14: Do It, Or Don't
In which I can't be trusted to take a simple productivity hack and NOT turn it into a philosophical treatise
This is the Eureka Project, a letter about writing, thinking, working and living well. I am James Mitchell.
This one might be a bit long. I’m trying something new: instead of writing every week with whatever I can think of and maybe some links, I’m saving my thoughts up a few weeks at a time, to see if I can’t collide a few of them together and come up with something new. Let’s see.
One: A Retreat Report
I last wrote to you as I was heading to Moniack Mhor, a writing retreat in the Highlands. Close to Loch Ness, one of those rare places in the world where people go to see something that isn't there. Power of stories, indeed.
I wrote, walked, cooked, chatted with the writing tribe. I swam in a loch first thing in the morning. The water was so cold that my skin hurt from the blood rushing to meet it.
Going on retreat costs money, in the form of time away from being able to earn anything. It also costs money in the form of pounds. So it’s very tempting to get all productivity about it. What’s your word target? Will you reach it?
(Reader: How many did you write, James? More Less than my wildest dreams, and more than my deepest fears.)
I didn't have a consistent method of working (which I've said previously is OKAY), but sometimes I fell back on that old classic, The Pomodoro Technique.
(Pomodoro Technique, noun: a method of working where the user sets a 25-minute timer, ideally using one of those red plastic timers shaped like a pomodoro tomato, and works for the whole of that time. There is a five-minute break, then the user starts the timer again. There are videos of this now. What a brilliant sub-sub-genre.)
Many of the great creative grafters of our age swear by pomodoro because it can break any task down into manageable units. And it makes you "Just Do It", to borrow a phrase from my advertising world. It's November; anyone currently embarking on their space pirate wizard dragon romance novel for National Novel Writing Month will understand the liberating power of go go go. It worked for me when I did NaNoWriMo.
And it worked for me at MM. But I had to break it first.
Two: Doing, Not Doing, And Mis-doing
Pomodoro (and NaNoWriMo sprint culture) are explicitly about focus. "You must do this thing, solidly, for 25 minutes." It works especially well when the work you are doing really is more important than anything else, and you have to get it out there. But even users tend to say "I tried Pomodoro and it worked really well." It's almost always a hack in extremis, and never people’s real way of working life. Which to me suggests it's not really sympathetic to how humans think. It places really high value on doing, which means that the pain of not doing could get even greater for us workaholics: "I was meant to be on task for 25 minutes, and I couldn't even do that?” It might lead to despair. We probably shouldn’t be creating additional despair inside ourselves - so what’s the compassionate way to get stuff done?
The other week I heard an episode of the Art of Manliness podcast (ignore the name, it's great and it's for everyone) talking to Nir Eyal, writer of the book Indistractible. There's a lot in there but the idea that stayed with me was: when it comes to doing the things we want to do, lack of focus is not the problem. Distraction is the problem. Splitting hairs? Let's investigate.
Even if focus is your goal, everyone occasionally stops doing the thing they intended to do. Human brains have a limit to their concentration, just like human biceps have a limit to how many reps they can curl. Both limits are flexible, but they're real. You can’t “focus” through a marathon if you haven't run anywhere near that distance before.
Distraction is literally dis-traction. "Wrong pulling". It's not just not doing the thing you meant to do. It's actively doing something else. Distraction is still action.
So really our (God, bear with me) productivity cycle is not
action -> not action
but
traction -> ? -> distraction
We do what we meant to do, then something happens, and then we do something else. Let's call this the Give-Up Cycle.
When you think about ‘productivity as doing’ culture then it's easy to see how we're primed to distract ourselves. Our sources of distraction can feel productive: ”Producing" social posts, messages, badges in a game... these experiences, developed by teams of experts and refined by a/b testing (that you’ve unwittingly taken part in), all increase the speed and power of the Give-Up Cycle. Which is sad, because when you really think about it, its not that you really want to do loads. you want to do a moderate amount, of the things that actually matter to you. right?)
The power and polish of our modern distractions are so great, that the traction -> ? -> distraction process can happen fast enough to slip by before the conscious brain even notices. (Think about how many times you’ve tabbed out of this post.)
But its speed is important, because something is happening underneath that question mark. Something big, that works at our deepest levels, a hundred times a day.
