Configure this…

Yesterday we got a start on building the configuration part of the framework for a system to organize goals, projects, and workflows. Today I’ll go a little deeper in explaining how you can use categories to organize your workload. Since a few of you have told me you enjoy the introspective parts of these pieces, I’ll write a little bit about how a significant part of my psyche chafes at this degree of organization and what I do to work through that conflict.

Of the categories that I use (Constitution, Craft, Community, Contemplation, and Competence), the one that takes up the most space in my planning and in my life right now is Craft. I tend to cycle through them, emphasizing one more than another at diffeent times. This is probably a common thing, maybe even innate. Many aspects of the world are seasonal or cyclical, it makes some sense, perhaps, that the order of our actions would be as well.

Because our realtionship is primarily a business one, let’s stick with craft for the moment. I’m not the only one in our office who wears several different hats. For some, you may be in the beginning of your real estate career at the same time you are pursuing creative work opportunities. For others, there might be an idea you’re excited about turning into a business. Maybe real estate sales is it for you and there are no other gigs.

If you’re working more than one business at a time—and you want to do each of them well and without consuming your entire life—you need to have a consistent system to organize all your projects and tasks. It’s easy to run off the rails when you hit even a gentle turn if you aren’t organized and prepared. The answer is very simple: keep track of your projects tasks in different categorized lists. It sounds so obvious. Why even bring it up?

I bring it up because most people’s default system is a list that they compile on the fly, or worse: you let your email inbox determine what you are going to do next. Neither of these systems satisfy a cardinal rule of effective action:

be deliberate and intentional in deciding your next action.

When you’re busy it’s easy and tempting to bail on configuring your workload. Add to that our tendency to emphasize one domain in a cyclical or seasonal way, and you risk ignoring huge, important swaths of your life until a mess builds and your focus then necessarily shifts to cleaning it up.

In my Evernote notebook for Craft, I have each transaction as a separate series of notes. I think of each client or transaction as a project. In my linear brain I need these distinctions between “domains”, “projects”, “tasks”; they signal a state of organization, facilitate the storage and flow of large amounts of information, and they reduce my stress by showing me the scope of work in front of me.

I usually spend some time at the beginning of the transaction thinking through the process with a particular client and then revising my transaction checklist template as necessary. A lot of my business includes helping clients solve issues prior to putting their house on the market. A deliberate approach here is often the difference between success and “meh”. Once I’ve got the process written down, I’ve usually put so much mental effort into it that I’ve internalized it and the written plan takes a backseat to action IRL. Periodic review is enough to keep me on track.

There are a lot of ways to configure your larger list. I encourage you to start looking for one that fits your work style.

This short description of configuring is woefully incomplete, and it is mostly silent on the obstacles that are certain to get in your way. I’m very interested in the obstacles. You can find any number of good descriptions of the process I’m describing; it’s basic project management. Good PM systems are everywhere. What is harder to find is good information on how to handle the internal roadblocks that many of us face when we get started on improving our approach to work¹.

Here’s one that’s popping up for me lately. My strong tendency is to take on a multitude of projects, more than I can comfortably handle. Some of these are intellectual projects that don’t have a concrete deliverable to shoot for. These projects are very satisfying; they scratch an itch that can become a rash if I don’t tend to it, and they’re not about work or money. But an even deeper need, one that spans the spiritual and intellectual, is a kind of raw solitude and contemplation. Carving out time for this kind of intense interior work is essential to my wellbeing. It is the yin to the yang of “productive” activity. It can take the form of writing, listening to music, very long walks with no distractions, etc. Generally, it requires time and distance from others. It can be very rigorous. It is not passive, usually.

For me, there is no seasonality to the need for solitude and interior presence. It must be a continual practice, even though the degree to which I attend to it may ebb and flow. If I don’t do this, the other areas of my activity fall apart. But the calls to business and projects are louder and more insistent than the quiet voice inside. I often struggle to hear that voice, but it never goes silent and I answer as often as I am able.

Joe

Cal Newport fields questions about this in his podcast. He has a new book out this week, A World Without Email. I put the link as a convenience. I don’t have any affiliate relationships. When I grow up and become a famous blogger, you’ll all be in on the joke when every post for the previous twenty years mentions Cal!

Go configure

It’s been about two weeks since our virtual meeting. How’s everyone doing with getting the important work done? Do you know what the important work is? Did you make a list of everything you want to do or must do? Okay, no problem, you can keep working on getting that part up to speed, and in the meantime, let’s talk about the strategies you might use to begin your practice in real life.

