John Dickerson's Navel Gazing: The Sneaky Pitfalls of the To-Do List

This episode delves into the psychological and practical challenges of managing to-do lists, exploring why they often lead to a sense of defeat rather than accomplishment.

1. To-do lists can create a false sense of achievement, substituting the act of listing tasks for actually completing them.
2. The Zegarnik effect suggests that uncompleted tasks are more memorable, which can add to one's mental burden.
3. Productivity methods, like the Pomodoro Technique, can offer structured ways to tackle tasks more effectively.
4. Personal stories and historical anecdotes provide insights into how successful individuals manage productivity.
5. Reflecting on and revising one's approach to to-do lists and productivity can lead to better personal management strategies.

1: Introduction to the Problem

John Dickerson introduces the topic by sharing a personal anecdote about his own to-do list, highlighting the psychological weight of uncompleted tasks.
John Dickerson: "Anyone who has wrestled with a to-do list knows a to-do list is a defeat."

2: Psychological Insights

Discusses the Zegarnik effect and its implications on how we remember and manage tasks.
John Dickerson: "The Zegarnik effect suggests that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks better than completed ones."

3: Practical Approaches

Exploration of various productivity methods like the Pomodoro Technique, and how they can help manage tasks more effectively.
John Dickerson: "The Pomodoro Technique is a well-known productivity habit that involves focused work intervals."

4: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives

Connects productivity with broader philosophical ideas and historical practices of successful individuals.
John Dickerson: "Before Darwin set out to write 'Origin of the Species,' he ordered his 20 years of research."

5: Conclusion and Reflections

Summarizes the insights gained and encourages a thoughtful approach to productivity and task management.
John Dickerson: "Life is small, nudging back on course, particularly in these times of attacks on our attention."

1. Reassess the purpose of your to-do lists to ensure they are tools for productivity, not procrastination.
2. Implement structured productivity techniques like the Pomodoro Technique to enhance focus and efficiency.
3. Regularly review and prioritize tasks to keep the list manageable and relevant.
4. Set realistic goals for each day to prevent overload and the stress of uncompleted tasks.
5. Reflect on the effectiveness of your productivity strategies regularly and be open to adjusting them.

In this week’s essay, John discusses the Pomodoro Routine (among other productivity routines), why he especially needs a meditation pillow, and how a particular teacher captured his heart.

People

John Dickerson, David Allen, Bluma Zeigarnik

Companies

None

Books

"The Creative Habit" by Twyla Tharp, "Atomic Habits" by James Clear

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

John Dickerson
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Terms apply hello, and welcome to Naplegazing. I'm John Dickerson. This is episode six of season one. The notebook entry that begins our episode comes from Notebook 75, pages eight and nine from September 2021. It is not a quote or an observation or a useful number.

It is a list of tasks. It reads, reinstating the Pomodoro routine. Start Marshall again. Write Bryce. Send Laura the larger project list.

Work on budget to get accounts in order. Meditation pillow upstairs a fellow with that list needs a meditation pillow upstairs. And maybe one downstairs. And maybe one on every floor. You would recognize this entry in the notebook as a to do list.

And so it is from that same period of entries in September 2021 that we have been looking at in this exercise of long looking. This set of directives follows my reminder to myself in the last episode to write an onboarding memo for my colleague Laura Doane. It affirms our speculation from the last episode that getting things in order for my colleague masked my deeper need to get things in order for myself. What do the items in this list mean? I will pierce the text with analysis in a moment, but in the largest sense, this list is a defeat.

A droopy bike tire, a waistband with no tone, a list of three where a list of two would have been sufficient. Anyone who has wrestled with a to do list knows a to do list is is a defeat. Why is this the case? Because for most of us, writing the items on the to do list becomes the psychological stand in for completing the tasks on the to do list. It slakes our thirst to do something, and then, because, verily, it was a shallow thirst, we don't do the actual thing.

