Review – Page 5 – Deborah Makarios

May 29, 2015

How To Beat Procrastination

Last week we looked at the first two steps to leading a successful Essentialist life: identifying the important, and getting rid of everything else.
Since you’ve all had a week (or seven days) to work on that, no doubt your lives are now swept clean of all extraneous matter, dust-catchers and time-wasters. No? Well, neither is mine, but every little bit helps, and we’ll get there.

Step three is to remove obstacles; in other words, to make it as easy as possible to do the important things, and not do the unimportant things.

But the procrastination, I hear you say. How do we defeat the procrastination? This has been an ongoing battle in my life, and an ongoing preoccupation of the blog since – well, since the second post I ever wrote.

It was sometime while reading Essentialism, or a book quoted therein, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg – sorry I can’t be more precise, but I’ve been sick the last couple of weeks and it’s all turned into a sort of formless soup of days – that I had the epiphany.

The solution to procrastination is habit.

What is procrastination but the deferral of what we know we need to be doing? What is habit, but the doing of things without thinking about it?

Of course, not all habits are good habits. When we think of having a habit, we tend to think of drink or drugs or smoking, or something similarly unhelpful or destructive. Think again.

Do you have to consciously make the decision to brush your teeth twice a day, or do you find yourself wandering into the bathroom and loading up the toothbrush automatically (whether it’s time to brush your teeth or not)? Do you need to think about where the light-switch is, every time you walk into a dark room, or do you just turn it on? Do you get dressed in the morning, or do you head off to work in your pajamas?

Habits can be good or bad. The trick is to make a habit (or rather a whole slew of habits) of doing the needful thing, so you don’t have to spend all your time and energy strong-arming yourself into doing it, or feeling bad for not doing it. You just do it. Easier said than done, I know, but there are things that can help.

For one, you can trick your brain. Brains get so used to how the habit works – cue, routine, reward – that they wander off and do something else meanwhile and just stroll back when it’s all over to check that nothing exploded. As long as the cue – whatever starts the routine rolling – and the reward – feeling good afterward – remain the same, you can put pretty much anything in the middle and your brain doesn’t really notice. If you think of a habit as a sandwich, the cue is the first slice of bread and the reward is the second. Your brain doesn’t really notice what’s in the middle, it just goes “ha! a sandwich!”

So you can change the filling of your habit sandwich, and your brain will never notice, because by the time it comes back to check that everything happened as usual, the sandwich is down the hatch and your brain is too proud to ask your digestive system what just happened. (It are a fact. I know because of my learnings. Read Duhigg if you want something a bit more legit.) The crucial difference is that you’re doing what you want & need to do, instead of what you briefly felt like doing.

That’s changing habits. It is also possible to start entirely new ones, although it seems to take more work as you are creating an entirely new pathway in your brain instead of altering an old one. This is the sort of thing that FlyLady gets you to do.

Either way, whether re-using an old pathway or creating a new one, the aim is to tread that pathway down into a rut that you can slide along with the minimum of effort. Yes, it takes a lot of work at first to create a new habit or amend an old one, but think of the results! Imagine a life where you don’t waste your time doing things that don’t matter, and where the important things get done quickly and efficiently without you having to constantly bully and nag yourself into doing them.

Doesn’t that sound good?
It is possible, and the way to reach this golden dream of a future is to train our habits to serve us, instead of allowing ourselves to serve them.

So there you have it, my fellow procrastinees. Go forth and conquer.

May 22, 2015

Essentialism

Every now and then I come across a book which is so thought-provoking that having reached the last page, I turn back to the beginning and start again. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less is one of those books.

The author, Greg McKeown, suggests three steps which the person who wishes to make the most of their life must take, and keep taking.

1) Decide what is most important. (Priority!)
2) Get rid of everything else.
3) Make the most important happen as easily as possible.

This applies not only to physical possessions, but (even more) to how you spend your time. “Dost thou love life?” Benjamin Franklin asks. “Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”

The first step reflects the undeniable fact that you cannot do (or have) it all. We cannot have every career, do every job, own all the clothes, or maintain all possible relationships. As Miss Pettigrew says, “There are times when decisions just have to be made, or you certainly will miss out.” Other people are generally only too happy to make these decisions for you – at worst, for what suits them, and at best, for what they think will suit you.

Of course, deciding what is really important in your life is seldom a quick or easy process, but then, it is your life. Worth taking the time, I would say.

Once the decisions have been made, comes the hard bit (what? you thought it was going to get easier from here?) – getting rid of the inessential. Clearing out one’s cupboards is relatively painless compared with learning to say no to people. Especially when what they are asking you to do is something good.

As a child, I read a book about a woman who went off to be a missionary in or near the Sahara. I don’t remember her name, or the author’s, or for that matter what the book was called. I’m not even sure it’s the same book. What I do remember is something she was told as a child: the good is often the enemy of the best.

The good is often the enemy of the best. Because there isn’t room in your life for everything, and the best is outnumbered. Because the good is defensible, because you can rationalize it away, because it’s often easier, because people will be happy with you.

The good is often the enemy of the best. Give no quarter; stand your ground.

And the third step? Same time, same place, next week.
Because the third step, mild as it seems when compared to the first two, is actually a complete game-changer.

May 8, 2015

In Which I Learn to FLY

For years I have been labouring (quite literally) under a delusion. I thought I was a naturally tidy person, because having mess around stresses me. And since I knew how to do all the tasks required, I couldn’t figure out why the stressful messful state of things continued.

