go today?
How can I get people to pay attention to me?
What does my car say about the kind of person I am?
Can anyone tell?
How do I know I’m getting the best price?
What will all my friends think?

Some are more obvious than others, but they all form the basis of multiple commercial messages you’ve seen. Try to spot similar questions as they pop up in your mind, and you’ll probably be able to trace their commercial origins too. As soon as you recognize the origin of a thought, you can decide to think something different.

A Commercial-Free Mind

Make a practice of tracking down the commercial questions in your mind, and your mind will start to get quieter. You’ll be less easily distracted and able to think more clearly about the things that matter to you. Think of it as having a commercial-free mind. The effect of quieting the mind is the same as the beginning stages of meditation without having to take the time to meditate. And that’s what meditation teachers tell me their students really want.

The Costs of a Messy Desk

2008-10-08T11:44:00.002-04:00

How clean your desk at work is is mainly a matter of style — but not entirely. Writing this morning in Fortune, Mina Kimes describes the “clean desk policy” at Audi, which parallels that of dozens of other corporate workplaces. The reason for a clean desk? “We want to create a sophisticated atmosphere,” says executive vice president Johan de Nysschen. “It’s conducive towards organization.” But appearing competent and sophisticated is not the only argument in favor of a relatively organized office desk.

As Kimes reports, “Studies estimate that the average desk jockey now piles about 36 hours of work on his workspace at any one time,” and that is about a one-week backlog. The risks of keeping such a large backlog on the desk surface are considerable. Tasks can get lost or mixed together. Worse, secret information could be stolen. In my work in banking, the main reason for keeping desks neat is to keep customer data from falling into the wrong hands.

A one-week active backlog of work is probably not realistic anyway. If you can’t finish most of your pending work by the end of the day, and organize the rest so that you know what it is when you come back to it, then imagining that you are really going to finish it all is just wishful thinking. In business, priorities change before the week is over, so you are just being realistic by preventing the backlog “heap” from extending that far.

Of course, filing everything away, then forgetting about it, is even worse. And you don’t want to force yourself into a workflow that goes against your nature. The key to desk success is being aware of what is in, on, and around your desk, so that you can get rid of things as they become obsolete or irrelevant. When your desk is free of clutter, you are looking at your actual work — and that can only make you more productive.

How Much Clothing Does It Take?

2008-10-02T11:55:00.004-04:00

Some people know they have too much clothing. Others are not sure. But the amount of clothing a person needs is far less than most people imagine.

The confusion about clothing comes from the huge improvement in the durability of textiles that happened a generation ago. Clothing made since 1990 is about five times as durable as clothing made before 1970, and we have not yet fully adjusted to this.

Before 1970, everyone needed to keep buying clothing. If you forgot to buy clothing for a season or two, you would find yourself wearing clothing with holes in it. Today that could never happen. If you forgot to buy clothing, within ten years you might be noticeably out of style, but the clothing you have already, if it had to, would probably last for the rest of your life (or until your clothing size changed). Yet people keep adding clothing to their wardrobes as if it were a necessity.

You may wear out your favorite clothing, but don’t wait for that stuff you don’t quite like to wear out. You will not wear it enough times for that to happen.

You do not need a closet full of clothes just to be assured that you will have nice things to wear. There is no need to keep second-rate or stylistically incorrect clothing that you are not likely to wear often. From chapter 11 in Fear of Nothing:

Do not worry about throwing too much of your clothing away. It is more powerful to wear clothing that is “you” over and over again than it is to wear clothing that is “totally not you” for even one day. You need to have enough clothing to get from one laundry day to the next, but what that means is that you only really need your favorite clothing.

Some people who have a closet that is a little too crowded think they need to remedy that by buying clothing a little slower, but that is not the best place to start. You might well need to raise the standards of the clothing you buy, but the quickest way to raise your standards is to go through the closet and take away much of the worst clothing that is there. Then, you’re much less likely to buy more clothing that’s like the clothing you just took away.