Plus, as Julius Caesar did not say, doing stuff is hard. To keep ourselves from escaping the list's obligations by merely coming up with the list, we employ all manner of systems. Eunice Shriver, the philanthropist, and John and Robert Kennedy's sister reminded herself of tasks by pinning small notes written on scraps of paper to her sweater as reminders. Sometimes she'd forget that she was wearing her to do list, and she'd go out in public dappled with little bits of paper which made her look insane, but which I resemble. There are a lot of you out there who find this topic interesting as well.

Books on habits and getting your life in order shoot through the roof in the american publishing system, the unrewarding aspect of the to do list has been studied and what I am describing essentially lines up with something called the Zegarnik effect. Named after the russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who first described it in the 1920s. The Zegarnik effect suggests that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. This phenomenon is rooted in the idea that our brains have a natural inclination to resolve and finish tasks that are left unfinished when we dont. Theres mental tension.

Thats where this idea of defeat comes from. That tension. Now that tension can motivate us to complete the task, or it can lug up against the lower back and become a fanny pack of nagging that we wear because were always conscious of how much weve left undone. The productivity guru David Allen calls these uncompleted tasks on the to do list open loops and compares the undone matters that haunt us to planes circling an airport. Now a look at the text.

This notebook entry tracks more than just things undone. It is a list of things undone that starts with two reminders to restart routines to help me get things done that that are undone. Yes, I am one of those productivity people who has not yet accepted life's essential messiness. I cocoon myself in the illusion of control and employ various systems to banish the Zeigarnik. I know exactly what Yuna Shriver was after.

However, in my defense, I have not gone so far as to adopt the latest hot fad, which is to order life's messiness through the belief in conspiracy theories which provide the same comfort of order and which share the essential quality with the productivity routine, which is that by clinging to a series of occult notions, we will be able to put everything right in the world. I read my first productivity book just after college, Stephen Covey's seven habits of highly effective people. I've read so many productivity books since then that a productivity book on how to arrange your productivity books would be appealing to me. So it makes sense that the first item in this list is a productivity system. For those of you for whom this is all a bewilderment, lucky you.

How free and clean the air must be in your world without bother of productivity systems. How smooth the uncluttered passage of your days must be to convey to you, sweet child of summer, what I'm talking about in this frantic little moment is that the top two items on this list are as if you were making a shopping list, and put as the first two items on the list that you should make a shopping list system the first item in my notebook entry is reinstating the Pomodoro routine. The Pomodoro routine takes its name from the tomato kitchen timer. It's a well known productivity habit. It goes like set a timer for 20 minutes, perform only one task during that period.

When you finish, take a five minute break, and then repeat the process. That's how I wrote this essay every morning. The second item on the list, start. Marshall again refers to an accountability exercise inspired by my conversations with executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. That system requires more description than I dare burden you with here.

You already think I'm strange enough, but someday I will burden you with this in a later episode. Essentially for the moment, though, just to explain briefly, it's a way to keep track of the kind of person you want to be during the day, which is a different kind of way to think about the to do list. But changing the way we think about obligations and accountability is the genius of the Marshall routine, and, frankly, the genius of Marshall Goldsmith. I wrote about the martial routine in the Atlantic magazine for those of you who can't wait for the episode of the award winning navel gazing podcast. So if the yiddish proverb is that man plans and God laughs, then this to do list in this entry, topped with prompts to return to strategies for tackling to do lists, is what causes God to roll around on heavens plush carpet creased in hysterics.

So what is the revelation that comes from long looking at this entry, other than perhaps some kind of diagnosis? There must be some meaning out of this. That, of course, is our premise here at naval gazing headquarters, that life is worth more attention than we give it in its initial blur. That reflection rewards life can only be understood backwards. I didnt come up with that last line.

You may know who said it, but youre not going to get me to quote Kierkegaard on this podcast, or ill have to get insurance for all the listeners who injure themselves from eye rolling. The claim I would like to test against your experience. The ping I'm sending out into the world in this episode is that this entry captures a universal moment in time. Not just a moment in time for me in the fall of 2021, but one we've all felt it's an I'm gonna put things in order. Moment.