When I was in my early teens, my mother came up with a complex mathematical – er, thingy, which not only ensured that each member of the household had a fair share of the housework, but that each person’s share was largely composed of the work they liked most (or rather, disliked least). Brilliant. Me for cleaning the toilet and cooking the dinner (no, not at the same time); avaunt, ye dreaded dish-washing!

That was some fifteen years ago. I have been an independent alleged-adult for ten years now, and it was only recently I realized that subconsciously I still classify the jobs I really don’t like as “someone else’s problem.”

To be fair, the Caped Gooseberry does a lot of these jobs, such as putting out the rubbish and emptying the compost bin (among other things) – as previously mentioned, my husband is not lazy – but there are nonetheless a good many jobs that aren’t going to happen unless I do them myself.
Those of you considering becoming adults, be warned: pixies do not appear in the night to do the dusting, and dishes do not wash themselves (unless you’re having tea with Merlyn).

There is quite a bit of work which goes into running a household, and the less organized you are, the more work it is. Hence my problem. While I knew how to clean, I didn’t necessarily know how to organize. Where to start?

Eventually I swallowed my pride (and my delusions) and admitted that I could use some help. I was never going to be one of those paragons who vacuums herself out the door when she goes on holiday (so as to have everything pristine when she returns), I just wanted the house to become clean and peaceful, and to stay that way with the minimum of conscious effort from myself.

Enter FlyLady, recommended to me by our previous minister. I borrowed her book from the library, and after various re-readings, browsings of the website – and the passage of a couple of years – I decided to actually try it properly, shiny sink and all.

In order to have some record of the experience, I kept a journal for the month of April, while doing the 31 Beginner BabySteps. These aren’t included in the daily emails, which are mostly advice, encouragement, testimonials and advertising for FlyLady-approved cleaning gear. There are about a dozen a day, although on Day 12 your task is to delete old ones; and on Day 31, to drop down to the FlyLady Lite emails (assuming you feel ready).

The FlyLady system is all about routines: you do the same things over and over again and then you don’t have to think about it, you just do it automatically. This applies to things you do every day, on a particular day of the week, or a particular week of the month. Forming good habits, little by little.

To be honest, I think I needed longer to practice each step of the routine in order to cement it in place, before adding further steps. Some steps I slipped right into – like dressing first thing in the morning – and others are less intuitive and I have to keep reminding myself. Such as, for example, remembering to replace negative self-talk (“I’m lazy! It’s hopeless!”) with positive self-talk (“I can choose what I do, and I can do it!”) – affirmations, the Artist’s Way would call them. Helpfully, all the routines are to be written down as you go, so you have something to refer to.

Looking around, those who seem to have the most success with FlyLady are those who adapt the system to suit their culture and circumstances. No need to wipe your sink dry each time you use it, for example, if your tap water isn’t hard and doesn’t leave marks when it dries.

And then there’s the getting dressed to shoes – an intended morale booster, which allows you to step straight out the door if need be. Here in New Zealand, it is normal to ask, on entering a house, whether it’s a “shoes off” house – and many are, mine included. Wearing shoes around the house so you can go out at a moment’s notice is about as weird as carrying your handbag around the house for the same reason. On the other hand, unless it’s high summer (which it seldom is) I wear socks and slippers, because my feet are almost always cold. So that’s “shoes” for me.

There are other minor cultural allowances I had to make as well. Doing laundry all the way from sort to shelve is only possible when the weather co-operates, as the vast majority of New Zealand laundry is dried on lines outside in the sun. This can be frustrating in winter, but on the other hand, you get that lovely fresh-air scent in your laundry, and you don’t have to worry about dryer fires.

But enough of this, I hear you say. Never mind the cultural adjustments, does it actually work? Well, as with most things, you get out as much as you put in, but I’ve never before come across a system which makes it so easy to get started and keep going. Possibly because it insists that you can’t “get behind” – you just start from where you are.

Twice a day you spend a couple of minutes clearing off a place that collects stuff – you know the one – and actually putting the stuff where it belongs, not just dumping it somewhere else. My first target was the top of the chests of drawers in our bedroom, which were generally invisible under thick strata of books, mending, odd clothes, pieces of paper, random oddments – you get the idea. It loomed at me in the darkness as I lay in bed.

I cleared it off in two or three two-minute attacks, and to my great surprise, it has stayed clear. There is a small stack of books in one corner, closest to the bed, with a candle-lamp and matches for late-night reading. At the other end is a decorative bowlful of knitted hats and gloves, winter having arrived in early autumn this year. And that’s it.

Another daily task is to spend fifteen minutes decluttering in the zone of the week (a monthly rotation). The idea is that you can’t really get a room clean until you’ve got all the junk out of it. To my great surprise, I was dusting the windowsills and the skirting board (the skirting board!!!) in the bedroom within the week. And having palpitations at the amount of dust I found, but that’s another story.

To make the long story short, the overwhelming thing about housework is that there is so much of it. Where do you start? How do you possibly find the time and energy for it all? FlyLady proposes an eminently sane answer: you do it a little at a time. Make a routine (it doesn’t have to be hers, the main thing is to have one and stick to it) and just keep going.

I am still working on developing and editing my routines to make sure they work as well for me as possible, but I am cautiously hopeful. I may never be naturally tidy, but that doesn’t mean a clean and tidy peaceful home is not within my reach!