Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

I’m sitting at my desk thinking I should probably write something, but it is a chaotic kind of morning on a chaotic kind of day, and my brain is focusing on everything but the task at hand.

I keep projecting into the future, looking at all the things that need to get done in order to finish off any given project. Even when I sit down and apply the various management tasks that are meant to stop you doing that – Getting Things Done, the Pomorodo Technique – I am still projecting forward and the resistance is building up and the subtle, low-key panic of so-much-to-do-and-I-am-not-enough builds up.

My conversations with my psychologist often revolve around the fact that my brain is not my friend, and it’s surprising how often they’re the one telling me that despite the fact that get your fucking brain out of the process has been my writing mantra for years. I’m meant to take a deep breath when this happens. I’m meant to focus my attention on starting something, instead of getting lost in the mire of a distant, unknown quantity that is finishing.

This seems simple, but it’s not. Most people’s lives are a melange of competing priorities, but the moment you engage in any kind of creative work you’re likely to find yourself becoming a hybrid of competing jobs and tasks. On any given week I’m trying to balance long-form fiction work, my short story drafts, my university commitments, and my commitment to running GenreCon. I’m trying to keep my apartment to a sane level of organisation and run a weekly RPG session for my friends. I’m trying to balance being a good partner to my girlfriend and support my friends and family members.

My brain rebels at the idea of starting something because even the decision to start means picking something from that list and saying This! This is the most important thing on this list right now. 

So I set my timer for thirty mintues and I close my eyes and point. I start on the thing that I’m pointing at and work that the timer is done. It may be wrong, but there is movement, and movement is better than stagnation. Stop panicking about the writing and it will come back, one way or another.

And if it doesn’t, set the timer again. Get started on another task and move on.

At the start of this year, when everyone was flush with New Year Energy and optimism, I had a bunch of conversations with various peeps about the way I used whiteboards and bullet journals and generally planned my life.

At the same time this was happening, I was basically packing in all of those habits and letting them lie fallow for the summer. Not because they were bad habits, but because they were responses to specific situations where conflicting priorities and time-crunch made my natural workflow untenable and inefficient.

Basically, once the scholarship kicked in and my thesis was underway, I didn’t need to plan so heavily because a) I rarely needed to be anywhere, b) most of what I was doing was reading things and noodling with ideas, and c) it didn’t matter if I destroyed my sleep schedule by staying awake and working until 5 AM, because it wasn’t like I needed to get up at a specific time. I could get away with a monthly plan, a list of upcoming deadline, and a quick whiteboard schedule on the busy weeks when I had a lot on.

The needle swings back the other way this week. Quarterly checkpoints, monthly checkpoints, weekly checkpoints, daily plans in the bujo. Detailed project lists where I adequately scope out what needs to happen and why. Partially this is because it’s July, when my commitments ramp up a bit due to book launches and writing events. Partially this is ’cause I’m a relationship, and I find myself syncing in with someone else’s schedule – I want to be free when they are free, and I do not want to be distracted by a nagging feeling that I should be working.

Mostly, it’s because the mandatory classes associated with my PhD ended and I am largely left to my own devices again, which means I am more likely to waste time if I am not mindful of it.

The temptation with any organisational or time management system, when you first come across it, is to embrace every aspect of it in the hopes it will make you suddenly superhuman. A dynamo of getting shit done, buoyed up by the glorious certainty of your to-do list.

I’ve done that in the past. And things rapidly fell apart.

Any productivity system I trail is there to solve a particular problem. Productivity systems are a tool, not a superpower.

I frequently get the shits with antidepressant medication and seeing my psychologist and all the processes that are necessary for managing the inside of my heaf. Part of that’s the ongoing struggle with self-stigma that any of it is necessary at all, part of it is the annoyance of the month-to-month cost of keeping my shit together, and sometimes it just feels like it’s not goddamn working and all the time, money, and effort is going to waste.

It’s not. I spent a good chunk of last night taking a really long walk, ’cause I was starting to get a little squirrely and fragmented. Two years ago, I would have disappeared into a week-long TV binge or computer game obsession where I skipped sleep for days on end, so even when three hours feels like a failure, it’s not.

Where I once used to stress-eat incredible amounts of junk food and cola after rising at midday, I will now usually respond to long-term stress by eating a considerably healthier breakfast at my local cafe.

I have slowly, painfully, gotten better at acknowledging that I occasionally have feelings, and will even discuss them with a select group of other human beings from time to time.

I no longer remember the last time I felt like a fake human being, merely presenting a clever facade to the world, or a bundle of incoherent rage lurking beneath a thin veneer of civility. Intellectually, I know it was about eleven months back, right about the time virtually everyone I know said get help, but it feels further back than that.

Progress feels weird and invisible. Sometimes it’s just swapping out really bad habits for less destructive ones, but it’s still progress. Not always as fast as I’d like, or as thorough as I’d like, but it is what it is. 

And when I get shitty with the process, I try to focus on that. I am not where I was, and that is a good thing.