Punches, Priorities, and Practice
WN.06 \\ 06.24-30.24
Greetings!
It’s been hot. Like, real real hot. The kind of hot that makes you wonder what you did in a past life to deserve this.1 The kind of hot that makes you ever so grateful for AC and fans, whatever other ills the modern era possesses. It hawt.
Anyhoo.
Welcome to my off-weekly off-the-cuff review of efforts, insights, and whatevers in the last few days.
This week’s notes include thoughts on:
stress-testing the workshop
making tough choices
adding friction to my online behaviors
Workshop Wallops
As the great sage Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
I decided to get some punches out of the way by hosting a dress rehearsal for my upcoming workshop.2 It went well, I learned a lot, and gained some practical feedback about how the material actually landed for real people (outside of my head).
I also discovered that, no matter how much you think you’ve checked and proofed your materials, when you go live you will always find an error that you’re convinced you fixed.3 Such is life.
Pouring TEA
One piece of feedback from the dress rehearsal has sparked some further thought, based on observations that in prioritizing commitments, everything felt “non-negotiable.”
And I get it, especially for those with families. We don’t make decisions in a vacuum, and some things that we wouldn’t necessarily choose or prioritize for ourselves are on the list because we make sacrificial choices that benefit others.
However.
If everything’s non-negotiable, then what we’re saying is that everything has an equally-weighted importance and urgency.
Which cannot actually be the case.
Some things don’t truly matter that much. Some things aren’t that urgent. And some things do hold an equivalent importance, which is why we have to make some tough choices about what we focus our limited time, attention, and energy (TEA) on.
A couple of years ago, I attended “Prioritize Like a Pro,” a Notion Mastery workshop led by Jessica Abel. I highly recommend checking it out, because the key insight Abel provides is that of figuring out your decision-making criteria “ahead of time.”
You have to discern what factors matter most to you in any given season. Such factors include increasing income, working from home, traveling more, or being more generous with your resources—whatever makes sense and matters to you—and you give those factors a weight.4 Then, any time you have a new decision to make, you run that decision through your various factors, and assess your new answers against your pre-established criteria.
What this effectively does is to rank your decisions in a way that aligns with your priorities and goals, while also putting some real :::ahem::: weight to those choices. My Practicing Commitment Care workshop is a quick-and-dirty way of helping us do this kind of ranking, and to set some parameters around our future decisions. Because I suspect that we rarely give ourselves the time and space necessary to identify how we make our choices.
If we don’t know what criteria we need to make a decision, all decisions default to “non-negotiable.” And that makes for a really stuffed life.
You’ll never convince me that the ends justify the means in any situation. And sometimes I’m pretty sure that the means are the ends. Which is to say, both the process and the outcomes of our choices matter a great deal for how we move through the world and the persons we are becoming along the way.
pssst…
If this piqued your curiosity about making tough choices and practicing commitment care, there’s still time to sign up for my free July 13 workshop!!
🗓️ Saturday, July 13
⏰ 3:00-4:30p EST
🖥️ Online via Zoom
🎁 Free!
Online Friction
I was thinking this week about all the ways that I’ve tried to add some friction to going online5 in the last couple of years. I know that many of us are trying to find some sense of balance or reduction in the deluge of data that streams through our devices. And the apparent ubiquity of “everyone’s at the party” makes it feel like we’re missing out if we’re not also “at the party.”6
So I thought I’d share how I’ve experimented with putting a pause between my impulse and my action when it comes to online behavior. It’s better than it used to be, but there’s always room for improvement.
I’ve always had my smartphone notifications turned off so that I’m not bedeviled with endless dings and red dots, and also removed all the social media apps and news apps from my phone. I use NetNewsWire to collect the RSS feeds for blogs, newsletters, and YouTube channels, and unsubscribed from most advertising emails. (There’s still too many.) I don’t sync the RSS reader to cloud storage, which means I can only check the feeds on my desktop (not my phone), and so Saturday and Sunday mornings become my “reading the weekend paper” time.
I have an extension on my desktop that puts a 7-second pause on specific websites any time I go to those sites, which is usually Instagram and YouTube. And, I also cleared my entire YouTube history, plus turned off the setting for “watch history,” which means my YouTube homepage is blank every time I visit it: no recommendations, no “finish watching this video?” prompts, etc.7 It’s bliss.
But let me tell you, that one small tweak has brought home to me just how much I go to these sites out of sheer boredom. Or, more accurately, out of the deep discomfort I feel at experiencing the boredom of my present circumstances, whatever they are.
I often visit Instagram’s website through the browser on my smartphone or desktop, which limits what I can actually post (not a bad thing), but doesn’t do much to stop me from checking stories or exploring (algorithmically-determined) public accounts.8 This is a habit (a twitch) that I’d like to break, because I’m often left with that achy-toothed sick feeling of eating too much sugar.
I’d wish I could claim victory over the sugar dispensers, and reclaim a less-fractured attention. I read somewhere recently a quote, that “the good is in the trying,” and I find that a comforting affirmation of our creaturely limitations: we’re not perfect (and never will be), but we can keep practicing to live the life we wish to lead.
Stay cool out there.
Let’s become hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
For those who attended, you’re the absolute best - thank you.
i.e., 1 = least important, 5 = most important
For reasons other than work, business, or research, that is.
You can be your own party.
I’m sure it drives the algorithm nuts.
So many cute cats, tho!! And recipes!