If you have lots of nearly new clothing that you will never wear again, please go to the trouble of donating it to a charity thrift shop. More people than ever are buying their clothing in thrift shops now because of the state of the economy, and the money that is raised there typically goes to help hold your community together, a task that is especially urgent now. The thought that some of the clothing you have that is “just not what I wear anymore” could help someone else look good may make it a little easier to part with it.

Do you have too much clothing? What is your approach for weeding out the clothing you don’t like anymore? Please use the Comments link below to add your thoughts on the subject.

What Are You Setting Yourself Up For?

2008-09-14T06:57:00.006-04:00

My friend Rhoda had told everyone about the health benefits of ginger, so it wasn’t too surprising when she came back from a weekend goal-setting workshop and said she had a plan to start selling ginger to the world. She even showed me the plan, 15 pages of circles, lines, and small handwritten notes. By Friday, though, she wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know how to do the first thing on my plan,“ Rhoda said. The plan called for her to invent a new kind of gingerbread that she could feature on the ginger infomercial she would be making. This week, she was supposed to bake just any loaf of bread to get herself started, but she hadn’t been able to do it. She had a bread machine, but couldn’t find it. “I’ve looked all over the place,” she said. “It has to be there somewhere.” Maybe she could bake a loaf of bread in the oven, but that was something she had never done — and her best loaf pan had a casserole in it. Besides, she wasn’t so sure she could make money selling ginger in an infomercial. Infomercial products were supposed to sell for $50 or more — how could she do that with ginger, which you can buy in any supermarket for about a dollar? Maybe she would need to pick a different product. Sighing and deflated, Rhoda didn’t look like someone who would be accomplishing any of her goals over the coming weekend.

It would seem that success in life would depend on knowing what your goals are, but there is something that is more important, and that is setting yourself up for success. In fact, if you pick the wrong goals, you are setting yourself up for failure and frustration. And no matter how good your goals are, if you manage your life according to your goals, you are likely to make progress only on your good days, when you are feeling energetic and optimistic. But even without knowing what your goals are, you can set yourself up for success — and you can make progress every day, on bad days and good days alike.

Most people’s lives are so full of hassles that they know in advance that any goal they set is going to be a challenge. Something as routine as doing their annual tax forms could leave their heads spinning for days, and that’s even before they find everything they need and get started on the forms themselves. It’s hard to feel optimistic about your direction in life when everything you can think of doing involves some kind of hassle.

The key to success, then, is to get rid of the hassles — get set up for an obstacle-free approach to all the routine and predictable things you know you will want to do. When we talk about getting rid of hassles, this can include reprogramming yourself so that you don’t have an automatic negative reaction to problems and subjects that you know will come up in your life. It can mean learning specific skills so that you can do routine things smoothly.

But no matter what you want to do, getting rid of hassles means taking away whatever clutter is in the way. And that’s why I suggest clutter as the place the start when you’re ready to make something of your life.

If you have clutter, it gets in the way whenever you are trying to do anything. When Rhoda couldn’t find her bread machine, it had to be hidden among many other possessions she wasn’t using. She would do better to set her ginger infomercial goal aside to focus on clearing away the clutter so that she would have space to work with and a clear path to whatever equipment and supplies she might want to use. After a few months of progress on the clutter front, she would be ready to spring into action. Then, baking a loaf of bread wouldn’t have to be a one-week goal — she could do it in the five hours it actually takes. And if she changed her mind and decided to pursue a different goal, she would be ready to do that too.

In truth, you can have no large goals at all and still move your life forward every single day. It might seem that you need goals to give your life direction, but the direction of your life never actually comes from goals. Your direction comes from your actions. If you have all the right goals, but you are taking the wrong actions, you are still moving in the wrong direction. But if you take action every day to remove hassles from your life and set yourself up for success, you can be sure you are moving in the right direction, whether you know what your goals are or not.

