From Me to Me: A "Gift" I Keep on Giving

Dr. Timothy Pychyl, whose credentials are much more impressive, and whose blog Don't Delay, for Psychology Today, is much headier than mine, recently wrote a post entitled "Is Your Future Self Getting a Bad Deal?"  In it, he considers questions raised by Christine Tappolet in her chapter "Procrastination and Personal Identity," in the edited collection of essays The Thief of Time:  Philosophical Essays on Procrastination.

Tappolet uses the example of leaving the dishes for our future selves to wash, and argues that to do so consistently is to demonstrate a lack of concern for that heir to the crusted, stuck-to-the-countertop messes. [1]

Pychyl counters, in part, that we may reasonably expect that our future selves will have a greater capacity to manage the task than our exhausted present selves.  He likens this kind of procrastination to being willing to accept help from another when we are overwhelmed.  And he suggests that one way to alter this habit, if it is proving excessively burdensome for future self, is to develop and act on empathy for that future self, much as we might for another person.  I recognized myself in his observation that many of us will burden ourselves (present and future) in ways we wouldn't think of doing to someone else.

In her pre-vacation post this week, Gretchen Rubin (For anyone still living under a media blackout, she is the author of The Happiness Project, and the blog that gave birth to the book.) mentioned writer Anne Lamott's practice of referring to herself in the third person as a means of self-protection.  She cited this example:  “I’m sorry, Anne Lamott can’t accept that invitation to speak; she’s finishing a book so needs to keep her schedule clear.”

In a similar vein, I'm thinking it may help me to negotiate my procrastination tendencies to, well, actually negotiate with my future self.  Bringing the transaction into consciousness would force me to consider the impact of the implicit shifting of tasks from Today Me to Tomorrow Me, to weigh the relative capacities of each of these entities, and to exercise compassion toward both.  It would also promote a better accounting, and a fairer overall distribution of work to each party.  

There is, of course, the issue of progressive selves, and of determining whether my Tuesday Self or my February of 2011 Self should be recruited to deal with the chore I postpone today.  The calculus might become prohibitively complicated.  It might also cause a fracturing of self, ala Sybil.  

But it is an idea I intend to explore further, waking as I do this morning to some hangover items on my rolling to-do list, passed on to me without consultation by the selves of yesteryear.  (In my mind's eye--or the eye of the mind "I" occupy today--I have a vision of a bucket brigade, stretching into infinity, passing the bucket/buck from hand to hand, but never addressing the fire. . . .)

---

[1] I should note here that when I leave the dishes for another day, I sometimes delude myself as to the likelihood that another family member’s future self might step up to do them.  It happens with just enough frequency that blind hope enters into my calculations, to an extent dependant on my mood on any given day.  So I am reimagining Tappolet’s dishes as a work task that only I can do—but one that, like the dishes, becomes more irksome and requires more labor the longer it is left.

Procrastinating 101: Making Breakthroughs, and Keeping My Clothes On

Chapter 16, and the second last chapter, in Marshall Cook's Slow Down. . .and Get More Done is entitled "Running Naked in the Streets."  Really.


So what does streaking have to do with productivity and the good life?


Well, apparently not too much, beyond contributing an intriguing chapter lead-in.  Cook is discussing creativity in this penultimate section of his book.  The streaking phrase comes from the story of Archimedes who lit upon the theory of displacement while in his bath, shouted "Eureka!" and headed for the streets to announce his discovery, not stopping to put on his clothes.  Cook takes off from this tale to discuss the thrill of creativity, and of novel ideas and inventions and solutions to problems.


As in other chapters, there is much material that, while quite enjoyable to read, does not seem to pertain directly to Cook's overall subject.  But he does eventually come around to the recommendation that we employ creativity to look at the metaphors for life and for ourselves that underpin the way we approach our efforts and our days.  The exercises he prescribes for accomplishing this examination ask us to, first of all, complete the statement "Life is _____" in as many ways as we can think of in three minutes.  Following that, we are to determine which of the statements we agree with, and then which seems to best capture our view of life.  Similarly, we are instructed to complete the statement "I am _____," again  jotting down as many ideas as we can in three minutes, and then performing the same sorting process to come up with that statement that best expresses how we see ourselves.  


At the conclusion of this exercise, Cook would have us "embrace our opposite," finding the statements about life and ourselves that are most unlike the ones we generally operate from.  And finally, we are to write a statement about ourselves as we would like to be, and then carry it around with us for a week, reading it often--as a way of pushing our reset.  Cook says

You won't become the reality simply by chanting the statement several times a day, but you can mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for the necessary changes.  You can begin calling forth from your Big Mind the wisdom and the will you need to become the person you want to be.  