You remember what the shop looked like when you stood. Nails of varying sizes in tidy glass jars. Pegboard was purchased, tools aligned. Everything was in its place. To create, all you had to do was reach.

Or perhaps you organized the kitchen drawer that holds the things and the one tool for tightening that knob and the refund stickers to put on the trash. When it was all lined up like soldiers in an ancient temple, you conquered your day. Life, you felt, was full of possibility and the click of sweet connection. Or maybe you know what it feels like to have organized your office. You bought a label maker and you used different fonts.

Or that day that ended with inbox zero. Before Darwin set out to write origin of the species, he ordered his 20 years of research in precise arrangement. And then, under the clarity of that order, he was free to change the world in that shed that he turned into a writers studio. Now, whether our reorganization leads to the redefinition of how mankind understands the world or not, I bet we all have a tantalizing moment where we really felt like we were up and running, where we inhabited the after picture, in the before and after comparison, triumphant over the before pictures swirl of chaos and street trash. This notebook entry lies at the border between the before picture and the after picture, the margin of choice, where you stare up from the bottom of the pit, where you find yourself amidst the dwindling bones of the defeated and the detritus of capitalism.

The bus transfers, useless coat check stubs, cracked straws. And you decide, set your jaw and declare that you are going to, through sheer force of will, spring up out of that hole and join humanity up there. Where you witness pedestrians purposefully ambulate through their day, getting 1% better with every stride. You are going to get your stuff together. In this fragile moment, life teeters on a knife's edge.

It is the moment between buying running shoes and going running. Wait a minute. What does that mean? I was kind of letting you go along here, but where have the cracked straws gone? And why are you now talking in the third person?

Okay, I will slow down and put myself in order. This moment I'm describing where you decide to get your acting gear is what a good citizen named Merlin Mann identified as the tension between buying running shoes and going running. Now, who's Merlin Mann and what gives him the standing to talk about shoes? Merlin wrote an insightful productivity blog called 43 Folders. The name came from David Allen's organizational system, outlined in a book called getting things done.

That's one of those books I pressed on Laura Doane when she moved to New York. The topic of the previous episode. Merlin wrote about the personal habits necessary to flourish out in the world, and his attention to routine and its necessary connection to our animating values really influenced me. I liked his work so much, I took what I thought were just insights for personal achievement and applied them to my actual day job as a political correspondent. I interviewed Merlin in 2008 for a piece on presidential productivity, how presidents could manage their day better given that they face the acute form of the blizzard of obligations we all face.

In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama and british conservative leader David Cameron shared a walk in London that wound up being captured on audio. What did these two fellows who would rule the fates of mankind talk about? Life hacking. Both complain that they lack time to think, having their diary chalked up, as Cameron put it, by their staffs diary, in this case not being the little booklet into which you whisper your most intimate truths at the end of the day next to a steaming cup of some tisane, youre trying to convince yourself is delicious, but a diary is what the Brits call a daily schedule. Cameron, who would later go on to be prime minister, said he called the life of constant interruptions the dentists waiting office, presumably because the rhythm of those kinds of offices is one of constant interruption, where a new patient is called in sequential short periods.

Obama offered that hed quizzed White House veterans, who told him a president must be given time to think or he will lose focus and feel and forget why he wanted the job in the first place. I interviewed Merlin Mann and David Allen for this piece. The real world practicalities of being president wound up being part of my book on the presidency, the hardest job in the world, which sought to focus on the job itself as it exists for the human in it, and how at odds that actual job is from the job we talk about in our campaign coverage. And so Merlin appears in that book, too, in the section on presidential priorities. Priorities are like arms, he says.

If you have more than two, you are crazy or you are lying. What I never put in the book because I was unaware of it at the time was a rewarding EB White essay on presidential time management. In 1954, Dwight Eisenhower announced he was going to devote an hour of his day simply to thinking, exactly the topic that consumed Obama and Cameron 64 years later. White responded with approval in an essay called 1 hour to think. This line could have come out of my book, and I wish it had.