You’ve given some thought to what’s important to you. You’re continuing to refine those thoughts. You’ve gotten a start on the list of things you want to and/or must do. Let’s assume the list is long¹. A long list with no organization is not useless—it can give you a valuable overview of how much you have taken on. But it can be much more valuable if you categorize it.

We talked a little bit about this in our meeting; identifying the roles you play in your life or the domains in which you act, is a good way to get started. I’ve done this a few different ways since I started the practice in my twenties². I’ll use my current system as an example, but I’d feel better if you tell me you’re working this out your own way, according to how your heart and mind see your place in the world.

My current set of categories: Constitution (the physical domain: health, fitness, et.), Craft (everything having to do with bringing intention to life in the world of commerce), Contemplation (mind and spirit, including writing, mental health, creative pursuits), Community (family, household, friendships, political stuff, etc.), Competence (intellectual pursuits, all types of learning and skill acquisition).³

Creating a set of high-level categories is the beginning of the process of configuring. Remember? Capture, configure, control.

This list-making and categorizing will seem obsessive to some folks. I get that. I do it because I understand the world in linear and hierarchical ways, and I hope to do a lot of things before I die⁴. You might have a less linear perception of things. It’s not immediately clear to me how to incorporate the kind of organization I’m proposing in a way that would be helpful to someone who sees the world as a continuous whole. I do see the world that way at times. I visualize it as an organism with distinct parts that will cease to live if they are separated from the whole. My liver, to function effectively, requires different inputs than my lungs. Maybe this is a good analogy; what I’m calling domains, and naming a certain way, are analogous to organs of the body. They each have a function that requires specific inputs to generate the desired outputs.

In any case, the objective is to find a way to categorize your list of things to do so that you can approach your life’s work in a way that will help to maximize the effectiveness of your actions. Everything is directed toward that goal.

Your homework today is to continue with the work you’ve been doing to identify what you value, what is important to you that you want to direct your energy toward; to continue to capture everything you want and/or must do; and to begin to think of the different roles you play in life, or the domains in which you act, or the organs that make up the body of your life. Like me, you might change this list a number of times. That doesn’t matter. What matters is to start to think intentionally and deliberately about how you want to expend your finite energy and time. This is a great place to start.

Joe

I think the length of the list might be inversely proportional to one’s age. The older you become, the more of the foundational and time-consuming projects you will have (more or less) completed.
I threw that in because I’m a late bloomer; many of the things I should have done in my twenties I’m just starting in my sixties. Ugh. I wanted you to know that I did at least that one forward-thinking thing in my misspent youth. I’m not trying to make you feel bad if you’re older and just now starting it.
I promised you in a previous post to include a reference to Cal Newport in every post. This list is from his brain, it just happens to fit mine right now, too. I’ve already gone through three or more iterations of generating my own list, so I’m allowed to borrow without guilt.
I don’t want to do a lot of things for the sake of doing a lot of things. I want to do some number of things very well. There are occasionally some delusions of grandeur there, but mostly not.

Sometimes, breakfast is a big cookie

…but you have to earn it.

Forgive the virtue signalling that follows. I cook breakfast every day, and I have for years. Not a bowl of cream of wheat, but a real, hearty breakfast for me and Joanne. They are not as elaborate as they used to be, much more prosaic, but they are custom-made every morning.

This has become a ritual of our marriage that is interrupted only on rare occassions. Take today, for instance. Joanne has a short-term unit turning over and so she’s on a tight deadline. I have a very early (third! yay!) showing on a listing, and there are a number of other tasks to be done while we handle the big stuff.

So we each had a cup of coffee and a big, gluten-free, chocolate chip cookie (from Village Bakery). Both of us have serious chronic diseases that are best managed, in part, by controlling what we eat. These cookies are not on the list of controlled substances. Which brings me to my next aphorism:

Aim for perfection, and settle for the best you can do.

When I was a carpenter (in the good-old days) that was a phrase that went through my head numerous times each day. I was always trying to make things perfect, and every single time I fell short of the mark. The shortfall might not have been by much, but there it was. I would be paralyzed if I let my inability to perfect my work stop me.

Like all of these issues I’ve been writing about, this one might not be a problem for you. But my guess is that it is a problem for some of you.