I haven't completed my lists yet, but I am generally inclined to accept Cook's premise.  I do believe that the way we think about things, and ourselves, has a lot to do with how we act, and how we experience our lives.  And I accept that changing our categories and our assumptions can take us in new, and perhaps more satisfying directions.


When I do figure out my new "controlling metaphors," however, don't look for me to take to the streets, or the rooftops, with or without garments, to announce them.  Whatever I am, or might wish to be, I'm pretty sure "a streaker" isn't it.  Especially not at my latitude, and in this season.

. . . By Any Other Name

Beating The Little Hater

December 18, 2007

My son the hip hop blogger sent me this, from ill Doctrine--"a hip-hop video blog hosted by Jay Smooth, creator of the hip hop music blog and founder of New York's longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI's Underground Railroad." And though I'm not as videogenic, or as hip as Mr. Smooth, I identify strongly with what he has to say here about the relationship of perfectionism to procrastination.  And why my standards for writing have grown over the years of not writing, until they loom like furies as I sit at the keyboard.

Every day, I understand more about the scourge in my life that is perfectionism.  And it is not just a stumbling block to creativity.  It comes into play in virtually every arena.  This past weekend, I was upset with myself for not being a perfect grandmother, who, in my "little hater's" view, would relish every minute in the sandbox, never tiring of pretending to be a front end loader, or of the incessant conversation of a three-year-old with a sophisticated vocabulary rendered partially unintelligible by the enunciation idiosyncracies of his age.  And yesterday, it was my mothering, life-partnering and household maintenance whose subpar results gave me grief.  I really need to rein this guy in.  Jay Smooth calls the actions of "all these little haters" a conspiracy, and appeals to all creative people to work together to beat them.  He asks us to share strategies.

Therese Borchard, author of the hit blog Beyond Blue, refers to perfectionism in a recent post as her personal "brick wall."  Her strategy? 

getting up at 5:30 in the morning to begin my day in prayer. Because if I go to God first thing each AM I'm less likely to hit that wall so hard.

Gretchen Rubin includes this advice in her post "Ten Tips for Being Happier:"

There are two types of decision makers. Satisficers (yes, satisficers) make a decision once their criteria are met. When they find the hotel or the pasta sauce that has the qualities they want, they’re satisfied. Maximizers want to make the best possible decision. Even if they see a bicycle or a backpack that meets their requirements, they can’t make a decision until they’ve examined every option. Satisficers tend to be happier than maximizers. Maximizers expend more time and energy reaching decisions, and they’re often anxious about their choices. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

Apparently, I may have gone a bit overboard yesterday, when I spent an hour an a half "maximizing" my choice of personal checks, though I think you'll agree that the results were excellent. 

  

But I see what Smooth means about all those open tabs. . .

Turning to another source of wisdom, I learned of the Buddha's perfectionistic (if occasionally homicidal) cousin, Devadatta. His story and its meaning are summarized in The Psychology of Mature Spirituality: Integrity, Wisdom, Transcendence, by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Melvin E. Miller.

The story of Devadatta shows that perfectionism is the enemy of perfection.

Of course, Devadatta was a moral perfectionist, caught up with rigorous rule-bound practice. Not really my issue. But still, the cushion recommends itself to me as a place to start befriending my imperfection. And it just might help, too, with what begins to look more and more like adult ADHD--which I am starting to think is a cultural artifact of our times.

I am taking away from Jay Smooth's video blog the "little hater" terminology. It is more evocative than the "internal editor" nomenclature I have been using for years to identify the voice that stops me from writing. An editor one might deal with rationally. A hater should just be tuned out for the killing influence he is.

So I will work on turning a deaf ear to "It's too late to make your mark," "You don't really have anything to say," "What the world doesn't need is another hatchet job of a manuscript in search of a drawer to die in," and their ilk. And just get on with it, already.

Done for the Week: Still Training After All These Weeks

Last week was a trying one, mainly because of the time spent on anxiety.  For anyone who hasn't had that particular thrill, it amounts to a lot of time feeling lousy.  In between minor out-of-the-blue terror attacks (terror, not terrorist),  I exercised, ate small frequent meals, failed at sleeping, and worked at not biting the heads off the people I love and live with.  Not my most productive period.  But if I am to believe some of those writing about my time of life, this experience can be seen as an opportunity to "finally, really grow up," to "awaken to my life's purpose," and to "let everything become my teacher."


