Mitch: Day 2 - On Commitments

Day 2: Evaluate your commitments. Look at everything you've got going on in your life. Everything, from work to home to civic to kids' activities to hobbies to side businesses to other projects. Think about which of these really gives you value, which ones you love doing. Which of these are in line with the 4-5 most important things you listed above? Drop those that aren't in line with those things.

We all spent yesterday listing out what we would spend our time and energy focusing in an ideal world. So Day 2 should be a piece of cake, right? Actually, for most of us I imagine it's a struggle. Because the reality is that we find ourselves so inundated with obligations because we truly find them all to be important. We wouldn't accept them in the first place if we didn't think they were for one reason or another.

For example, a few months back I found myself in an impossible situation at work. We were in the middle of a massive project, and our team was just beginning to ride up against crunch time. At the time we knew that we only had 30 days to complete a mountain of work and none of us believed that we stood a chance at actually accomplishing it. Most of us were so overloaded with competing priorities that we were finding it difficult to make any headway on any work at all. Our management staff had begun bringing on outside contractors to help us with the work, which was a huge relief.

For myself, I found that I had four major tasks to accomplish:

Task 1 - Always urgent, sometimes important and always unpredictable

Task 2 - Always urgent but less urgent than Task 1, always important

Task 3 - Somewhat urgent, but very important

Task 4 - Not urgent, very important

Since the start of this project Task 4 had been an area I was excited to work on. Unfortunately, as it was easily the lowest priority item, I could never find time to work on it.

In the midst of all this, the company I work for required us to use up the rest of our vacation time from the previous year, despite it being an incredibly busy season, and so I took off for two weeks to adopt a couple kittens and visit my dear friends in Chicago. At the end of it all I was relaxed, focused, and ready to get back and use my new found energy to burn through Tasks 1-3 in order to finally get some time in on my pet project.

Sadly, this was not to be the case.

Now, I love my co-workers. We truly are a team and they're many of the most wonderful people I've ever had the chance to work with. They're the kind of people that look out for each other and help out whenever they can. So during my vacation, knowing how burdened I'd been, they brought in a new contractor who just so happened to specialize in my pet project. This was intentional. They knew that I hadn't been able to get to it and didn't want me to have to worry about it anymore. What they didn't know was how important it was to me. So the reaction I had was certainly not one that they expected.

For one, I felt betrayed for having something that was so important to me taken away by the people I trusted and cared for most. On top of that I was jealous because some new guy just waltzes in and gets gifted with the time to work on the one thing I had been trying for MONTHS to get to, and it seemed cruelly unfair. And finally I felt guilty. Guilty because I had been assigned this project and here they were bringing in this guy to take it over because I couldn't do my damn job well enough to make any progress on it. But really it had nothing to do with any of that.

My friends were making the best decision they could without me there to consult, and genuinely tried to do the right thing on my behalf so I can't fault them. Our contractor was simply paid to do a job and my project happened to be the job he was brought on to do. And honestly, I was overworked, I couldn't get to Task 4 because I had too much on my plate, not because I couldn't hack it.

The reality is that I didn't get to work on that project because I actively chose not to make what mattered most to me a priority in the first place. That simple choice not to be true to my values got me all twisted up inside. I needed a reason to not have to accept the fact that I made the decision to lose that project. So I made up a number of them to preserve my place as the tragic antihero of my own life. I used those false reasons to turn against my friends, against our contractor and against myself so that I could play the martyr and somehow justify my loss through it.

But that still doesn't answer the question of why I didn't just focus on that project in the first place. What was stopping me? It isn't like I put off the task because of some deep seated desire to create misery for myself and people I care about. I put it off because I saw why the other tasks were more important to the organization than the one I cared about. And because I value having a job, I've made a commitment to my organization to value their commitments and take them on as my own. In this case, what the organization wanted and what I wanted were at odds, and the choice I made was to put the organization first because it seemed like the right thing to do.

This happens any time we make a commitment to an organization, a person or even an idea. We marry ourselves to their values. In our ideal world, we find ourselves married to others whose values are in line with our own. In that scenario we can focus on the things that matter most to us within a support system that encourages and provides for us in a way far greater than we could possibly do for ourselves. Too often, though, the reality is that we marry ourselves to jobs, friends, lovers, and belief systems that put us at odds with the things most important to us. Before long we find ourselves forced to start making choices between what we want and the desires of those we've committed ourselves to. In general we make the rational decision that the benefits we gain from having any kind of support network is worth more than the small piece of ourselves that we just gave up.