Heres White one trouble of being a leader of thought in America is that it leaves no time for thinking. And currently the duties of president are so heavy that they pretty well carry a man through the day without his having to think at all, except for the most triggerish sort of fashion. After interviewing Merlin for that piece, we became friends, a friendship, I should note, created entirely on the Internet. When we talk about how awful the world is online and it is awful, Merlin, nevertheless is one of the reasons for me that it isnt completely awful. And I should also note I was introduced to that Eisenhower essay by a fellow named Mark Wegener, who I only know from the Internet as well.

When you meet these kinds of friends in real life, the moment combines a mix of first day of school, will you be my friend? And the quirky sense that youre meeting a version of yourself. Because whatever has drawn you together in the salad toss of the Internet means you probably have a host of hidden, shared interests. When Merlin and I finally met in real life for a chinese food lunch in San Francisco, we buzzed back and forth in conversation, exchanging exclamations and recommendations about books and musicians and ideas. Notebook 18, December 6, 2009 Instapaper Alpha smart Richard Hugo on poetry degrees of Grey in Phillipsburg those are some of the notes from that lunch with Merlin Instapaper, a web app that just grabbed the text of a page and took away all the ads.

That was a big deal 15 years ago, and I've used it ever since. Alpha Smart is a word processor, just a keyboard with a tiny little window so that you can write without distraction. The struggle against attention attacks has been a long one, ongoing. The last two entries are a Richard Hugo poem and the book on writing poetry by Hugo, from which I quoted in the last episode, and which I've quoted in at least one of the commencement addresses I've given in an interview with Tina Esmaker. In the great disconnect, Merlin explained why he started writing about productivity.

I really needed the kind of advice that I ended up giving to other people. I've always felt like my personal productivity or my ability to make the things I wanted to make was out of reach. I wanted to be able to do that stuff, but somehow I wasn't always able to get my hands around it. I like Merlin's idea of seeing productivity as a route to making the things you want to make. This is a much more pleasant view of productivity than the one conveyed by the striving and straining set who promote productivity measures all over the place.

Productivity life hacking, the self help genre have a bit of a bad rap for a number of good reasons. Let's enumerate them. Cultishness. The inclination to feed our inward looking eyes so that we're just accruing ever greater neck pain looking at our navel. The notion that in society it's all up to the individual, and that there arent structural impediments to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

And then theres, of course, the grift of impractical routines that lure us into wasted hours by convincing us that if we just set up the right complicated system, well live a smooth and easy life in that framework. Its all a march back and forth between cold plunges and crossfit, always keeping your face turned towards the sun to feed your ocular nerves, while your perfectly synced bluetooth headset feeds you mandarin lessons. Not that we dont want that. Instead, what im talking about here with productivity is more the attentiveness of craftsmanship. Its not necessary to sculpt clay or fashion musical instruments from enchanted forest timber to appreciate the importance of craft, consciously honing your work to yield the finest results.

Those traditional conceptions of craft offer a mindset for us, whether the things you want to make are produced in an office or at a home. After you're home from the office, the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self mastery. This is what Socrates said, but the mastery of the craftsman, not the mastery of the drill instructor. Have I landed this idea I've been trying to work out here out loud? I'm not sure, darling.

I'm not sure you have. Okay, I will add one more layer of paint and hope not to lose you if I lapse into repetition, but I'll risk it in the event that I've been unclear. This is the joy of thinking out loud as you figure out what you're thinking. Okay, so I'm not talking about productivity in the sense of a chart where the arrow of stacked accomplishments surges ever upward. Instead, I would like to find a sense of intention that strikes a golden balance, where daily commitments are not so awful they flatten me into a life of drink, but also where idleness does not give way to rot.

Just enough astringency of intention to create an appetite for little moments of escape. Work that makes you march down the avenue to a meeting, but then makes the morning light seem like a wonder when you pass it draped over the corner of a building, bound up just enough in routine that a shard of aimlessness in the day is a tonic, and commitments just sufficiently numerous that you are not. I am not forced to be alone with your thoughts when they are nagging you. Heres a big claim ill make. This balance, if it can be found, is where these notebook entries come in, these entries worth looking at later.

