Establishing Priorities
So if I were to ask you now, what are the five most important things in your life, without which nothing else works, what would you say?
Perhaps you would immediately reply that your health and fitness is the most important thing, because without this it’s difficult to do anything at all. Certainly if you have ever suffered with a chronic illness, had some kind of health crisis, or seen someone close to you go through one, you are likely to be especially aware how important good health is.
Or maybe you would say you value relationships most highly—your family, your friends, or one primary relationship you cherish above all else.
Or career. For some people this is at the top of the list, and relationships, health, and all other aspects of life get put on the back burner.
If you’re reading this book, it’s likely you are in a phase of your life where creating a home or work environment that supports and nourishes you has a high priority.
Or maybe for you the most important thing is acquiring wealth, financial freedom, travel, adventure, studying, pursuing an activity that you love, or something I haven’t listed here. The main thing is to find what holds fire for you, what ignites you, what you are passionate about. Your priorities will emerge from that.
Note that I’ve left happiness off of the list. This is because it means so many different things to different people, as can be seen in the responses of a psychological test group (Emmons and McCullough, 2003), who were asked what they considered to be the greatest blessing in their life. Their answers ranged from “a healthy body” to “my mom” to “Instant Messenger.”
Perhaps all the priorities I’ve listed so far are luxuries for you in your present circumstances, where the most important thing for you each day is to find enough food to eat, clothes to keep warm, and a safe place to be. Until you have the basic necessities of life, all other factors generally take second place.
But then again, perhaps you would say that even these are not the most important things. Food, shelter, health, loved ones, money, and everything else can vanish, but through all adversity, a person’s spiritual path remains. Maintaining your spiritual practice may therefore have the highest priority of all.
Prioritization as a Daily Practice
Prioritization brings about a major clarification and simplification of your life. This is beautifully illustrated by a story about Charles Schwab, president of the Bethlehem Steel Company in America in the 1930s. He once employed a time management consultant, Ivy Lee, to shadow him for two weeks and then advise him on how he could improve his business. The report, when it came, consisted of just three recommendations:
1. Make a list of “Things to Do” every day
2. Prioritize everything on that list
3. Tackle things in order of decreasing payoff
“Don’t pay me now,” said Ivy Lee, knowing that this succinct advice was a far cry from the usual hundred-page reports Schwab received. “Just put my advice into practice for a month and then pay me what it is worth to you.” The story goes that one month later, Schwab sent Ivy Lee a check for $25,000—an incredible sum of money in those days. His company went on to become the largest independent steel producer in the world, and in later life he declared that this was the most valuable piece of business advice he had ever received.
Whether you are a million-dollar executive or a suburban housewife, this advice holds equally true. Try it for a month and see for yourself!
Is the Jar Full?
To help you discover your own priorities, here’s one of my favorite anecdotes that is said to have come from a talk given by Vice Admiral H. Johnson, who was the director general of the Indian Coast Guard in the late 1980s. To vividly illustrate his talk, he brought with him a transparent glass jar and proceeded to fill it with small rocks.
Having done this, he asked his audience, “Is the jar full?”
“Yes, of course,” they replied, since it was clear not another rock could fit in it.
He then took a handful of tiny pebbles and threw them into the jar, filling the gaps between the rocks. Again he asked, “Is the jar full?”
“Now it is,” they agreed.
Then he produced a bag of sand and tipped it into the jar, filling all the spaces between the rocks and pebbles.
“Is the jar full now?”
Finally he agreed with the group that it was full, and he explained how the jar is a metaphor for life. If you fill it with sand first (small details), it leaves no room for the pebbles (bigger issues). And similarly, if you fill the jar with pebbles first, it leaves no room for the rocks (your most important priorities). Life works only if you establish your priorities first and fit everything else around them.
In case you’re interested, he listed his own top priorities as health and integrity. And if you want to take the metaphor a stage further, you can pour a cup of liquid into the jar at the end, analogous to the general smog of everyday life that everything is soaked in.
Getting Down to It
So again, what are your priorities? Seriously, don’t go past this page without thinking this through. Stop reading right now and list your own top priorities in order of importance:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
In future editions of this book, I’d like to fix it so that the rest of the text vanishes until you’ve completed this exercise, but that technology doesn’t yet exist. For now I’ll just have to appeal to your greater wisdom to do it before reading on. If you’ve just read this paragraph without making your list, go back and do it!