Despite the lofty promises of its outcome, I can't say I'm really enjoying this course.  However, I did manage to get the following done last week:


Done List--Week of July 26-Aug. 1

1.  Finished Week 11 of revised 14-week Sprint Triathlon training plan--3 weeks to go!
2.  Continued assembling tri gear
3.  Finished The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, by Alexander McCall Smith; Sabbath:  Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy   Lives,  by Wayne Muller; When We Were Romans, by Matthew Kneale
4.  Spent time dealing with effects of medication change--extra resting  
5.  Continued my two part-time paying jobs
6.  Published 5 blog posts
7.  Meditated 5 times
8.  Wrote 5 Gratitude Journal entries
9.  Wrote 5 Morning Pages
10.  Continued cleaning campaign
11.  Continued mini yoga practice 
12.  Attended 1 yoga class
13.  Took my husband away for his birthday weekend; read, slept, biked, relaxed, walked; continued    reading aloud Elizabeth George's Deception on His Mind                                   

In red above is last week's most important accomplishment, something I've been putting off for far too long.  Unfortunately, my anxiety came along for the ride, but I did manage to leave my teenagers without the obsessive worrying I have experienced, and all too often for good reason, in the past.  A watershed event of our late parenthood.  And something to be repeated soon.

Last week's focus goal, and my focus goal for the next three weeks, was/is to continue training and preparing mentally for the triathlon, in three weeks.   On Sunday, I arrived home from our weekend away to find that my Size XS wetsuit had arrived--but not at my house.  UPS had delivered it to a neighbor, and I had received his King Size something-or-other.  We made the trade, so now I am ready to join a group of tremulous initiates at my first open water swim clinic on Tuesday evening.  (I don't know where my neighbor will be with his package.)  I am trying out "gels," which are little foil packets of quick energy food--something like an astronaut might relish, I imagine--and have tested my new "hydration system"--a Camelback water bottle held in a mesh sack suspended by a strap across my front, which allows me to drink while biking, without falling off.  

My times are holding fairly steady, around the tortoise mark, but my endurance is still increasing.  On Saturday, I will receive instruction in setting up for transitions (T1 from swim to bike, and T2 from bike to run) at an all-day triathlon prep camp.  I am awaking at night with visions of lining up with my wave at the race start, and refusing to get into the water.  I train, and rest, and talk about the tri.  I am enjoying the process less, and starting to feel the shortening countdown.  

Striving to reach this goal is like nothing I've ever done before.  The biggest thing to work on at this point is my head.  I am trying to come up with visualizations (one I encountered is thinking of fear as a balloon that you've held tied to your wrist since childhood, and of letting it go, blowing it away as you breathe through the events, up and away like those balloons I've seen released at funerals. . . . Oops!  Skip that last part.).  And mantras.  My daughter suggested modeling Stuart Smalley's affirmations (performed by SNL's now U.S. Senator Al Franken)--"I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me."  But that's just silly.  I came up with "I'm strong enough, I've trained enough, and gosh darnit, people like me."


But enough about the tri.  I'm late for a training run.

How to Make Myself Miserable at My First Triathlon

A number of years back--three mostly grown children ago in fact--I happened on a book that helped me laugh at all my little neurotic tics and phobias.  It was entitled How to Make Yourself Miserable:  A Vital Manual, written by Dan Greenburg with Marcia Jacobs.  This handy little guide included tongue-in-cheek instructions for extracting the most distress possible from several fairly garden-variety situations.


One that has remained in my head since reading it, probably because the description corresponds so closely to how my household, in all its various forms, has generally handled it, has to do with getting to the airport.  The reader is advised to leave just enough gas in the car to maybe make it to the airport, if all goes well.  Similarly, we should depart from home with just enough time to dash onto the plane as the door is being closed, and no margin for traffic snarls, accidents, or other contingencies.  You can see how this sets us up for a significant period of suffering, as we stress in traffic, watching the descending needle on the gas gauge, and knowing that if we stop for gas, we will definitely miss the flight.  Of course, if we don't stop, we may run out of gas and miss the flight.  And this was written pre-9-11.  Just think how much more agony can be mined from this situation today!


Of course, Greenburg's volume was really intended to show us all the ways in which we sabotage ourselves by behaving neurotically, adding to our stress levels.  Maybe it's my oppositional personality, or my Irish black humor, but I got more out of reading this laugh-out-loud handbook than out of many more direct and traditional self-help books.  So having kind of late in the game figured out that the triathlon I am preparing for is going to be, for me as for many others, largely a psychological challenge, I decided to try adapting Greenburg's approach to my own sports psychology.


Here are 8 ways to drive myself crazy at my first triathlon.

1. Visualize myself drowning, or worse, panicking and embarrassing myself.
2. Use this handy little mantra--I think I can't, I know I can't, why did I ever think I could?
3. Follow Therese Borchard's (Beyond Blue) example, detailed in this very funny post, and freak out about getting a fish in my shorts.
4. Compare myself to all the younger, fitter, faster athletes.
5. Obsess about my heart rate.
6. Keep torturing myself about whether to drop out of the race.  Use this technique in all three events, right up to the finish line.
7. Visualize paramedics standing over me.
8. Keep thinking "what if. . ."  "What if someone kicks me in the nose while swimming?"  "What if I crash into a tree on my bike?"  "What if a squirrel runs in front of me?"  

