I wrote at the end of last year about the importance of reflections. “Give yourself the time you deserve to reflect upon 2020. It wasn’t all garbage and time wasted indoors.” The year had decimated everyone’s goals but had made room for new ones, which in my case meant a ton of quality time with family.
Sometimes the only way we can see what’s going on is by zooming out. And not just at the end of the year, when we tend to cram all of our reflection, but throughout the year, when we pass judgement on ourselves without all the facts. “I’ve been eating terribly. I’m not focusing at work. I need to call my parents more.” Think of the generalizations you make about yourself.
Mine is clear: I’m not writing enough. It’s what I tell myself each day that my journal stays tucked away in a drawer. It’s what I tell myself when I see the last time I posted something to my website or worked on a short story. It’s what I tell myself when I sit down to write my newsletter late on a Sunday afternoon. For nine months now, it’s been bouncing menacingly around my head, uninterrupted.
Last week I finally put an end to it. Did I snap my fingers and start writing more? No! I’m not Superman. What I did was much easier, and a necessary first step to making a change: I stopped bemoaning what I wasn’t doing and instead reflected on what I was doing. I sat down and listed, in hours, how I had spent my time that week:
- Work 50 hours
- Sleep 56 hours
- Groceries 2 hours
- Family phone calls 2 hours
- TV 8 hours
- Reading 8 hours
- Screentime 14 hours
- Walks 5 hours
- Exercise 8 hours
- Writing 4 hours
- Etc…
Then I circled all the places where I felt I was misallocating time. Eight hours of TV? A habit from our honeymoon that had stuck around, and a good place to cut. Fourteen hours of screentime? A lot of miscellaneous scrolling that should be spent more intentionally. Even reading seemed excessive.
Hopefully you get the picture. Was the exercise exact? No. If I waited for a perfect tally of how I spent my time I’d never do it, and by the time I added everything up I came pretty close to the 168 hours in a week. But an exercise like this also doesn’t need to be exact. The point is not to make changes around the margins, but to make the big, easy changes. If I’m “not writing enough” then what am I doing instead? If writing were truly something I valued, I would be dedicating more time to it. Plain and simple.
So now, instead of pointless self-flagellation, I have a path forward. When I sit down to watch Ted Lasso, I know I’m choosing not to write. Same for spending an hour absorbed in a new book, or twenty minutes reading travel blogs. There’s no invisible bogeyman, just a bunch of choices to think about. It’s an exercise I’ll repeat again in the future.
Another exercise I will repeat in the future is asking myself questions about who I am as a person. Hippie sh*t, I know. But last week, as an icebreaker for a leader roundtable, each of us answered the question: “What makes you who you are at the core?”
If that question gives you goosebumps, join the club. We’re very seldom asked to be vulnerable like that in the workplace, and we very seldom take the opportunity to be vulnerable like that with ourselves. What if the answer is a bad one? What if my core is ugly?
I sat down with pen and paper before the meeting and wrote out a couple of ideas. Some were idealized versions of myself. Some felt accurate for my professional life but not my personal life. It was much more difficult than I expected.
I ended up settling on community. Being active in whatever community I’m a part of is critically important to who I am. It’s why I dedicate time to recruiting, and why I coordinate the Great Saunter each year. It’s why I’ve stayed a part of Centro NYC despite the school closing during the pandemic. It’s why I continue to say good morning to the runners I pass in Brooklyn despite their refusal to reciprocate.
Is it the perfect answer? No. I’m sure there are other core motivations of mine that I overlooked. But that’s the point of the exercise. To put a finger on what it is that motivates you so you can leverage that knowledge in the future. Given how much I value community, I know how difficult it would be to leave my company. That has a big influence on how I approach my career going forward.
I am going to spend more time on reflections like this.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
Revolt of the Delivery Workers – The Verge
“To the apps, they are independent contractors; to restaurants, they are emissaries of the apps; to customers, they represent the restaurants. In reality, the workers are on their own, often without even the minimum in government support.”
Go For a Walk – Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic
“The Camino is all about walking, not arriving, which forces one to live in the moment and (at least temporarily) to abandon the fruitless chase for lasting satisfaction through bigger accomplishments and better rewards. On the Camino, one realizes that fulfillment cannot come when the present moment is merely a struggle to bear in service of the future, because that future is destined to become nothing more than the struggle of a new present, and the glorious end state never arrives. If we want to find true satisfaction, we must instead focus on the walk that is life, with its string of present moments.”
How to Age Gracefully – Jane Brody, NYT
“I will stubbornly resist altering my habits to avert potential tragedies that others foresee. I walk my dog in the woods over slippery rocks, roots and fallen logs so I can enjoy his fearless energy and athleticism and improve my own balance and self-confidence.”