But, over time, we take on more and more of their "important" commitments until we find that we've no time left for ourselves. We're in a quagmire, feeling betrayed at the lack of support of the people, organizations and belief systems most central to our lives, jealous of the people living the lives we wish we could lead, and guiltily perceiving ourselves as selfish, lazy, or simply not capable enough to do the things we wish we could be doing.

So when we're forced to make the difficult choice of what commitments to keep, and which to let go, don't get hung up on the idea of importance. In fact, for every commitment that you see as being important, take a deep breath, clear your mind, step back and ask yourself who it's important to and why. If you can't answer this by saying that it's important to YOU because it supports YOUR values, then cut it from the list.

As difficult as it may be to cut some of these things from your life, remember that you're making a covenant with yourself today to believe in, support, and focus on the things you love, the things that you're most passionate about. Sometimes this can be a lonely experience if it means saying goodbye to places, people and things that have become comfortable to you despite the conflicts they create in your life. But a strange thing happens that's not unlike buying a new car or, for us gamers, not unlike rolling a new character you think looks cool and unique in some online game. It never fails that as soon as you get out on the road you see people all over the place driving your same make, model, and color of car. And in the game suddenly every other player you come across seems to have the same race, class, and hairstyle as your character. And it's all because our minds are trained to look for things that resonate with the things we value.

When you put the desires of others above your own, you're of course going to find all kinds of people who are more than willing to burden you with the things that are important to them and you're probably going to take them on. But when you live the life you want to live and put the things that matter most to you first, you'll find yourself more and more surrounded by people and situations that mirror your values and that will support you on the journey that you've chosen to take.

For my personal journey on this item, over the years I've largely been able to cull the things I do down to be fairly in line with my values. But that doesn't mean my life doesn't need some re-prioritization! The recent discovery for me that much of my exhaustion is very likely caused from over stimulation means that I need to very seriously commit to making sure I get honest, quiet time for reflection. So even though I spend my time focusing on the things I care about, I err in trying and cram in as many of those things as possible in far too short of a time span. As a result I simply get overwhelmed and don't enjoy ANY of it because I stress myself out from wanting to do it ALL and over stimulating myself even more. So you'll see this as the big theme of my culling exercise.

Work:

Team Leader & Intra/Inter-Departmental Liason - While not my actual title or position, I often fill this role by running meetings and coordinating work assignments. I tremendously enjoy it because I feel like I'm helping people understand topics and focus their work on the projects that matter to them. Could definitely benefit from being more focused in meetings by giving myself more time for quiet reflection.

Problem Solver - Figuring out creative ways to solve issues ties into my desire to learn and grow in knowledge and wisdom, which lets me discover new and better approaches to situations. More than anything this could benefit from quiet reflection and the focus gained from that.

Social:

Son - I meet my mom for lunch weekly because having a good relationship with her is really important to me, but could definitely center myself more and be more present during it.

Friend - As I mentioned yesterday, I meet with friends pretty regularly, and I've really put a strong emphasis on building and maintaining relationships with the friendships with those who complement my values and challenge me to develop better understandings of them. Tragically I'm usually so caught up in a whirlwind of stimulus from the day that I'm probably, at most, only ever about 10% present. Quiet reflection wins here too.

Civic:

Good Citizen - Another thing I'm passionate about is helping total strangers. I have a strong belief that our society lacks so much trust in strangers because the most exposure we get to actually interacting with them comes from slasher flicks and urban legends. So whenever I can I try to just do something nice for people I don't even know in the hopes that they'll be willing to do the same for someone else. The biggest thing that gets in the way is mental exhaustion, which I'm hoping I can resolve through effective quiet time.

Hobbies:

Video Games/Playing Music/Discovering and Listening to Live & Recorded Music/

Reading/Watching Television Shows & Movies/Writing - As much as I would prefer to focus on productive time with these hobbies, usually I'm so exhausted that they become escapes. For example, I find myself putting way too many hours into playing an MMO called Rift because it's totally mindless for me, and should be relaxing, but isn't. I throw music on while I'm playing, bombarding myself with stuff I love, but overstimulating myself past the point of enjoying it. Then I finally settle down to read and end up just glossing over the pages, taking in only a small portion of the content, because my brain is in overload. Again, without putting energy into the number 1 most important value on my list, the other things begin to fall apart.