When you’re starting out it can be difficult to discern the standards you are expected to meet. In our business only a portion of what’s important is information that’s easily found. My carpenter self could see the tightness of the joints I was making, or how plumb and straight the walls were. But who’s going to tell you that you didn’t do enough to prepare yourself for the tour you just completed with your new clients? Who’s going to help you do a post-mortem on that listing appointment? Or, even better, role-play beforehand.

One time, when I was working for my-brother-the-general-contractor, we were installing vertical siding. The siding had to be nailed to blocks that were supposed to be somewhat-precisely spaced underneath the plywood sheathing. Whoever was responsible for putting the blocks in the right places totally blew it.¹

My brother didn’t yell, but I never forgot what he told me, and the lesson of this mistake:

Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you don’t have to do it.²

It wasn’t even that hard to do it right. I was being careless. Not a huge deal, but it made the subsequent work that much harder.

So, aiming for perfection means just that. You are convinced that this is the one you are going to nail! You do the hard work to get it perfect. You believe you will get it perfect. And then you forgive yourself ex post facto because you will never, ever get it perfect. But, by believing you can, and trying hard to accomplish perfection, you end up with a product or service that is so good they can’t ignore you.³

So, yeah, I had a cookie for breakfast. But I’ve done the hard work of making breakfast damn near every day for a really long time. I aim to make breakfast every day of my life until I can’t do it anymore. But I’m not perfect. Sometimes I just have to eat the cookie.

Joe

It was me.
It doesn’t flow off the tongue as well as my other mottos, but I frequently use it to guide me.
Steve Martin said that first. Cal Newport borrowed it from him, and I borrowed it from Cal. I intend to have some reference to Cal Newport in every blog post, just to see if I can.

The dragon was angry today, my friends

The battle is fierce—and raging still! I woke up early and alert, yet the dragon pinned me down and would not let me rise. I summoned the strength to break free and I ran downstairs, hoping to elude it. But it followed, thrashing me with its sharp and spiked tail.¹ I knew I had to write to you early in the morning to make sure you started your day with words of encouragement and love. The dragon did not feel the same. Every paragraph I wrote was met with a stinging swipe from its claw and a jeering laugh, both cutting me deeply. I faltered, drank more coffee, checked my phone for some sign that would point to my eventual rescue. Alas. No help in sight. I struggled on in solitude.

That all sounds a lot better than: I woke up at the usual time, but I decided to stay in bed an extra thirty minutes for no good reason. Every sentence I wrote on my little blog sounded like bullshit. Ugh. I need to get my shit together. Maybe a second cup of coffee will get me out of this funk. Ugh. Whatever. I can skate by today. I’m mostly caught up. I can let a few things slide until I feel more motivated.

Maybe you’ve had a morning or two like this. It might be easier if there was a real dragon, something you would have to fight tooth and nail or lose your life. The metaphorical dragon is a much stealthier foe, much more difficult to fight. I can’t see it, I can’t even give it a name that seems to fit. Is it Lack of Motivation? Procrastination? Laziness? Ladder-Against-The-Wrong-Building Syndrome? Ugh.

I’m going to go with Procrastination because it’s the one that I have some ammunition against.

You’re in the minority if you never have to deal with procrastination. The problem is pervasive. I’ve given it a lot of thought and read a lot of other people’s thoughts about it.² Here’s what seems true to me.

Procrastination is the result of your subconscious mind not being on board with your conscious plan. This can take several forms. The form mine is taking today is self-doubt. That’s a tricky one because it doesn’t yield easily to reason. Here’s how I deal with that.

The other flavor of procrastination that you can fight with reason is more like this: you feel okay about yourself, but you have a vague unease that’s hard to pin down, and you know this inchoate feeling is keeping you from working on some task or project you need to begin. This happened to me recently when I had to price a listing that was coming to market shortly.

I sold this house to the owners twenty years prior when they called me to say, it’s time to sell. They had just bought a fixer in another part of town and they needed the money from this house to fund the new project. They were very excited and wanted to talk right then about how much money the house would fetch. Pretty typical conversation.

I’m obsessive about pricing. I rarely shoot from the hip. Being obsessive in this helps me in two primary ways. First, it gives me complete confidence when I discuss listing price and potential selling price as I advise my clients. This confidence is critical on a listing appointment or in any conversation with clients and other players. If you take the time, and make the effort, to become confident in what you’re saying, you will have a super power.³ Second, if the listing price is not bringing in activity and offers, the pricing work, if done well and thoroughly, gives you a strong basis for the often-difficult talk about price modification. Maybe that’s not important in this market, but this market won’t last forever.