Pretend You’re Moving

2008-09-08T08:58:00.003-04:00

In Fear of Nothing, I mention moving as one of the events that can change your perspective on your possessions. Moving is so expensive, in such an obvious way, that you know you cannot move everything. You have to let go of some of the less important items. But you don’t have to wait till you move to get the benefit of this change in perspective. You can start preparing for your next move, even if you have only a vague idea of when it might be. Or you can pretend you’re moving.

In the Happiness Project blog, Gretchen Rubin wrote recently about moving as a chance to do some clutter-busting. She suggests a good set of questions you can ask to get at the real value of things. Some of the comments readers have added to that blog post highlight the suspense of clutter and the sense of relief in letting it go.

Space Journaling

2008-09-03T00:11:00.011-04:00

Sandy Grason writes regularly on the use of journaling for personal transformation. I came across an article of hers that addresses the basic problem of clutter in the way that I advocate in Fear of Nothing, by focusing on the quality of space, but with a flair I couldn’t pretend to imitate. Sandy graciously offered to let me repeat her article here.

What’s In Your Closet?

We moved this weekend. Two adults, two fabulous little girls and one little doggie named Lily Madonna. Wow, do we have a lot of ‘stuff’! (Lily Madonna only had one box, so she’s really not the problem here).

It reminded me of a really funny bit George Carlin does about humans and their stuff. Have you seen this? He says that our houses are really just piles of our stuff with little covers on top. He makes me laugh. My friend Rick Wright teaches a program called “Clean Your Closet – Change Your Life” and his best advice to me when I’m feeling overwhelmed has always been “go clean out your closet”.

It’s amazing how much a crowded, unorganized, overstuffed space can weigh you down. And it’s equally amazing at how quickly you’ll feel your energy shift when you begin clearing out your space.

As much as I procrastinated about cleaning out and packing up our home, I felt immediately energized to watch it going out the door, on its way to our new home or to someone who will need it, use it or love it.

It also made me laugh at how ruthless we became as the minutes ticked away. Items that had been tucked away, like priceless treasures were quickly released in the heat of the moving day “Packing Palooza”.

So as I sit in my new office space, setting up my desk, computer and asking myself if this office space is worthy of a Hot Mogul, Rock Star Author and Empire Builder, I want to ask you the same questions.

Is the space you are living and working in supporting you in creating the life of your dreams? Or is it weighing you down with heavy energy from the past? Everything has an energy to it. Your thoughts have energy. Your house has its own energy. Your shoes have energy, too. (My shoes definitely say; Hot Rock Star Mogul!) :D

Today I would like you to take a moment and write about the kind of spaces that fill you up with good energy. Create a ‘dream space’ that you’d like to spend time in each day. It doesn’t matter if you live in the Midwest and you want your dream space to over look the ocean. Just write whatever is in your heart. And be as specific as possible. Write about what kind of fresh flowers you would like and the color of the floors and walls. Close your eyes and get a clear picture of you sitting in this space, and take time to ‘go there’ in your imagination.

Once you’ve created this “power space” that will fill you up with good energy, go there every day, for 5 or 10 minutes. And see if there are items that you can manifest in your waking space that will do the same thing. When you take the time to surround yourself with a creative, nurturing space (and people, for that matter), your life will reflect all of the good energy back to you.

Sandy Grason is a Rock Star Author, Int’l Speaker & Hot Mogul. Get your name on the Guest List for Sandy’s next Virtual Cocktail Party®, gain access to private videos, articles, tips, tools and strategies. Take the Hot Mogul Quiz and get Free Gifts including Free mp3 Vision Exercise now at www.SandyGrason.com

Book Cover Revealed

2008-08-06T13:49:00.004-04:00

Readers have been asking for months what the Fear of Nothing book cover will look like. Finally, here it is.