Home:

Kittens/Laundry/Food/Plants/Cleaning/Sleep - All of these, the latter most ironically, get sacrificed as well from wanting nothing more to just relax, which is attempted through hobbies, which fails because I'm not doing what's most important for me to do. And everything else suffers for it in the end.

That's it for today! Thanks again, everyone, for making the time to check in.

- Mitch

Mitch: Day 1 - Why Priorities Matter

Day 1: Make a list of your top 4-5 important things. What's most important to you? What do you value most? What 4-5 things do you most want to do in your life? Simplifying starts with these priorities, as you are trying to make room in your life so you have more time for these things.

Well, here we are - day 1 of 72 on a journey to "simplify our lives". I use quotes because this journey is really so much more than that. It's a journey to create the meaning you want for your life, and the means to develop the tools to create and sustain the life you want to lead. Now that may seem outlandish because, let's be honest, there's very little on that list that isn't common sense. Several are simply other ways of phrasing aphorisms that we've heard thousands of times. But one key thing I hope to explore with this project is to peel off a layer of these seemingly innocuous exercises and expose how powerful and transformative they can be on our lives.

A lot of the concepts covered in these 72 Ideas are part of an adventure of self-discovery that I began sometime ago. When I started, back in my early twenties, I had no idea that my life even needed simplifying. I was young, in college, managing a record store, surrounded by good friends and living with a girlfriend. To the me at the time, it seemed like nothing could be better.

The reality was that my life had been an emotional roller-coaster of my own making for quite a while. Relationships have never come easy for me, and the ups and, predominantly, downs of love had shaped my view of the world, and of myself. Much of my self-esteem hinged on whether or not some particular girl was interested in me or not, with the remainder hanging on the approval of my friends and co-workers. And then, one day, my girlfriend tells me she wants us to do this six day course called the Art of Living.

The course centered around advice on how to get the most out of life through a handful of principles and a focus on breathing exercises. At the time I had no idea that the Art of Living Foundation was a highly respected international organization with an impressive track record for dramatically changing people's lives for the better, so I was naively convinced that it was just some ridiculously expensive New-Age support group for lonely hippies. But, not wanting to disappoint my girlfriend, I obliged.

What I experienced there changed my life forever, even if I didn't realize it at the time.

Sure, it reads like a typical mopey antihero driven plot from your average young adult fiction, indie film, or even a Hollywood blockbuster these days. Directionless nobody suddenly finds him/herself with the power to change the world. But I'd posit that there's a reason we bond to those kinds of characters. The truth is that they're not not a far cry from how most of us feel in our own lives. Lost. Wishing for something to happen, whether its the lottery, or super powers, or an alien invasion. Some of us would take just about anything if it would break us out of a rut of making sure our boss is happy so that we can keep our jobs and our stable incomes to support our families and pay for our rent and our escapes from the daily grind. If we work hard we might even get a promotion or a raise to tell us we're on the right track, even if the hours we work come at the expense of our families, our friends, and ourselves. And when we do get time to focus on those relationships, we compromise daily to keep everything on an even keel out of the fear that we might be rejected or abandoned.

The real struggle, however, is within ourselves. Often we have this ideal in our heads of the person we could be if we had just made the right decisions and if other people or circumstances hadn't gotten in the way. And what's worse is we spend every day watching our ideals get bigger and bigger and our real lives slink further and further away until we just stop trying, or at least put on a good show of pretending that we're content with where we're at. And as if that wasn't enough, we have parents, motivational speakers, hometown nobody turned rising star television programs and even the Pilgrimatic American Dream all telling us that if we just tried harder to reach those ideals then we could do it. But if we can't do it, well, then it must be because we're just not good enough, or we're too lazy, or because we just didn't care enough to deserve it.

What they don't tell you is that every bit of the whole process is a lie. Every step being just one deeper into a quagmire of self-deception that most people never find their way out of. And nobody tells you not to go in there because they're so deep into the quagmire themselves they don't know any other way.

But there is a way out.

In fact, the first step out of that morass is one you can take today, and it's the first idea of these 72. The first step is that YOU get to decide what your life gets to be about.

NOT your parents.

NOT your family.

NOT your friends.

NOT your spouse.

NOT your children.

NOT your boss.

NOT your health.

NOT your finances.

NOT your government.

NOT your culture.

NOT your religion.

YOU.