This is a bit of a digression, but hang with me, it will all make sense in a minute.

On the call with my clients, they were like, “Joe, can you get us this price? If you can get us this price, then we’ll pull the trigger, spend $25K to get it ready, make all kinds of plans and irreversible commitments, and we’ll have enough money to do our new project!” I know this house, I know this neighborhood, I know this price was within the realm of possibility, though it was pushing it just enough to make me slightly uneasy.

I told them, no guarantees, but it’s possible to get their price. My fear, later on, was that they heard, “Absolutely I can get that price! No question!” It happens, right? But these folks are sophisticated and they probably heard exactly what I said.

There was a couple of months worth of work to be done on the house. I was helping to make sure it got done on time and to a decent standard. I didn’t do my pricing thing before the work began.

I hate flying by the seat of my pants. It makes me nervous. There was nothing to stop me from doing my work and confirming the price before they started spending money and making commitments, but I didn’t do it.

I was stuck in a loop of anxiety and procrastination. Which, if you think about it, is the stupidest thing ever. It makes no logical sense. But it is what it is. I needed a strategy to break the loop.

Being a person who thinks best in print (or cursive), I started typing. I went about it systematically, listing every thought I could identify that seemed to be involved in my reluctance to just do the damn CMA. There were maybe five of them. It would be too embarrassing to share them. Ugh. Whatever. I am what I am.

I took the five issues and wrote short rebuttals. These were no Stuart Smalley Daily Affirmations; they were concrete analyses of obstacles. The whole exercise probably took maybe half an hour. Facing this dragon was not too difficult, but doing so broke me through and got me out of this silly cycle.

There’s no big, dramatic blow up in this story. I put it off until I couldn’t wait any longer. Why? Because I wasn’t sure that my assurance of value to them was valid. I was afraid my detailed analysis would show that I was wrong. I didn’t want to face the possibility that they had just spent a significant amount of money on my erroneous gut feeling. Everything was fine, the value of the house was in the right range. There was no problem except the procrastination that produced in me a notable amount of anxiety that I could have done without.

I think my success with a deliberate approach to slaying the procrastination dragon in this instance might make me less likely to allow it to happen again. I know exactly what I will do differently because I completely thought it through. There will be other problems to trip me up, but I have a tighter grip on this particular one. That feels good.

Joe

P.S. It’s taken me forever to write this post because, well, who knows? I’m not going to proof it much because then it will never get posted. Forgive me my grammatical and other errors. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly, I always say.

P.P.S. It’s embarrassing to admit that I will procrastinate and over-cogitate. I’m pulling the curtain back because I hope you will find my experience helpful and useful.

Read that: ‘spike-ed. It sounds much better that way.
You guessed correctly! Cal Newport! Gold star for you. There are a lot of others, but Cal’s take on this is one I had never heard before, and it seems to hit the mark. I’m not going too deeply into it here; maybe in another post I will.
I’m talking here about confidence that’s based on something real. False confidence is much worse than no confidence.

Continuing to Capture

Capture. Configure. Control.

Let’s see if there’s more to get out of staying with capture a little longer. Remember, capture is the piece of the information/productivity management puzzle that involves identifying everything you have to do and everything you want to accomplish in the next however-long-you-decide period.

Is this really necessary? It depends. My assumption is that you are ambitious and driven to accomplish something dear to your heart. You might not know yet what that something is, but you are propelled to act. It’s safe to assume that, because you’ve chosen a field in which the work is demanding, complex, and completely uncompensated until you’ve produced something of value for the client, you are not an ordinary worker. No one takes on real estate sales as a career unless they have a minimum of confidence and moxie—and some powerful motivating factor.

If all of that is true of you, and you are actively working or trying hard to work your business, then you are submerged in complexity almost all the time. When the complexity of your work is unmanaged, the most common result is anxiety. I know this from my own experience, and from my conversations with colleagues over many years.

To decisively and finally end the anxiety, to increase the number of successful projects (sales in this case) that will move you toward your heart’s desire, you have to face and conquer the other dragon. The productivity dragon.¹

You will recognize this one, I’m sure. You get up early, you have a full schedule, you are anxious because you know the schedule is too tight and a lot of things have to go right to make it all work out. You skip breakfast and pound the caffeine (because THAT will help your anxiety!), you know you should at least make a list of what you have to do today to keep it from getting all jumbled up when the first unforeseen obstacle pops up, but you don’t because the dragon is breathing down your neck and you’re afraid if you stop you’ll lose momentum. The dragon doesn’t wait, and it doesn’t want you to slack off. It also doesn’t want you to have control.

