Mitch: Day 3 - Fighting Automation

Day 3: Evaluate your time. How do you spend your day? What things do you do, from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep? Make a list, and evaluate whether they’re in line with your priorities. If not, eliminate the things that aren’t, and focus on what’s important. Redesign your day.

So I don't know about you, but I love technology. I love being able to carry my entire music collection around on something smaller than a deck of cards. I love being able to pull out my smartphone and look something up on the internet, or check my e-mail or my Facebook, or send a text, or play scrabble or chess with friends. I love the internet for being able to get up-to-the-minute information on the things I'm passionate about, or do research for some decision I'm making, or watch YouTube videos, or shop for things, or find a cool new restaurant, or see movie reviews and showtimes... the list is endless!

In short, I love technology because I have the world literally at my fingertips, and the best part is I can have it tell ME when there's something I might be interested in seeing instead of me having to go to IT. Nowadays we have all kinds of ways for the world to let us know exactly where we should be focusing our attention that we don't really even need to think about it!

My day today was a perfect example. I wake up after hitting snooze one too many times, and the first thing I do is check my phone to see what's going on. And sweet, I find out it's my move in a game of online chess and I have a couple of Facebook messages. So while I'm getting ready for work I'm already making things happen by simultaneously planning my next chess move and thinking about how to respond to said Facebook posts.

After I finish getting ready I hop in my car, pull out my Zune mp3 player, and load up the Russian language lessons I've been working on during my commutes. Halfway to work my phone buzzes and I check it to see what my exciting new message is. Meh, turns out to be another e-mail from the blood bank who've been hounding me to donate with daily phone calls and e-mails for the last month and a half which, sadly, makes me increasingly less inclined to donate. I look up and realize I've almost missed my exit, causing me to swerve into the exit lane, and finish my trip to work while explaining to the Russian speaker in my stereo that I have five children of which three are boys and two are girls. This happens to be a lie, but I don't mind because he's just a recording, so he probably won't be offended.

I stroll into the office, log in to my computer, open my e-mail and see a shlew of urgent requests, FYIs, company announcements, and a couple personal e-mails. I open up the first urgent e-mail and start responding. Suddenly my phone rings. So I stop what I'm doing, pick up the phone, deal with another urgent request that requires me to start a new e-mail, which I start working on. Immediately I get another e-mail requesting a report I was supposed to provide last week, which makes it the highest priority item, so I start a third e-mail, on top of the other two half finished e-mails, to resolve that problem.

This is great, now I'm really multi-tasking. I've been at work for half an hour and already I am a paragon of modern efficiency. I'm solving tons of problems and so far I haven't had to waste one second to wonder what I'm supposed to be doing with my day. Pure, 100%, engagement.

As I get close to finishing that e-mail, I get another e-mail reminding me that I was supposed to be at a meeting first thing this morning that somehow never made it on to my calendar. So I put the rest on hold, rush to my meeting, remote into my desktop from there to take notes while simultaneously answering questions and updating a workflow document and, during any downtime, focusing back on those e-mails I left previously. When I finally get back to my desk, I realize that the super high priority e-mail from earlier is still open and unfinished, so I go to run the report that I need to attach to it before sending it off on its merry way. While doing that, my cell-phone buzzes. I see it's a text from my mom wanting to know if we're on for lunch today. "Hells yes!" I respond. Then I put down my phone, look up, and find a rep from our vendor sitting in my cube asking to get caught up on the status of a project we're working on.

Once that's done, I'm on my way to lunch, explaining to a pre-recorded Russian woman that, yes, I have gasoline in my car. This happens to be the truth, which I'm grateful for because she sounds attractive. I try not to fixate on how sad this is. Arriving at the restaurant I pull out my phone as soon as I get out of my car, check e-mail, a couple of websites, and Facebook updates, and sit down for a nice conversation with my mom which is, of course, interrupted by an important text that I must respond to immediately.

The afternoon effectively ends up being a repeat of this process.

Finally, I get home, I check the 72 Ideas blog topic for the day and respond to some texts while I get changed so I can head right back out the door to meet up with some friends. On my way there, I brainstorm about what I should write about for today's blog post, take a wrong turn and get lost on the way to my friend's place because my mind is not focused on where I'm going. And when I finally arrive, one of my friends asks a very simple question:

"So Mitch, what did you do today?"

"I dunno. Not much, really."

Yes. These are the words I chose to describe a day filled to the brim, nay, bursting with non-stop "productivity". And not because I didn't want to bore him with the details. Rather because, when I thought back on it, I really couldn't find any meaningful way to define it. The day was chaos, being pulled non-stop from one urgent demand to the next, and I realized I never stopped once to think about what it was I was doing and why. I didn't for a second envision what I wanted this day to be about. I simply reacted mindlessly to the non-stop stimulus and embraced the ensuing roller-coaster.