I'm sure there are some other strategies I can come up with to make my race the ordeal I clearly deserve.  But this is a start.


And seriously, if I can laugh at any or all of these ideas, that's a good thing.

The Center's Not Holding

I’m having a hard time staying on course lately.  The community organization that has been a large part of my life in the last few years is in crisis—yet again—and I’m getting drawn in.  I’m not sure whether I’m attending a prolonged wake, or handing instruments to roadside surgeons.  The field is definitely contaminated.

Personally, I am presently engaged in the process of reconstructing my routines, and refocusing my efforts.  This is a project I know too well, having spent most of my adult life living semester to semester, as a student, an instructor, a parent of students, and a professor’s wife.  I have also juggled part-time and full-time work with mothering, which has required me to restyle my days on a regular basis.  I know that I am not alone in this but, at least among my friends and acquaintances, I seem to have experienced more than my share of flux.  So I’m a little off balance to begin with, these days.

I’m giving myself a little talking-to this morning, consisting of the advice I would give a friend who found herself or himself in similar circumstances.  And I am telling myself to give some thought to how much flexibility and responsiveness I can afford, as I react to the new demands and opportunities created by my organization’s death rattle.  And my answer needs to be, not so much. 

It has taken me months to reach this place, where I am beginning to do things that I have been planning/wanting to do for a long time, and to have some clarity about where I want to put my energy, what is important to me, what choices I have.   The years are short, as Gretchen Rubin reminds us, and I don’t want another of these precious periods to pass only to come around again to the same point.  And though my Buddhist teachers would perhaps say that “progress” is an illusion, I think they might also be sympathetic to my desire to be in my own here and now.  And on my own path.

So I am reminding myself not to jump ship.  My ship.  If I need to throw out life preservers, or lend navigational skill, or put in a call to the Coast Guard, I am more than willing.  But I have my own vessel to pilot, and going down with my large and listing seafaring neighbor is not an option.  

The phrase “whatever floats your boat” carries a flavor of hedonism, but in this case, I am what floats my boat.  And it is my job to keep it afloat.  As I witness the struggles of the perhaps doomed craft whose crew I never really left, I need to stay aware of my own weather, and keep my oar in the water.

Procrastinating 101: Working on Language

Dr. Neil Fiore wants us to talk to ourselves.  He just doesn't like what we are saying, much of the time.  (See above.)


Dr. Fiore is the author of The Now Habit:  A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, which I have been examining in my Tuesday Procrastinating 101 posts for the last few weeks.  In the chapter on "How to Talk to Yourself," Fiore elaborates on how resentment fuels procrastination.  In his view, when we experience alienation from the work we have to do, we adopt a victim mentality.   We perceive "others" or "them" as dictating what we must do.  This sets up an internal conflict between the self that must resist such "threat[s] to [its] integrity", and the self that attempts to direct us to accomplish the imposed task.  The conflict can be experienced as either a stress response or a depressive response.  (Or if we're really lucky, both!)  


According to Fiore, we can observe this mechanism at work by becoming aware of our language, or self-talk.  When we work from resentment, we tell ourselves, and often complain to others, that we "should" do this, and we "have to" do that.  When we use these words, says Fiore, we communicate to the subconscious mind

• I don't want to do it.
• They're making me do it against my will.
• I have to do it or else!--something awful and terrible will happen.  I will hate myself.
• This is a no-win situation:  if I don't do it I'll be punished; if I do it I'll be going against myself. [p.59]

Using Fiore's map, the way out of this morass is through marshaling the power of choice.  And our journey "from resistance to commitment" begins with that staple of self-help advice, learning how to say "no."  In this way, we begin to thin the number of tasks that are not of our choosing.  


Having trimmed our to do lists in this way, we can then "reprogram" our self-talk to experience the power of choice.  For this, Fiore offers "five self-statements that distinguish procrastinators from producers."  He directs us to:

• Replace "I have to" with "I choose to."
• Replace "I must finish" with "When can I start?"
• Replace "This project is so big and important" with "I can take one small step."
• Replace "I must be perfect" with "I can be perfectly human."
• Replace "I don't have time to play" with "I must take time to play." [pp.71-75]

One scary piece of advice Fiore gives is that we count the number of "should" statements we issue to ourselves in a ten-minute period.  This, he says, will give us "a good estimate of [y]our degree of depression."  I'm still working on my procrastination chart from last week--I'm a little behind in my procrastination homework.  What else is new?  But I have a feeling that when I get to this little test, I'm not going to like the results.  


In the meantime, I'm going to start on my language repair, because "I choose to."  But first, "I have to" switch off the circuit powering my oven before its malfunctioning beeping drives me insane.