Hopefully, that doesn’t describe every day. Maybe it describes enough of them that you want to do something to stop the madness. The answer is…

Capture!

Rather, the answer begins with capture. Remember: you’ve got moxie, and you’re going to need it because the real answer takes time and big effort.

So, back to the question, is this really necessary? The answer is, yes. It’s necessary if you want to avoid the pain of anxiety, and the physical problems that result from long-term excess stress.

I told you yesterday how to get started. Write everything down. Everything. Every task you have to do for every project you’ve given yourself in every domain of your life. If it will take more than two minutes to accomplish—write it down.

There’s a productivity system called Kanban. It’s super-simple, just three concepts:

Know the scope of the work
Limit work in progress
Track what you’ve completed

If you want a quick-start productivity system because Getting Things Done is too complex to implement this minute, you can’t do better than starting a Kanban board. Search it online, there will be a huge number of references to it. Here’s one I found that looks like it might be a good introduction. https://kanbanize.com/kanban-resources/getting-started/what-is-kanban

I hadn’t intended to go in that direction this morning, but if you are in distress, Kanban is a good way to proceed with some deliberate action. Because…

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly

Just get started. Write everything down the minute you have time. Take as many minuts or hours or days as you need to get it done. Forget about perfection. You can work on that later.

I’m intentionally not going too far into the weeds now, for two reasons. The first is that it’s a complex project and this is only a short blog piece. The second is more important: if you have to fumble your way through learning how to do this you will learn it better than if I spell it out for you. Your sytem will be yours. You will own it at your core and it will serve you for the rest of your life.

Is that reason enough to get started?

Joe

Directly lifted from Cal Newport’s podcasts.

Climb the ladder, but…

Hindsight may be 20/20, but what can we do to make foresight clearer?

At the risk of cramming too many clichés into the beginning of the post, here’s one of my favorites: go ahead and climb the ladder to success, just be sure you’ve leaned it against the right building.

What does this have to do with our current topic of your productivity as a real estate agent? Well, in my last post I tried to persuade you that identifying what is important to you is worth the hard work it takes to accomplish that task, but I didn’t make it obvious how that might be useful in your business practice. Some people are apparently able to move with great speed in business and in life without any of the kind of deep thought or self-reflection I’m encouraging. If a person like that truly exists, I envy them with my entire being, but for the rest of us, doing our best requires that we understand what it is we are aiming for.

In early phases of life, the work in front of you may be so obvious that you don’t need to think much. For me, almost none of it was ever clear. I had to fight for every crumb of direction and motivation. True, I was driven to provide for my family without having to think about it, but I was severely conflicted about how I would do that providing. That kind of conflict can be uncomfortable and even debilitating, but if you find yourself in that situation, the only way to sanity and peace is to face the dragon.

Oh, you haven’t met the dragon? Well, it guards the inner sanctum, that place where your true loves and your deepest desires reside. Don’t seek those and you won’t have a problem with the dragon. Start to search for those things that move you at your core, and the dragon is there to test you and make sure you are serious. The difficulty of the test often looks like doubts about the process and severe procrastination in attempting it. If you fail the test, it’s clear you were not yet ready to go deep.

The search for what’s important is the same search you do to find your deepest loves and desires. The search requires you to devote yourself, not simply to finding out what’s important, but to doing what’s important. And here’s the kicker: you have to devote yourself to doing what’s important even before you know precisely what it is.

What if I find out I was devoting myself to the wrong thing? you ask. Join the club. That’s life.

I’m being a little hard on you, but the point is, you stand up, dust yourself off, and start figuring it out from the place you find yourself at that moment. You’ll be farther along than you were when you started, but nowhere near the end of the trail.

I’m switching back to the “ladder of success” metaphor now: the sooner you figure out what’s important, the better chance you have of not having to move the ladder ’cause you’ve discovered you’ve leaned it up against the wrong building. Knowing saves you a lot of time, decades, maybe.

My inclination here is to begin preaching about how we err by using money and wealth as the primary—or only—metric of success and of what’s important, but I will be strong and resist. Money is crucial, I know. Let me gently encourage you to include money, but look beyond it and material things when you’re trying to measure how close you are to doing what’s important. The other measurements are not concrete, they are fuzzy and hard to grasp, but look hard and you’ll find them. When you do, you’ll be pleased with yourself; you’ll know something true that is not widely understood.