The design is based on contrasting colors: black on top, with white lettering for the title, and tan at the bottom, with a splash of bright colors across the middle in the form of a tropical beach pavilion scene.

An eight-word summary of the book’s themes, “no clutter/no to-do list/a new day,” appears at the bottom of the cover and can also now be seen in the new title graphic for this blog, which incorporates details from the book cover picture.

I expect the hardcover book edition of Fear of Nothing to be available in time for New Year’s Day.

How I Went From Writing About Computer Programming to Writing About Life

2008-07-30T09:41:00.007-04:00

There is good news on the book Fear of Nothing. A week ago I got the 7th draft back from the editors, who say it’s now final. I am now getting the book ready to go to press, and to record as an audio book. It’s my goal to get the book in your hands in time for your new year’s resolutions — which I hope will include tearing up your to-do list (more on that as the new year gets closer).

The world knows me as an author of books on computer programming, and now I’ve written a book about how to improve your life by taking away the clutter and to-do list. The subject of my new book surprises some people, so I’ve written a story that explains how it all came out of my longtime interest in the way people make decisions.

You Have to Balance Before You Can Juggle

2008-06-26T16:37:00.009-04:00

“Please don’t talk to us about living in balance. No one does. Even space shuttles veer off course during the trip, and they have computers to guide them. Just teach us how to be better jugglers.”

That was the desperate plea of a woman who had organized an event at which Joan Borysenko was about to speak. Did Joan fall for this line of reasoning? Not really, even though she today wrote a blog entry supposedly “busting the balance myth.” I don’t know if she really meant that or it was just an attention-getting headline, but after four paragraphs, Joan comes around to admitting that balance is not a myth, but a reality. If we fall over, our productivity suffers. “When I’m in balance,” she writes, “the unbalanced hodgepodge of things on the to-do list are accomplished more effectively.”

The failings of juggling as a life metaphor are easy to see if you approach juggling in its literal reality. How many of the people who aspire to “juggle” their lives ever actually picked up three balls, or bean bags even, and tried to juggle them? It’s not nearly as easy, or as practical, as it looks. I juggle, not well, but well enough to know that it isn’t possible to do it all day long. (Incidentally, the world record: 11 hours 4 minutes 22 seconds.)

If you juggled three balls for three minutes you would know that the idea of choosing between juggling and balance is nonsense. Lose your balance while juggling, and all three balls fall to the floor, and you may have to adjust your stance to avoid hitting the floor yourself.

And so someone who asks to be a “better juggler” as an approach to an out-of-control life is really saying, “I’m not ready to face reality. Let me try to live in my fantasy world a little longer.”

It is important to be gentle with people who are not ready to face reality, but let’s not keep this life-juggling myth alive. The real reason people try to keep so many metaphorical balls in the air at one time is fear. It is fear of nothing, the fear of what they would become if their hands were empty. Take away the fear and you soon find that you are juggling only for sport — not as a way to try to keep up with an impossible life, but just for the thrill of it. And that, frankly, is what juggling should be.

Nothing in the News

2008-06-03T10:12:00.004-04:00

This short (0:41) news reel catches most people off guard.

It’s just as compelling the second time you watch it if you read the crawl, the headlines at the bottom of the TV screen.

Imagine if a news channel really would say, “Stand by . . . we’ll bring you the news as soon as something happens.”

It’s not just about news. In this crazy world, we tend to think we have to be ready for anything. But the bigger challenge is to be ready for nothing.

Traveling Light

2008-05-26T13:32:00.003-04:00

You take for granted that you can check at least one bag when you fly on an airplane, but that is about to change, starting with American Airlines. They’ll be charging a $15 baggage fee for most passengers who travel with baggage. And that’s the fee for the first bag. As of two months ago, a second bag will set you back $25 on any major airline.

The airlines have little choice. Jet fuel costs more than gasoline, and airlines have to get something for the fuel costs of carrying baggage. By 2010, I have to imagine, most airlines will be charging according to the weight of your checked baggage. Now is a good time to learn how to travel light.