The vice of daily obligations is tight enough to make one alert, not a blob sluicing through the day. But that vice is not so tight that you feel hunted. This whole podcast is a trust exercise that if you shape your days to allow for these moments, maybe what happens in those moments is worth a second look. And if you conclude that its fuel to be more intentional about trying to find this balance in your days between work and wonder if all this sounds like muddy goods and ive gotten it totally wrong, well keep it to yourself. Thats too much astringency for me and youll push me out of the golden balance.

Dammit.

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Homechef.com Navel must be an active subscriber to receive the free dessert. This episode is brought to you by Audible. The destination for thrilling audio entertainment. My thriller that im listening to on audible or have been listening to recently, is the wager by David grand, who was, as everybody probably knows, the author of killers of the Flower Moon. When you're listening to the wager, the imagination does something, and I swear I felt like I was on the ship.

I mean, that's also in part because the description of life on the ship in the various different levels and how they passed the days is so rich and detailed. Plus it's an incredibly thrilling story of shipwreck and survival and the court martial and the surprises. So check it out. Audible members can keep one title a month from the entire catalog. New members can try audible.

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Navel gazing is blessedly sponsored by field notes. I had this wonderful experience where somebody who's been listening to navel gazing listened to it with their college age child, and the response was, hey, I want to start keeping a notebook. And so they sent them on to our dear friends at field notes, who's been in my back pocket since about the George W. Bush administration, I realized in writing a later episode. So if you'd like to carry along a notebook to be a noticer in the world, visit fieldnotesbrand.com and save 10% on your first order by using the coupon code.

Gazing hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, the Queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title the Welfare Queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor. Now it's time to hear her real story.

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John Dickerson
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Life as craft, living with intention, keeping an eye on what you do and how you do it reminds me of one of Ann's professors, a man named Ernest Meadow. Id like to tell you briefly the story of how his sense of craft offered me a model of how to live, certainly, but also of intention and focus, unhooked from the idea of task completion and mere efficiency. Ernest Mead chaired the music department at the University of Virginia and later taught a seminar to fourth years. Thats what they call seniors. It was a seminar about life.

An official title to the class appeared in some course catalog somewhere, but no title could capture the range of this class. Though Mead taught in the music department, the class wasn't about music, per se, or maybe even at all. They met once a week for an unhurried seminar, sometimes sitting on the lawn at UVA, the way that seems only to happen in staged admissions brochure pictures. There they would exchange ideas about philosophy, art, creativity, business, a distillation of the humanities education an hour course catalog of course, the class is called Mabel gazing. The class met for defined hours, but Mister Mead, Boots was his nickname, carried his lessons well beyond the chalkboard.

He asked students what they truly cared about and encouraged them to pursue their dreams. Since his death, a fund has been set up in his memory to give teachers money for the purpose of taking students out for a meal. The fundraising page cites a Gallup poll that asked students in college what meant the most to them during their time there. The overwhelming answer, according to Gallup, was having a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams. A professor who teaches that kind of class, which seeks not merely to convey knowledge but fertilize the being for life, turns his students into boomerangs.

They come back after they've graduated, and so we did. Anne and I made regular return visits to Charlottesville, to school, to see Bootsmead. I never took his class, but I felt like I had. After a few visits, he attended our wedding, and he wrote a prayer for it. The prayer he wrote hangs on our wall.

It's a collage of sorts of different prayers, lines from prayers in the episcopalian book of Common Prayer. The back of the framed copy he gave us lists the different citations for each to always hear what each other says and to have a right judgment in all things, are some of the lines from that prayer that I like most. Mister Mead's house, tiny rooms, furniture arranged as he and his wife had said it probably 40 years earlier, was a depot through which a lifetime of students returned to drink tea and have simple snacks. On the living room table, in the shadow of the enormous piano. A notebook entry from June 4, 2011 notebook 18, page 105 visit to Mister Mead.

He was playing piano as we entered. During our conversation, he do you find your work fulfilling? Do you have a close circle of friends? Questions about life and living it well? Boots Mead asked, as a matter of habit.