Choices
Knowing your priorities is the only way to find your way out of time clutter. Otherwise, how will you ever decide what to say yes to and what to say no to? Life is a never-ending stream of choices to be made, and clear priorities will allow you to navigate through them rather than aimlessly drift or have things just happen to you.
Most people are so busy they couldn’t cram another thing into their day if they wanted to. So forget about time management. That went out the day the electronic age was born. You are never going to have enough time to do all the things you need or want to do. Your only hope is to learn how to be selective, which quite simply means prioritizing from the top down, and learning to say no to low-value uses of your time.
Figure out the things you really enjoy doing and schedule them on your calendar before anything else. Don’t allow your mental taskmaster to dominate your life. These pleasures are what your Spirit thrives on and if you just work, work, work without ever having time for yourself, or spend all your time looking after other people with no time to nourish yourself, pretty soon your enthusiasm for life starts to wither and die. The first signs of this are general fatigue and diminishing health. In planning your year, month, week, or day, schedule the activities that are important to you as a first priority and then fit everything else around them.
This is also very much in keeping with the Pareto principle I mentioned in chapter 9 (you get 80 percent of your results from 20 percent of what you do). The delicious implication of this is that you don’t have to do four-fifths of all the things you think you have to do.
Prioritizing from the Top Down
At this point I want to introduce to you a concept that I teach to all the space clearing and clutter clearing practitioners I train. It’s called Top Down, Zero Procrastination or TDZP for short, and sounds best pronounced as letters: “tee dee zee pee.”
The TD (Top Down) part is what I’ve been talking about so far. Living life from this perspective gives you an overview. You position your consciousness so that you are always looking for how to invest your time in the wisest way and with the highest integrity. You see the bigger picture viewed from the top down rather than a narrow, blinker
ed view from the bottom up. Without this Top Down approach you will tend to choose the path of fastest, easiest gratification rather than the path that facilitates your highest priorities.
ZP (Zero Procrastination) refers to the immediate confirming action you take to ensure your life priorities are actualized, and are not just wishful dreams. ZP needs to become a way of life. Any time you catch yourself procrastinating, you need to shift to a Top Down standpoint and motivate yourself to action.
PROCRASTINATION
Do successful people procrastinate? Of course not! Successful people do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, whether they like doing it or not.
Why Do People Procrastinate?
Many studies have been done on this topic over the years. One school of thought says that the main reason people procrastinate is that they fear failure so much, they don’t even want to start. Other studies conclude that people put off doing things as an act of rebellion, because they feel the task is boring or unpleasant, or because there is no immediate reward from doing it. If you can identify which of these fits you most closely and watch out for it happening, your days of “blind” procrastination are nearing an end.
Then there are the people who are good at starting things but get easily distracted and put off finishing them. A hilarious version of getting distracted is “yak shaving,” made famous by author and blogger Seth Godin. Yak shaving is defined as “any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you’re working on.” He gives an example of wanting to wax his car, but to do this he first has to buy a new hose, but to do this means he first needs to borrow his neighbor’s E-Zpass to cross a toll bridge to get to Home Depot, but to do this he first needs to restuff the Moshi pillow his son borrowed from the neighbor. Hence ending up at the zoo shaving a yak!
Here’s an example that nearly happened to me while writing this new chapter at my home in Bali:
“I want to finish writing this chapter. To do this, I need to search the Internet for Seth’s blog, Don’t Shave That Yak!, so that I can quote his example.”
“Ah, but my broadband is not working today, so I’ll need to use dial-up.”
“Hmmm…the phone line is dead. The mice must have nibbled through the wires again.”
“Oh dear, the bamboo ladder I need to climb my garden wall to check the wires is broken.”
And the next thing I know I’ve left my computer, loaded the broken bamboo ladder into my car, and spent the whole morning at the repair shop having it fixed.
Being wise to the perils of yak shaving, of course, I didn’t do this. I used my neighbor’s phone to call the broadband and phone companies to repair their services, sent my gardener to the repair shop with the ladder, skipped this paragraph until later, and continued writing.
How to Overcome Procrastination
My own observation of what lies at the root of procrastination is that it all comes down to will. Put simply, people of will get things done and people who lack will, don’t.
And how do you build will? Well, that’s one of those million-dollar questions, with no single or simple answer. Will has to be deliberately cultivated, a thousand times a day in every little way. Begin small and work your way up to great acts of will, which are sure to have a resounding effect in every aspect of your life. If this is your quest, an excellent starting point would be a wonderful little book entitled Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy, subtitled 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time.
