Posted on 07 Jul, 2010 -
The Bearable Lightness of Summer Being
At a time of year when it feels so great just to be, why are we haunted by the feeling that we haven’t done enough?
5 ideas for achieving more while working less
Including: The dangers of multitasking. Why time is like a garden. And the need to celebrate your achievements.
There is something about this summer weather that makes my mind, my troubles and my life seem lighter.
My mind has become so light in the heat today, in fact, that I’ve been sitting in front of my computer for some time now but my mind is just not here to do the job.
Half of it has drifted off to a meadow somewhere in search of the Field Scabious, Bird’s-foot Trefoil and Meadow Cranesbill flowers I’ve just been reading about in a book… half of it is walking along a beach at low tide - with the old abandoned boats, the blanched dry shingle and the hermit crabs loitering in the cool, wet rock pools.
If truth be told I’d rather not work at all but just spend all day watching birds at a marsh… weeding the vegetable beds… or just looking out of the window at the people strolling by in sandals.
The pleasure of just being…
It is this time of year for me, perhaps, when I feel that just being is enough. So much, in fact, that work and jobs and obligations feel like a hindrance…
Perhaps if I hadn’t been told too often as a child to “Stop staring out of the window” I could allow myself to enjoy just being more - without the guilt that I should always be doing something more constructive… Getting things done… Making myself useful… Earning more money… Keeping the house tidy… Keeping up with the chores…
… spoilt by the guilt that we should be working more
We are living during times when we actually work less hours, have labour-saving devices to do the housework, and enjoy more leisure time than ever. So why do we feel as if we never have enough time, never get everything done and are always in a rush?
Perhaps we are just spoilt? By which I mean that because we could quite easily spend some time by the sea… because we could quite easily be making extra money on the internet, learning how to paint in watercolours, making a phone call to our mother, or one of the hundreds of other activities that modern technology and our wealthy lifestyles allow us to do… then we feel that we should be - or deprived because we are not.
But the reality is that there are only so many hours in a day. There are only so many days in a week. And if we keep on believing we should be doing more then we will always feel disappointed or as if we are failing.
5 ideas for achieving more while working less
I do not have the answer to the conundrum of time, of life, of lightness and heaviness. But I do have a couple of interesting ideas and antidotes to offer…
Discovering the joy of ‘single-tasking’. The first idea comes from a Harvard Business Review blogger, Peter Bregman, who believes that multitasking is one of the bad habits we’ve developed in our time-strapped lives. We miss half of our phone conversations, for example, because we’re also trying to surf the net or make our breakfast at the same time.
“Doing several things at once”, he says “is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don’t actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.”
As an experiment, Peter spent a week trying not to multitask but rather to concentrate on one thing at a time only. The results, he says, were great and the process “delightful”. He not only got more done but enjoyed the processes more fully.
Jobs he’d been trying to avoid got done because he made himself concentrate on them instead of allowing himself to be distracted. He felt calmer and less stressed.
He lost patience with things like long meetings or pointless conversations that he felt weren’t a good use of his time. But found he had “tremendous patience for things I felt were useful and enjoyable”.
Know what your priorities are. If a sense of achievement is important to you, make sure you know what it is you feel are the most important things for you to achieve. On a day-to-day basis this may mean writing a list of things that need doing - and that are definitely achievable in the time you have available. At a different level, it is important to understand what our general priorities in life are so we can enjoy a sense that we are using our time on this earth well.
Celebrate your achievements. Many of us are prone to giving ourselves a hard time about the never-ending lists of things that need doing - yet we rarely congratulate ourselves (or even notice) the things that we have done. This week, make sure you give yourself a pat on the back for all the things that you get done - and actively do something to celebrate any bigger achievements.
A balance between work and play. As adults - and particularly as parents - we can get to a place where we feel that our main purpose in life is to make money, to maintain the home and to look after our children. But as John Ruskin said “There is no wealth but Life.” and “Life without work is robbery; work without art is brutality.” More than anything, surely, we are here to live: To love. To laugh. To create. And to be. It is not selfish to do things for ourselves.
See time as a garden. We all have our own very individual relationships with time and will have different images of it. For one person it may be something that is always escaping them - for another a space that needs to be filled. A nice suggestion in Tiki Kustenmacher’s book How to Simplify Your Life is to picture time as a garden that you are strolling through. “Here you go as fast as you like, run around in a circle, try other ways or just rest.”
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”
Henry David Thoreau