The kinds of questions you come across in the kinds of life ordering books that I've referred to in this podcast previously in the history of mankind, the wisdom wouldn't have come from self help books, but the relationships with a person like Mister Meade in your life, a pastor or the family doctor, mentors, counselors, wise elders. Mister Meade was 92 on that visit. When we walked in, he wasnt just playing the piano, he was practicing. He told us with quickening excitement that he had been working on a new technique for playing. He was still tuning his craft even at 92.

This, it seemed to me, was the thing to be engaged for life in a craft where working at it provides that kind of renewable joy. Mead put that same kind of craftwork into his relationships, the same intentionality into his teaching, which is why students were always coming back. Living life with a craft or the craft mindset is what I want to mean when I think about the conscious and intentional approach to the way we live our days, our hours, the way we defend ourselves against the cultural equivalent of the dentist's waiting room. Now that we have defined what we mean by productivity, we are nudged back on the path to that topic of running shoes that I mentioned so many months ago. One of Merlin Manns essays is titled because buying new running shoes is more fun than actually running.

He wrote it in the high age of productivity apps that were flooding the market during the period where everyone was dropping the term life hacking in conversation with knowing ease. The apps were all gorgeous fun to set up, full of promise. Merlin worried that these tools were a trap, though youd get addicted to setting up the apps and getting your life in order. But then all that activity, all that futzing with smooth arrangements would become a stand in for the actual order. You'd never get to that sense of control that would free you or direct you towards that work you wanted to do.

Merlin was describing what is sometimes called the Hamlet syndrome, where you prepare and prepare and prepare, and then you stab your uncle. No, you prepare and prepare, and then you don't act. You dont build the treehouse with your neatly arranged tools. You dont write the business plan on your desk. Youve spent all afternoon tidying.

The Killer podcast lies fallow in your brain as youve already intuited. The running shoe equivalent is that you want to go running. But before you do, you watch YouTube videos about running shoes. You have special measurements done to fit your particular feat. You buy running shoe holders youve seen on Instagram, because Instagram knows that you are obsessed with the art of running shoe purchasing.

But when you buy the shoes of your dreams, you never go running, at which point, to slake your guilt about not going running, you start the shoe buying process again, convinced that if you just turn the process a quarter turn, youll overcome the obstacle and become the running person, person you wish to be. The person you actually are in this costume of activity though, is the buying running shoes and not running person that you started out as. The to do list can be a kind of running shoe purchase all the appearance of activity, but lacking that crucial step action, there is no substitute for action. Now we transfer over to James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, another of those books I ladled on Laura Doane. He has his own analogy involving running shoes.

The key to a goal is forming a gateway habit that makes it easy want to run a marathon? Great. It's hard. So get addicted to the small first part of building habits. To run the race, put on your running shoes.

Commit to that and nothing else. Because once you have the shoes on, well, you might as well go out and take a walk. Or instead of just walking to the end of the block, why don't you try running? Gradually you will scale up if you stay committed to the shoes and the first act of putting them on the system isn't the thing system in this sense being the to do list or the bits of paper on the sweater or the great planner that you bought. The shoes aren't the thing.

The putting on the shoes is the thing. Writers have a similar mantra. Put the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Twyla Tharp, the famous choreographer, wrote a book called the Creative Habit. Creativity is a habit, she writes, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.

Here's Tharp describing her habit I begin each day of my life with a ritual. I wake up at 05:30 a.m. Put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirt, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi and tell the driver to take me to the pumping iron gym at 91st street and First Avenue where I work out for 2 hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training that I put my body through each morning at the gym.

The ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go, I have completed the ritual. The ritual is the cab. Just get in the cab. If you miss a day, next day just get in the cab.

So what is the cab for you? For me, its the pomodoro. Which brings us back to our notebook entry and the first item on it. After Ann and I walk in the morning, I head to my office and I hit the Pomodoro timer. 20 minutes of work on one task, no other activity allowed other than running from the room if theres a fire, what task gets the 20 minutes?