Tracy explains, “It has been said for many years that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.”
He adds, “It has also been said, ‘If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first’ and ‘If you have to eat a live frog, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.’ ” Of course, the book is not actually about eating frogs. They are just a metaphor for your most daunting tasks. But the vivid imagery that eating a live frog conjures up somehow works very well.
In my definition of clutter (see chapter 4), procrastination falls in the category of “anything unfinished,” and like other forms of more tangible clutter, its effect on your energy is tiring. When you finally get moving and just do it, major reservoirs of energy are unlocked. You discover it actually takes more energy not to do something than to engage your will, roll up your sleeves, and get on with it.
Take correspondence, for example. Do you have letters or emails that you keep meaning to write but never get around to? Every time you think about the task and don’t do it, your vitality levels drop. The longer you put it off, the more difficult it becomes to write the letter or send the email. If you just sit down and take the time to catch up on your mail, you will release huge amounts of energy for other purposes. It’s the same with every procrastination you have in your life.
INTERRUPTIONS
Procrastination has been around a long time, but a new aspect of time clutter that we have to deal with in our modern, fast-paced world is the constant barrage of interruptions we’re subjected to. Phone calls, text messages, emails, time pressures requiring multitasking, and the constant stream of interruptions from coworkers in most work environments means we are under constant stress to juggle all these things.
Studies led by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, for example, have shown that IT workers are lucky to get three minutes of uninterrupted time to complete any task. She also found it takes an average of twenty-five minutes and two intervening tasks for employees to get back to what they were doing before being interrupted, and around 25 percent of tasks are not resumed at all the same day, if ever.
Interruptions cause a jarring in our energy that can be exhausting and debilitating. Some people cope better than others, but the continued assault on our senses to some degree affects our vitality, health, and well-being.
An experiment (Lefcourt, 1976) in which two groups of people were given complicated puzzles and a piece of proofreading to do while being subjected to an irritating noise sheds some light on why interruptions are such a problem. One group had a button that enabled them to turn off the noise; the other group did not. Not surprisingly, the group with control completed five times more puzzles and did a much better job of the proofreading than the group that had to put up with the noise. But very surprisingly, the group with the button never actually pushed it! As Howard Bloom commented in his book The Lucifer Principle, “It wasn’t the noise or lack of it that affected their performance; it was the mere idea that if they’d wanted to, they could shut it off.”
My husband, Richard, and I enjoy working together at home, usually on different projects. Realizing how irritating and nonproductive it is to be constantly interrupted by each other, we have developed a protocol that resolves this. Instead of asking questions or making comments whenever we want to, we first ask, “Can I interrupt?” It’s remarkable what a difference this makes. By giving control to the person being interrupted, the whole jarring effect is radically lessened. We can say to each other, “yes,” “not right now,” or “wait a minute,” and that’s that. And if something is so critical that one of us has to interrupt urgently, we have found that a brief apology before doing so (“Sorry, but I need to know right now…”) smoothes this over. Instead of feeling frazzled, we are able to take the interruptions in our stride. Studies conducted at the MIT Media Lab in Boston have found that polite interruptions by computers are similarly perceived as less intrusive.
Adapting this to a busy corporate work situation can be tricky, but certainly possible. Develop a system that lets colleagues know when you are working on something important and do not want to be interrupte
d (for example, close your office door, put a chair in the doorway, or put up a sign). Make it clear when you will be available, and do the same with emails and voice calls (use autoresponders and voicemail messages to inform people). Give an emergency access route when absolutely necessary and you’ll find most people will adapt to your rules.
By planning your interruptions instead of having them constantly bombard you without any control, your productivity and job satisfaction will increase, and your immune system will not take such a pounding. In lab experiments, animals given control of their environment live longer, have higher antibody counts, and fewer ulcers. Your choice.
One man sent an email to tell me, “I am busy clearing the clutter. Now I see more clutter than ever. I laugh at myself. I look in a drawer for something and see the mess. I stop and clean out the drawer. I feel better after each project is done.”
Some weeks later he emailed me again: “I came in from a skiing trip last night and had four bags of stuff. Before I left this morning it all had to be put away because it was driving me nuts seeing the clutter.”
This man has definitely integrated clutter clearing into his life. The knack to staying clutter-free is to change your daily habits.
Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Revised and Updated) Page 11