January 9, 2025
I’m sorry this is late. It is Thanksgiving. Recovering from the Thanksgiving holiday. Preparing for Christmas. Christmas. Recovering from Christmas. New Year. Kids at home for days etc. etc. Back to school chaos. Snow days. Sick days.
Unfortunately, I suspect we may all be running out of excuses reasons for whatever it is we’ve been putting off, though the clever amongst us can always eke out one more. Personally, the messes of domestic life provided an endless supply of procrastinatory false productivity. I will absolutely start working on this essay. But first, small thing, those crumbs must be wiped off urgently, the floor swept, cat litter changed.
Oh dear, is it time to start dinner already?
I was tickled by the influx of posts in my social media feed this week with the theme of: we said a month ago we’ll get to this next month. It’s next month. We’re not ready. Keep reality at bay a bit longer, if you please.
About a year ago I gobbled up Four Thousand Weeks. I can see how that sentence is confusing. I read voraciously a book with said title. I could say much more about this excellent book, but for our purposes, key takeaway: it prompts the reader to focus on what really matters, with the radical message that doing so requires (shock!) saying no to things.
Even good things. Meaningful, beautiful, enjoyable things. Many iterations of your best life must be tossed in the dust bin for you to have any chance at actually living it.
A corrective I desperately need; I am always trying to cram too much in. I should read the book again. After I finish the twelve other books in progress…
Within the book, however, there was an anecdote related to this radical pruning that troubled me. Some quite accomplished man, maybe Warren Buffet, shared the wisdom that to be effective, you should make a list of your top ten priorities in order. Then, cut the last seven. Just don’t do them.
Wait, you can just not do things and life carries on?
I mentally applied this rubric to the mental load I found myself carrying this morning, for fun:
- Send my newsletter out, which is already nearly a week late (bad stuff for an every two week newsletter)
- Prepare daughter for upcoming first ballet class
- Brush children’s teeth before school
- Call pharmacy to refill child’s medication, which can only be done with a call
- Pay friend for awesome workout class she led Tuesday morning
- Return items to Target
- Mail / deliver final tranche of Christmas cards
- Complete paperwork for child’s upcoming medical appointments (approximately nine multi-page forms)
- Complete assignment due next Monday at absolute latest for spiritual direction training
- Earn income?
- Attend existing scheduled meetings in my day of which there are several
OK, so which do I not do? Fail to pay my friend is just rude. Child might die without medication, so probably keep that one in. I guess I could send my daughter to ballet in street clothes; they’d probably forgive her for the first class. We could just keep the Target stuff, but then without the income how will we pay for it?
Sigh. Maybe when Buffet says he scraps all but the top three he just means he delegates them to an admin assistant? Add that to the queue.
What is clear, derived from the primary premise of the impossibility of doing it all, which I regrettably accept, is the logical corollary: you must make choices. Buffet may pick three great things, I may squeak in ten small ones; I still have to decide, which ten? As surely as any dollar in my bank account can have but one job (shoutout to the budgeting app YNAB!), I cannot use the same hour to ‘catch up on email,’ clean my kitchen and finish this post.
On the one hand, it’s not the most original observation. Obviously you can’t spend the same hour twice.
If it’s so obvious, then why, another part of my mind interjects, does your to do list routinely fail to reflect it?
It’s hard enough to do things that take sustained, unseen effort, as most things that matter require, without tipping the playing field by crowding your life with too many good things. There is always something to do more rewarding in the moment than the things you would like to have done. Even if just the reward of a ping of pleasure at a newly cleaned floor, often more satisfying than pounding away at a Word doc whose likely audience and impact are small. And if, like me, you possess endless creative hypothetical generation powers, whatever you do give your time to, you see as easily the upsides of having made a different choice.
The email that’s so hard to circle back to: is it because you know in your gut your voice really isn’t needed, and you can bravely disregard, let others sort it out, give your attention to something more important for you? Or are you dreading the work it will entail, the feelings you might upset, when you pull the trigger on saying something you really need to say?
My newsletter is late, because, among other things, I chose instead to: spend time with my husband, share a spontaneous pizza night with friends, attend a birthday gathering, complete family admin tasks from the list above, work, take a walk. Was I procrastinating or is this delay the product of a well-considered ordering of priorities?
When I pause my writing, just now, enthralled by the stark red crest of the cardinal perched in the bare tree across the alley, am I distracted, or fully alert?
There’s no prescription to guarantee the right choice in ten easy steps. Just as there’s no escaping choices, there’s no escaping discernment.
(As a side note, “no escaping discernment” seems to be the conclusion for at least half of my posts, perhaps a sign that the next book I work on should just take that as a title.)
We must discern what matters most, so we can choose to do, and not do, the right things. Not because we’ve finally run out of excuses to avoid them, or because our procrastination foreclosed an option, but because we’ve done the work of settling within ourselves what that is. Some no is inevitable. But a no is always easier when it reinforces a wholehearted yes.
As we move full on into 2025, excuses for delaying reality reluctantly set aside, what is it you would like to wholeheartedly say yes to?
And what are the nos that will make that possible?