Besides, when you get your house in order and work on the important stuff, the money often follows. That’s simplistic, I know. I could say a lot more. Maybe later; it’s true enough for now.

Identifying what is important to you results in a kind of foresight. You know your path better than you did before. You don’t have to worry so much about making the wrong moves; you’ve figured out the principles and you let them guide you.

“We dutifully read to the end of your post; now, what productivity hacks do you have for us? That’s why we came back.”

Fine. Here’s something you can use.

Capture, Configure, Control.¹

As you’re beginning to root your actions in your values, you can get a handle on your work by getting your arms around everything you need to do. This is capture. I use Evernote for my basic capture, but there are any number of systems, including a yellow pad and a pen, that can work. I’ll go into this in depth in another post, but for now, pay attention to the volume of tasks you have in front of you. Make a list of every single thing you have to do. The list might be very long, don’t worry about that, just get everything down on paper. What you are doing is “closing open loops”²; you’re taking the burden of holding on to each item in your memory and giving it to the paper or the program. When I let myself get behind in capture, I catch up by making my list on an Excel sheet so I can assign priorities and categories and sort the list. The prioritized list I end up with might be long, but it makes it very clear what has to happen now and what can wait. Doing this enables me to have a degree of clarity that takes a lot of the pressure off.

Try it. Be exhaustive. Think about how you can improve the process as you work at it. Keep current. Have a place to write down tasks as they occur to you so you can add them to your list later. When you get frustrated and you mess up, see that as a sign that you are making progress. You wouldn’t be frustrated if you were ignoring the work of getting things under control. You’d be anxious and maybe depressed, but probably not frustrated.

I’ll move away from philosophy and dive more into practicality (configure and control) in the next post. For now, here’s a good quote from Frederick Maitland:

“Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work; not the starting point.”

Joe

Cal Newport uses these three terms to describe his information management and productivity steps. David Allen is the source that Newport took the basic ideas from. Cal is my current guru, but his writing isn’t specifically about productivity systems, it’s about focus and deep work in an age of distraction. His podcast is all about the practice of productivity and deep work. I highly recommend it. calnewport.com/podcast
David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the classic source for the best, most complete discussion of closing loops and getting this stuff out of your mind and into a system that you can trust.

Turn the flywheel…

Last week I hosted a class in my office for agents who wanted to make a dent in their productivity—without giving their entire lives over to work. I’ve been working on this most of my adult life and I’ve got a few thoughts. The first thought: it’s often hard to find the motivation to begin a complex project. I think of this as “turning the flywheel”.

A flywheel is an incredible tool that takes advantage of physical principles to make mechanical work smoother, less erratic, and more efficient. A spinning wheel is a good example of a flywheel. The operator pushes down on a pedal, and a rod and cam turns the up-and-down travel of the pedal, where only half of the cycle transmits energy, to the smooth motion of the spinning wheel. Take your foot off the pedal, and the wheel will keep spinning for a little while. Depending on the mass of the flywheel, it can take a significant amount of energy to get it turning.

When I’m struggling to get started on something, I’ve lately been taking a few seconds to picture myself hand-cranking a big steel flywheel up to speed, then standing back and watching it turn! It’s not magic. I still have to sit my butt down in the chair and do the work, but just the visualization is enough of a reminder that the hard part is getting started to motivate me to do the work.

So what’s this “complex project” we’re starting on? Just this: controlling our time so we can live on our own terms, using to greatest advantage the gifts we’ve been given.

You get to define all those terms and figure what the good life means to you. I’ve got my definitions, but they won’t fit you. And here’s where you can make a good start.

What is important to you? If you’re like most people, you have a vague sense of an answer, but you’ve never made the effort to clarify it. Do that. Clarify it. Don’t stop until you’re able to articulate it in words that resonate deeply. I don’t know how you could accomplish this without writing, but that may only be my bias. If you don’t want to write, figure out another way. If that other way is not working, try something else. Don’t give up. Don’t be lazy. Know yourself, no matter what it takes.

This exploration of what’s important to you might take a long time. I’m still working on it, and I’ve been at it for more than forty years. But you can quickly get to a point where the fruits of this investigation are useful in your everyday life. I encourage you to crank the flywheel, push the pedal on the spinning wheel, whatever, but get started now.

I’m going to tease the next installment by telling you that it will include a device or two that you can use to make a practical start on improving your use of time…

Joe