What is it? Wait, hold on. My sponsor made me put this next bit in.
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If you've read this far, you probably like what I do. If so, there are a few actions you can take:
a) Support my writing: a somewhat special piece of life writing is coming out next month, in the anthology Better Than IRL. It took a lot to pull this one out, but I'm glad I did. The whole book is looking amazing, and you can still get a digital copy in time for release. Support writers like me! Support brave publishers!
b) Support my strategy side: I'm currently on the lookout for projects, gigs and collaborations for the backend of November, and December. See what I do here.
c) If a friend sent this to you, why not subscribe? I won't send you a letter unless I really feel like I have something you should hear.
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Three: That Awkward ? In The Middle
Back to the cabin in Moniack Mhor. Usually when it was writing time, I took myself to the cabin with the log fire. I was there to work but not to hate myself over it, and I had limited concentration after the last few weeks. So when I needed to stop, I stopped. But I didn't give myself anything else to do. I'd taken myself beyond the reach of wifi, and left all my books in my bedroom. So...
Action -> ?
So I looked out of the window, or doodled shapes in my notebook, or paced. The kinds of things people do in novels, when they're about to reach a bit of self-understanding.
Often, after a few minutes, the need to do something else faded, and I could go back to work. That's great, and if you just came here for the productivity hack than feel free to leave now and get back to your to-do-list.
But that isn't the interesting bit. I lingered in that uncomfortable limbo, that in-between moment. I heard the signal from myself to turn away from this work. And I asked back: "what's going on with my work that makes me want to turn away from it? Is this an opportunity to make it better?" And then I asked, "what's going on inside me that makes me want to turn away? Am I scared it’s not going to be good enough? That I’m not good enough to do it? Am I sad?"
I took this behaviour home, and I took it beyond the writing. Once you start considering distraction, you notice it everywhere. Now, when I reach for my phone without having an explicit reason to look at it (you hope that the phone will give you a reason once you've opened it, and the damn thing always does), I linger in the question. What's happening around me, or inside me, that is making part of me want to turn away from this moment?
We aren’t distracted unless something’s wrong. And like a new job, a new partner, or a new city, we have little chance understanding what’s wrong if we always run after something else. We might well take our problems with us, in our pockets.
Four: This Was Always Going To Be About Phones In The End
This sounds like an anti-technology jeremiad, but it's not meant to be. Without tech, getting to and staying in the Highlands would have been too much for this guy. On the contrary, I'm starting to think phones have a brand new function for us. Uniquely phones, uniquely now.
Two reasons. This is the first moment in history where we have a device that can provide every kind of self-soothing. It's the first time that most people have depended on a single item as their response to most bad feelings.
Secondly, while computing will only become even more omni-soothing, it will also migrate to the internet of things ("ambient computing", Google calls it). So this is also the *last* moment in history where that omni-soothing device will even BE a device.
In other words, we are in a unique time where almost all of us share a behavioural script, where picking up a particular item is a semi-reliable signal that something is wrong with us in that moment. We've never had that before and we won't have it again.
So my invitation to you productivity-heads is not to see picking your phone as a sign of broken willpower. Instead, it's a signal from you to you: *something's up*. This is similar to practising meditation: early on, you learn that when your mind wanders, you haven't failed. It's just a cue to gently bring it back on track. In other words, losing guidance of your thoughts and then getting it back isn't a cessation of the process. It *is* the process.
Picking up our phones, or reaching for any distraction, is a way we let ourselves know when we're unhappy. Finding out why is an opportunity to look within.
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Thanks for sticking with me for something different. Longer, more layered, and less frequent is what I’d like to do in future. It feels right to me, if I'm to give you something more original and personal. I certainly prefer writing it. But I'd love to hear what you think. As ever, write back on this email, or leave a comment, or tweet me @jamescmitchell.
Finally, the easiest ways to:
☞ Support my writing: get a digital copy of Better Than IRL.
☞ Support my strategy side: Let’s work together.
☞ Support this newsletter: send on, subscribe, click the little green heart so Substack knows you like this.
☞ Go deeper on the idea of compassion and productivity: Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird is a writing classic for a good reason: she knows how to mix compassion for how hard things are, with a gentle insistence that there’s only one way to really get them done. The talk she gave for this year’s NaNoWriMo is a must.
See you, one way or another, in December.
James