Now I want to stress that this isn't a lecture on the evils of technology. Technology has nothing to do with it. After all, I truly do love it. But I talk to people all the time who have similar non-technologically related experiences. They come home at night only to be drawn in by the urgency to deal with cleaning up bits of clutter throughout their homes, or they turn on the TV and get distracted by the fact that something is on even if they can't figure out the first reason as to why they're watching it. Others come up with some endless series of mental or written to dos that keep them fixated on checking items off an often arbitrary list just to feel like they're making use of their time.

I comes down to the fact that, whatever it happens to be, we just have an impulse that compels us to do these things, one that feels comfortable and familiar. So we react to that impulse without giving it a second thought because it seems like the rational thing to do. At the end of the day we can often end up regretting how we spent our time and wishing we had done more, and that regret ultimately walks us deeper into the quagmire that I described on Days 1 and 2.

What's fascinating to me is that it really comes down to the fact that we are creatures who are genetically wired to prefer a reactive, comfort driven lifestyle, dictated by a largely outdated means of survival. If we don't learn that we can reject that reactive preference, then we can make lists of values and commitments to those values all day long without ever figuring out how to break out of our comfort zone and truly pursue them. That rejection of our mind's recommended course of action is called being proactive, or choosing, or exercising our free will.

Now as to why, scientifically, I believe the above statement to be true, I'd like to first clarify that I'm not a neuroscientist, but I have studied bits of the brain here and there. The real neuroscientists I've cleared this concept through tend to say that it's accurate enough for what it aims to explain. So I'd like to share it with you here, because I think understanding the cause of why we do what we do is the key to overcoming it.

So let's imagine there are three areas that control our life experience.

1. The Senses - These process what's going on in the outside world and pass it up to the Emotion who will ultimately pass it up to the Cognition to act upon.

2. The Cognition - The area of our brain that either makes decisions based on information passed up from the Senses, or generates new information and passes it down to the Emotion to put into action.

3. The Emotion - Our Cognition's personal assistant who frames the information given to the Cognition, advises the Cognition on what it should do, and then interprets and disseminates any decisions made by Cognition. No piece of information comes to or from the Cognition without passing through the Emotion.

A simple example would be that you're at a restaurant, minding your own business, when suddenly you hear a loud crashing noise behind you. An objective assessment of the situation shows that a waiter at the next table over dropped a plate, and that you're not really in any immediate danger. But our minds are far from objective. A typical scenario within the mind would go something like this:

Senses: "Hey Emotion, we've got this noise thing going on. We've analyzed it, but Body needs an answer on how to address it ASAP. Could you pass it up to Cognition and get this sorted out?"

Emotion: "Sure thing! Wow, Senses were right, this noise thing is pretty loud. According to both our Genetic Code and past experience, loud things like this usually mean trouble. I better let Cognition know we're in danger."

Cognition: "Holy crap, Emotion! This memo you gave me says we're in a bad situation! It seems pretty rational to me that we need to get the hell out of here!"

Emotion: "Aye aye, sir! Body, let's get moving!"

Body: Flails its hands into the air and half falls out of its chair trying to escape.

The body ends up doing this because you're mind is telling it that it's in danger and needs to move. The decision making part of your brain is acting in a rational manner based on the information it got from the emotional portion of your brain. Now, your emotions aren't stupid. They're not giving you some arbitrary willy-nilly recommendation. Part of it is built into our genetics, part of it was from experience. So it's always worth acknowledging. But, as in the above example, it doesn't mean that emotions are always right. Cognition had a choice to stop, get more information, and make a decision that might contradict Emotion's recommendation based on a broader understanding of the situation.

So what it comes down to is that for everything that you feel, there's a space between the stimulus (and the resulting emotions) and your response, where you get to choose the action you take. And this is true for everything you experience throughout the day, whether it be the tasks you're confronted with, your social encounters, or your assessments of yourself and others.

In my example, the reality is that I didn't have to shift my entire focus to all those e-mails as they came in, or respond immediately to those texts or other phone notifications. I did it because the emotional portion of my mind told me that they were important and there could be serious consequences if I didn't handle them right away. I chose to accept that assessment without questioning it. But instead, I might have started the day saying, "I'm going to make a list of the things that are important to me and in line with my values that I'd like to accomplish today." Then, as each of those new situations arose throughout my day, I could have stopped myself and asked, "Is this in line with my vision of how to make the most of this day?" If yes, then great, I'm happy to make time for it. But if the answer is no, then I know it's not something I need to worry about.

When we live our lives by challenging our mind's pre-concieved assessments of each moment, we stop living reactively and start living proactively. And when a proactive me gets asked the question, "Mitch, what did you do today?" I'll be able to tell them with pride and passion about the meaningful choices I made that brought me closer to living the kind of life I want to live.

After all, no matter how much thought we've put in our values and our commitments, in the end, if we don't make the hard choices to put those first things first throughout each day, before we know it we'll find ourselves right back at Day 0, starting the process anew.

- Mitch