Many people already know how. Just ask my friend and colleague, economics journalist Suzanne Garland. “The change doesn’t really affect me,” she told me. “I have a suitcase, but I hardly ever take it with me.”

One key, Suzanne said, is knowing what will be there already at your destination. If your hotel room will have an iron, you can take clothes that might need ironing. That makes it easy to take low-bulk clothing that doesn’t take a lot of space in your bag. If the hotel provides shampoo and toothpaste, you don’t need to take that along with you.

When you’re traveling around, you don’t need as much clothing. The usual rule of wearing something different every day doesn’t apply if you’re going somewhere different every day.

Traveling without a suitcase, you’re less likely to go shopping or collect souvenirs. After you get to the airport for the flight home, you can go through your carry-on bag and throw away maps, notes, and other things you picked up along the way that you won’t be needing at home.

Baggage is not the only way to get your things from place to place. Especially when you’re heading home, you can mail a box of things to yourself. Now that airlines will be charging for the cost of baggage, it could cost less to mail your dirty clothes home than to take them on the plane. And you have a smaller chance of losing things in the mails than in an airline’s baggage handling.

What do you do to travel light? What keeps you from traveling light? Add your comments by clicking the Comments link below.

Stuff: A More Complete Picture

2008-05-19T14:57:00.002-04:00

The key word in Fear of Nothing is stuff. If you’re drowning in stuff, or just slowed down by having stuff in the way, Fear of Nothing is designed to help you reach a more productive understanding of stuff so that you can keep the stuff that helps you and get rid of the stuff that’s in your way. But Fear of Nothing focuses on just one little corner of the world of stuff. Annie Leonard has created a 21-minute movie that shows a more complete picture of stuff — where it comes from, where it goes, and why we all seem to have so much of it. It’s based on the high-school economics model of production and consumption, but fills in the more unsavory details of the process.

Especially take a look at the “Consumption” chapter. It explains the ideas behind the clutter that slows us all down. As Annie puts it, “We have more stuff, but we have less time for the things that really make us happy.” See the movie at:

http://www.storyofstuff.com

Who’s Afraid of Nothing?

2008-04-05T13:41:00.004-04:00

Fear of nothing provides the title for my new book, so what is it about? Who’s afraid of nothing?

Actually, everyone is. Fear of nothing is part of the human condition. It is the kind of thing philosophers like to consider, because it can’t be adequately understood without a lot of deep thought. And yet, as hard as it is to explain, it is easy to see that something is up.

As Sara puts it, “We always have to be doing something . . .” Please read Sara’s whole paragraph on the subject:

A Fear of Nothing

Or look at this way: When a room is so empty that you can hear the echoes from every wall, what is it that makes it seem eerie? When you tune in a television station and it’s nothing but static, why does that seem creepy? When you go into a store and half the shelves are empty, why do you leave so quickly?

Since I’m a shaman, I’m going to go out a limb and say that there is an explanation for all this — that it has to do with the way we humans are sometimes more like lizards than is good for us.

I suppose that sounds freaky, but it’s literally true. Deep down inside the human brain, the actual core of the human brain is a brain that is virtually identical to the brain of a lizard. It thinks lizard thoughts, primal thoughts that are never any more profound than ideas of comfort and continued existence. And it is so nearly identical in size, form, and function to the brain of a lizard that scientists actually call it the reptilian brain.

Some say the reptilian brain focuses entirely on survival, but it doesn’t do so in a way we would recognize. Our human brains entertain all kinds of lofty, paradoxical thoughts about fighting for survival, but the reptilian brain has no such concept. The closest idea we have to the reptilian-brain idea of survival is more like continued existence, which doesn’t sound very exciting.