The first time I heard this idea I thought it sounded selfish. We're an integrated society, not a chain of islands. You can't just go around doing whatever you want; it's not what a civilized person does. Or is it? I worked at a job for six years that I was excruciatingly miserable at. I did it because I spent seven years of college tuition to do it, because I felt the next step in life was to work a real job. I did it to be respected by my girlfriend, my family and my peers. I never once did it for me because it was something I loved. I didn't even do a good job there because all I could focus on was how little I wanted to be there. I was depressed, which created problems with my health, with my relationships, and the whole thing just slipped into a downward spiral that affected everyone I cared about. A quagmire.

The truth is that it's your life and you deserve to live it focusing on the things that you're passionate about, not about the things others think should matter to you. When you spend time on the things in your life that engage you, you feel energized, excited, and full of passion. And that kind of passion is contagious! People love being around someone whose excited about life. It's inspiring. You are inspiring them to do more and better for themselves. And the more they do for themselves, the more those people will bring that passion to the community. Everybody wins! But when you resign yourself to spend all your time focusing on things that matter very little to you, then misery is all you reap for your efforts, and you do nothing more than drag others into the quagmire with you. Nobody wins.

Today is your chance to change that. These four or five things must be the mission statement for everything you WANT in your life, not everything you think SHOULD be in it. This may sound like an easy task, but choosing honestly what's right for you and walking the walk of making these items a priority is going to take courage, focus and discipline.

Luckily for us, the next 71 days are all about giving us the tools we need to create a habit out of our new priorities and take the first step of living OUR lives for US, allowing ourselves and the people around us to benefit from our happiness and our passion.

So without further ado, here are my Top Five, in order of precedence:

1. Quiet Reflection:

Making time to be alone in an environment with minimal sensory input to recharge and center myself. I tend to easily get overwhelmed by stimulus from my surroundings, whether it's tracking multiple conversations going on around me including the one I'm in, trying to interpret the endless array of non-verbal queues in a social situation, reacting to the receipt of an e-mail, or phone call, or text message, all while bombarded with the thoughts and emotions from my own body assaulting me from within. These things tend to pull me with a powerful current into the ocean's depths and I find myself struggling just the reach the surface and breath. I could do nothing better for myself than to make time to free myself from that current entirely and give myself the energy to swim back out there when the need arises.

2. The People I Love:

To always make time for my dearest friends and family and give them 100% of my focus. By doing quiet reflection, spending time with the people I care about ceases to simply blend in with the cacophony of stimulus that I let dominate my life. It changes social obligations into an opportunity to appreciate and focus my attention on the people I love instead of focusing my energy on simply getting through it and everything else during the day to make it to the next moment I have to be at peace. They deserve my energy, focus, and love, just as I deserve to be present enough to be blessed with theirs.

3. Self-Education:

Challenging myself every day to learn new things or have new experiences. I tend to find little joy in a day that doesn't end with me being at least a slight bit wiser or more knowledgeable than I was when I awoke. In addition, the more I'm aware of and the more I understand, the more I can gain perspective on my own situation as well as connect with others and be there for them.

4. Counseling Others:

Helping people gain a broader understanding of themselves and of difficult situations to give them power to take control of their own lives. We're all together in this big crazy world, and as much as it seems like our lives can be so different, I truly believe we all struggle with just a small handful of the same core issues that send us careening into all kinds of different challenges in life. If my experiences can help someone else shed light on their own situation and the choices available to them that they may not have otherwise realized, then my going through it was all worth it.

5. Immersion in Stories:

To partake daily in rich fictional stories to appreciate human interaction without the need to engage personally. I find people and relationships endlessly fascinating. But oftentimes the simple act of engaging is exhausting for me, especially with a larger group of people, so I tend to burn out long before my curiosity is ever satisfied. Reading a book, or watching a great movie or television show, or playing a video game with an immersive story, really helps me satisfy that need for human interaction without ending up overstimulated and burned out, and often gives me great insights into people I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Moreover, when you meet someone who's experienced that same story, even if you know very little about them otherwise, it can give you a tremendous amount of shared experience, as you've both been together with the same characters on the same journey.

Lastly, I want to thank everyone that made it to the end of this ridiculously long post for making the time to listen! I hope you can also make time to read the experiences of everyone else posting about their journey here. No doubt everyone will have a unique and valuable take on all this. And, of course, a special thanks to Christa Terry for organizing this and to Leo Babauta for making something so valuable so readily accessible!