I dont know. Whatever demands 20 minutes of focus that morning, usually its writing. For many months it was the essays that make up this podcast, one pomodoro after another. If you hit the Pomodoro timer, the task will present itself. Find yourself lost in the day after a zany email from your colleague.

Hit the pomodoro. Lose yourself and get tossed around by a social media thread. Hit the Pomodoro. The Pomodoro routine forces prioritization, the one thing that needs singularly focused attention in your day, and sets a constraint that leaves the brain free to do the work. When I interviewed the author Dan Pink about his writing process, he told me that he relied on the Pomodoro technique so heavily he credited the theory's creator in the acknowledgements of his New York Times bestselling book, Free Agent Nation what's getting in the cab for you?

Is it doing the top item on your to do list? The moment you sit down, no matter what, the task to which you commit yourself doesnt have to be about work. I dont think it could be that you put tending to your spouse at the center of your life and getting in the cab is cooking breakfast every morning for the two of you. I bet thats a great life to live in. All the productivity books I have read, I have learned many useful skills, and there are no real tricks you have to put in the work.

Mostly you have to do it, because any good system is one that you write yourself in. Your attention to daily habits. That takes work, takes time, takes patience. But what is true of all systems I have tried, adopted, failed at implementing, is that they all rely on one. Putting yourself in the cab.

If you have work you care about, and in this case the subject of the work is you, then you owe a duty of honor to yourself to put yourself in the cabinet, to play the scales on the guitar, to make the bed, to walk the lap in the park with your spouse in the morning, to hit the pomodoro and do whatever it is that is lucky enough to get your precious focus and attention. The reset represented by this notebook entry the I'm going to get my stuff together moment is part of the habit because sometimes you fall off the bandwagon, you flop out of your systems. You haven't gotten in the cab in ages. Thats what this notebook entry appears to me to be, a reset. And when that moment comes, low stakes are indicated.

Restoration comes not through a grand opera of activity, but a single act. When youre at the bottom of the pit, the way out is getting in the cab. That tiny moment, that choice to act is the key to any system aimed at improving human flourishing and in chaos. If you build a habit of just doing that small starter habitat, you've built the most useful habit. One more stop before we head out the door.

Productivity is a practice in the way that all craft is a practice, but also in the way that meditation is a practice. Good thing I have that meditation pillow upstairs. It is defined not by perfection mastering your life, but by imperfection. I'm introducing this notion to temper my initial assessment of what this getting your life in order notebook entry meant. I judged it too harshly at first to be useful.

I saw it as a self delusion. I see it more softly now. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg offers a great set of lessons on Dan Harris 10% happier app. In meditation practice, she explains, the mind wandering isn't a failure. Rather, it's a necessary part of the practice itself.

When your attention drifts away to distractions or tangents, you gently bring it back to the center that return that recentering yourself trains the muscle of focus. You need the distracting and the wandering to develop that muscle. The distraction is the weight that builds the muscle, not a bug, the mind wandering a feature. And so in that sense, is the impulse that was behind this entry. Fall off.

Get back on. That's the practice. Get in the cab. Hit the pomodoro.

It was wrong of me to conceive of this notebook entry as a defeat, as I did upon first looking at it. It's just the normal way it goes in life as you're nudging yourself back on course. It is an entry that focuses us on the fact that life is small, nudging back on course, particularly in these times of attacks on our attention. We need simple rescues that remove us from the chaos and root us back to the values and meaning we want out of life. We don't need a fancy plan, and we don't need to strain the lower back muscles.

That makes restarting too daunting. Just get back in the cab.

Thats it for this week of navel gazing. Or as the Irish say, what are you on about now? In episode seven, we will explore the spaces in which we do these things, these things being living.

Navel gazing is produced by Shayna Roth. Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio at Slate. Our theme music is produced by the band Plastic Mary. Remember, send us a note@navelgazingpodcastmail.com. And let us know your thoughts.

If you are a noticer out in the world, or a note taker, or the kin of a note taker, maybe youve got to do lists with. Send an email to navelgazingpodcastmail.com at the top of the to do list, check it off and send us one. Id love to hear from you. Im John Dickerson. Talk to you next week.