Yet the reptilian brain is also the center of ideas about comfort, and this is the exact same idea of comfort that makes us sit one way in a chair, but not another way. When we move to a more comfortable position, it is the same way a lizard does it. When you stop to take a stone out of your shoe, there really isn’t any thought involved — at least not till after you’ve already taken off the shoe and turned it over to dump out the stone.

And so, we can learn about our reptilian brains by examining our thoughts about comfort. By looking at our comfort zones and the things discomfort makes us do.

Fear of nothing, then, is one of the most basic, primal forms of discomfort. If you feel uncomfortable because something is empty or seems hollow, that is fear of nothing. If you feel like you need something to do, that is fear of nothing. If you are always looking for more, that is fear of nothing.

And if you have so much stuff that the stuff is crowding you and so much to do that you have not the slightest chance of getting it all done, that is the ultimate proof that fear of nothing has an effect on your life.

This is from the draft of Fear of Nothing:

If you are like most people, all you have to do to prove that the fear of nothing exists is to sit with a once-valued possession next to a wastebasket. The possession to choose for this demonstration will depend on what your possessions mean to you. Most likely, it is something you have saved for an extended period, not because you have had a way to use it, but because of what it once meant. For someone, it could be a fish bowl that last housed fish some twenty years ago. For someone else, it might be yesterday’s newspaper. For another person, it might be the decorations from a party. Whatever the specific item, your rational thoughts tell you that you should drop the item into the wastebasket. The fear, though, tells you to wait — then prompts you to come up with a reason to keep the item. If you listen to the voice of fear, you might as well jump headlong into the wastebasket yourself if you throw this old possession away. Logically you know otherwise, yet the fear is hard to ignore.

Logically, we know we ought to have only the possessions we can actually use, and a schedule that contains no more tasks than we can actually do. There is no benefit whatsoever in the excess things and excess things to do. On the contrary, these things worry us. So what is so hard about getting rid of them?

Well, fear of nothing is what makes it hard. When we try to cut back, when we think about having an empty shelf and an hour with nothing in particular to do, there is a reptilian thought in the deepest recesses of our brains that says, “Not less. More!”

And so, completely logical approaches to clutter and time management are doomed to fail. Logic means nothing to fear of nothing, because there is no logic or rationality in the reptilian brain. If you want to get a handle on clutter and a busy schedule, you don’t really need logic. What you need is to change the way you do your life so that it is comfortable again.

Moments of Power

2008-03-15T13:46:00.010-04:00

I woke up this morning thinking, “I don’t know what I’m going to do today.” It can be a distressing feeling, not knowing what you should be doing. When you say, “I don’t know what to do,” the feeling that goes with that expression can contain an air of helplessness or defeat.

But then I remembered — the moments when you don’t know what to do are the moments when you are the most powerful. In these moments, you are not just reacting to what’s going on around you, or rushing to keep up with the world. These are the moments when you can choose what to do. You can do whatever is most important to you. You can choose the direction for your life.

If you say, “I don’t know what to do,” and then think of that situation as a moment of power, it can remind you that you are in control of your life. You are always in control of your life, but especially in those moments when you are ready to imagine something and decide on a course of action. If there is something you have been meaning to do, this is your chance!

And what better time to get going on something new than at the beginning of spring? It’s a time of rapid growth and renewal, and so it seems fitting that this is the day I am launching my new blog. I’m finishing up the process of writing and rewriting my book Fear of Nothing. I know I’m approaching the end of that process because my readers all say my latest draft is ready for the world to see. And so it’s time for me to start telling people about this book.

In this blog, I’ll be discussing ideas from the book, and some related ideas, and sometimes sharing simple stories and experiences. You can offer your own thoughts and stories by adding comments. I want to make sure the comments stay close to the subject of each blog entry, so if you want to share a thought or story that goes off in a different direction, e-mail me so I can create a new entry for that topic.

You’re probably wondering why the book is called Fear of Nothing, and what that phrase is all about, so that’s the subject I’ll write about next.