Mitch: Days 6 & 7 - Defragging Your Day

Day 6: Learn to say no. This is actually one of the key habits for those trying to siplify their lives. If you can't say no, you will take on too much.

Day 7: Limit your communications. Our lives these days are filled with a vast flow of communications: email, IM, cell phones, paper mail, Skype, Twiter, forums, and more. It can take up your whole day if you let it. Instead, put a limit on your communications: only do email at certain times of the day, for a certain number of minutes (I recommend twice a day, but do what works for you). Only do IM once a day, for a limited amount of time. Limit phone calls to certain times too. Same with any other communications. Set a schedule and stick to it.

The events in our lives present us with choices. These choices that we make either lead us into a life of harmony or discord. If we are bombarded with decisions to make, or feeling pressure to make decisions quickly, we're more likely to make poor decisions. Those poor decisions can enter us into commitments that conflict with our values, leading us down into the quagmire of misery and regret.

Last post we talked about how these events can be broken down into two major classifications: the events we can control and the events we cannot. We also talked about the fact that we can alter the quality and the quantity of the events. So today we'll focus on controllable events and what we can do to most effectively bring them to a manageable level that's in line with our values.

To begin, I want to talk about my recent decision to upgrade my computer. I've been putting this off for a couple years too long now. For one, it's not cheap, and secondly, for me it involves a clean sweep of my drives and operating system. There is a significant time and energy investment in backing up what's important and figuring out what to let go. I'm sure those of you walking through these 72 ideas can relate!

The reason I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger was that my system was noticably struggling to keep up with the demands of modern software. It would take forever to load up programs, or lock up and even crash when trying to do too much at once. This has had a dramatic impact on my enjoyment of my computer time (it's my video game platform of choice and doubles as a home theater PC that's wired into my projector and sound system). It was failing to keep up because, as technology gets better, there are more and more demands on the computer's limited resources and eventually it just starts to cap out. At that point everything it does suffers.

This is because a computer can only do one thing at a time. Depending on the complexity of the task, it takes varying lengths of time to accomplish those things. A computer appears to excel at multitasking only because it tends to do those individual tasks very quickly. But just like us, it can get spread too thin, or be given more than it can realistically accomplish. The difference is that when demand exceeds supply, we can simply upgrade our computer to a more powerful version and give ourselves more space to work with.

But what if we couldn't upgrade? What if the machine we had was the machine that we were stuck with?

There are two key ways we could keep things running smoothly:

• Make decisions about the kind of software we're running, and say no to features or programs that exceed our capacity.
  
  
• Minimize how many programs we run concurrently, as even little programs can easily overpower our ability to manage them if we have to deal with them in large quantities.

The same is true for us as people. Our brains have a set amount of capacity, and if we exceed that capacity things start to break down.

We've talked a lot about making hard decisions on what to keep in our lives, but this is the point where it's essential that we make a stand as the gatekeepers (or the firewalls, in keeping with the analogy) of our own life experience. And while it's very easy to buy into the idea of saying, "No, I don't want to take this on", it's never that simple in practice. We can always find plenty of reasons to say yes, and sometimes, it's in our best interest to say yes. Sometimes we may feel the need to say no to something we really want to say yes to because we already feel totally overwhelmed. So how do we know when to say no?

To answer that, I'd ask another question: "How do we make the right decision about anything?" And the answer is that to give a useful, relevant solution, we need to be knowledgable about the topic we're discussing, whether it be through an intuitive insight based on life experience or from detailed scientific research. For example, if you were planning to sail across the ocean, there's going to be a significant difference in your experience if you learn effective navigation techniques as opposed to if you just decide to feel it out as you go.

Unfortunatley, whereas learning navigation is the objective study of a science, being human relies on an inherently subjective understanding of ourselves; so the lines are a little more fuzzy. But, if we take the time to do it, we can develop a better awareness of what our capabilities are so that when we have to decide between whether or not to take something on in our lives, it becomes more like navigation and less like a jumping off a cliff and hoping everything's somehow going to work out.

Luckily there's one major key we can use to unlock our ability to study the science of ourselves, and that key is acceptance.

As people, particularly in the West, there is tremendous pressure on us to appear successful, to take on more responsibility, to get bigger and better promotions and buy bigger and better houses. Because of this we tend to wrap up our self-worth into this cultural vision of success. The problem is that it's never ending. No matter how much we succeed, no matter how much money or prestige that we attain, we always have our sights set on the next thing. And so what happens is that most of us go through a process that my friend's father calls "being promoted to our level of incompetence". We take on more and more until we finally reach the point that our capacity to perform has been exceeded; the point my computer reached in the above analogy. When we reach this point we have a choice we can make: Do we beat ourselves up for not being "good enough" to handle how overwhelmed we are? Or do we accept that we're overwhelmed and that things simply aren't working?

The distinction between these two questions hinges on our image of ourselves. If we think we "should" be better and be able to handle it, we'll keep beating our head against the wall until we either brute force our way through the situation, often at the expense of our health and our values, or until we accept that we have limitations and that our current method of doing things is just going to destroy us. If we can accept the latter, then we free ourselves up to start looking at why we're running into problems.

One of my weakpoints, for example, is delegation. When I have staff reporting to me, I have a very difficult time giving them work to do while keeping myself from micromanaging it. If I find myself in a position where being able to effectively delegate work is crucial, and I stubbornly refuse to stop micromanaging everything because "if you try hard enough you can succeed", then yeah, chances are I'm going to end up failing at my job and dragging everyone around me into the quagmire. But if I can look myself in the mirror and admit that some of what's not working out in my job is my inability to delegate effectively, then I suddenly open up options for myself that weren't there before. Option 1 is to consider that maybe this isn't the right position for me, and look for a job that's better aligned with the areas I excel at. And Option 2 is to take some classes or find a mentor who's a skilled delegator to teach me how I can do this more effectively. Either way, I'm making an honest assessment of my abilities and my situation and, most importantly, I'm not attaching value to it.

