Bifurcated Life

The conjunction of a new semester and a new year always instigates a frenzy of productivity experimentation in me. I make lists, focus research goals, reinvigorate exercise plans, examine new recipes, rearrange furniture, discard unwanted books, print out calendars, attempt to magically reorient the earth so that a bit more sun comes in the window by my desk, and purchase new pencils. Only last year did I begin keeping a “log” instead of a journal (I’ve recommenced the journal in addition this year), to track personally important daily goals: numbers of pages written, pages read, minutes run, hours asleep, etc.

The main lesson of the log was that the most significant productivity changes involve minor but far-reaching improvements. An example: my peak hours of clear-headedness and nervous energy are from about 8:00-12:00 in the evening. But in the past I always liked to bathe for a while in the evenings. (Yeah, I’m a guy and I like to read during long baths — so sue me.) But at least 5 times out of 7 I’d end up continuing to read the same light novel or whatever late into the evening, only to wake up to my planned obligations about 20 minutes before bed, with the result that either I didn’t get things done or I stayed up much too late and therefore had trouble getting things done the next day. So just a few weeks ago, it dawned on me that I should only shower at night. Voila! Suddenly I find myself getting a whole lot done between 8:00 and 12:00. Small things can make a huge difference. Is there something about your desk that makes you reluctant to be there? An uncomfortable chair, that your desk faces a wall, the texture of its surface, lighting? Changing those things can tremendously impact your productivity over the long-term — suddenly you go eagerly to your desk and reluctantly away from it, adding those ten or fifteen minutes every day, that hour every week, those four hours every month, those two days every year. You know how weight-watchers keep little journals, to chart their progress and success at target calorie intake or whatever? I think it’s totally worth it to keep a productivity log, tracking whatever daily increments of work you are hoping to build into great opuses. As with medication, dosage in routine is a precise and powerful science.

Far too many people advise improving one’s motivations or dwelling on long-term goals, but they only occasionally examine their indefinitely repeating habits. The trouble with New Year’s resolutions, for example, is that they presuppose the main condition for achieving something is to correctly conceive and state it. True, conception and statement are important — the provide clarity and unity to one’s efforts. But relying on such things alone reminds me of one of the more hilarious parts of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Pip and his best friend, a young and impecunious nobleman, begin their independent lives together with profligate spending habits. They run up debts right and left. Occasionally the magnitude of their respective financial straits overcomes them, and they set aside a day to settle their accounts. So they spend the day listing on a sheet of paper their full financial condition, all the problems, etc. and then — they congratulate themselves and continue in the same patterns of spending. As if clearly stating a problem produced its solution. It didn’t work for them, and it doesn’t work for us.

Because, honestly, coming up with goals, resolutions, projects is the easiest part. Actually observing the shit you’ve “programmed” yourself to do, routines and habits and invisible time-wasting ticks — that’s most of the stuff you do — is much harder. Using time well is undoubtedly much harder than losing weight, and we live in a culture obsessed with the difficulty of the latter. Recognition and control of minute daily details is the key in both cases.