So when we evaluate the activities we do in our day to day, we need to do two key things:

• Be honest with ourselves about what we are and are not able to accomplish based on our current commitments and our current skill set.
  
  
• Avoid making value judgments on ourselves and refrain from telling ourselves that we "should" be able to do more.

If we can do both those things, then we can very quickly and accurately determine whether or not we have room to say yes to the things that are in line with our values, or no to things that exceed our capacity or conflict with our values.

Accepting our situations and abilities, and using that as a grounding point to know when to say yes or no to events is what allows us to control the quality of what we confront in our lives. We know that we're only focusing on what we can achieve, we're learning how to be more effective at achieving the things we value, and by eliminating the value judgments on our abilities we can eliminate the guilt of putting unrealisitic expectations on ourselves to accomplish things that are beyond our capacity. We're freeing ourselves up to maximize the energy we can place in our values.

However, even if we do these things, we can still be easily overwhelmed by the sheer number and frequency of the events we deal with daily. Look at my post from Day 3 as a great example.

Let's assume that I have already streamlined the quality of that day by accepting my limitations and ensuring that my commitments are in line with my values. That's all well and good, but I'm so scattered by the interruptions and distractions that for all of my optimization I'm still not getting anything accomplished.

There's a rule of thumb that says that every time you have to change focus, it takes 15 minutes to start being productive. This is because your thought patterns, physical habits and memories of where you left off all take time to align themselves with the task at hand. This also means that if you're interrupted more than once every 15 minutes, you're constantly in a state of switching gears, and never making worthwhile headway on any of your tasks.

What's worse is this: I was talking with my friend Sarah about this topic today, and having had some time to take in our conversation, it occurs to me that our body makes a habit out of our interruption patterns. The more we're used to engaging in distractions, the more our wiring begins to anticipate those distractions and begins to regularly disengage us from what we're working on, even without an actual interruption occurring.

I first noticed this when I transitioned from my job as an auditor, where we had to track every six minutes of the day with what we were working on, to the job I have now, where we don't track time anywhere near that level of detail. I found that when I was socializing with my co-workers (i.e. not working), I could still actually feel the six minute increments as they went by, and I could feel my stress level increase, feeling a need to get back to billable work from all the years I spent categorizing each of those segments of time.

I believe the same thing happens to us with interruptions. If we're used to changing gears every few minutes due to phone calls, texts, e-mails, smart-phone app notifications (I'm looking at you, Words With Friends) and people, we begin creating an internal habit that prepares us for those distractions. So even if we go 5-10 minutes without any of those above events, our minds actually disengage out of habit, and we find ourselves feeling the need to browse the web, check Facebook, go refill our water, grab another Mountain Dew, or go socialize. We do it because we've been trained to do it, and we've trained ourselves to continue to do it.

Since this is an area with tremendous potential for improvement in my own life, I've developed a two-pronged approach to dealing with it:

1. Eliminate all controllable interruptions.

This is something you'll have to evaluate for yourself based on your situation, but for me, it meant doing the following:

• Turning off all push notifications on my iPhone. No more announcements every time someone makes a move on a game, or posts something on Facebook. I have to make time to check for those updates.
  
  
• Turning off vibrate and sounds for everything but phone calls. This means no more announcements for texts, e-mails, or anything except actual phone calls. This way people can get a hold of me if there's an emergency, but everything else can wait until I make time to check for it.
  
  
• Setting my work phone to go straight to voicemail. In my position I don't deal with emergencies that involve patient care, so there are few things that can't wait for an hour or so to be responded to. If something does come up, usually my boss brings it to my attention personally, so I don't need my phone ringing for those situations. I can check my voicemails whenever I make time to do so.
  
  
• Turning off audio and visual notification of e-mail from my Outlook at work. Again, 99% of the e-mails I get do not truly require immediate action, so I can go read them on my own time without being interrupted.
  
  
• If necessary, I will find a way to work from a location where I can avoid human interruption.
  
  
• After reading Rebecca's post on limiting communications, I wanted to include her great idea to create a good notification (an alarm) based on how often you want to allow yourself to go out and check these things. That way you can focus on the task at hand and allow that alarm to be the trigger for you to check on your communications. I'll be setting mine based on trying to...

2. Gradually break the distraction habit.

Since quitting addictions cold-turkey (and this is a form of addiction) usually results in relapse, I think it makes more sense to give myself the option to check my phone and e-mail every 20 minutes, and increase that by 5 or 10 minutes each week until I can get to an hour or more before feeling the need to check for new communications.

Now chances are I'm going to cheat every so often before hitting the designated time, so it's crucial to apply the acceptance principle here as well. Acknowledge that I have allowed myself to be wired for distraction, and that my natural tendency at this point is to let that take over. I am not going to get it right every time, and criticizing myself will only help to convince myself that I won't be able to break the habit. When I do cheat, I'll accept that I cheated, I won't make value judgments on myself for it, and I'll do my best to finish out the 20 minutes without cheating again.

Through eliminating the frequency of interruptions and distractions (largely controllable events), we're accomplishing two things: First, we're allowing ourselves a tremendous increase in productive time for the quality commitments that we've made. Second, we're minimizing the opportunity for us to make additional commitments while under the duress of frequent interruption. This allows decision making to occur on our terms when we're in the mental state to make quality decisions.

By bringing these two principles together of knowing when to say no and how to make decisions on our own terms, we can potentially cut out the vast majority of controllable stresses in our day and finally begin to maximize the time and energy spent on the things and people we value most.

Thanks for reading!

- Mitch