The Benefits of letting your mind wander

Allowing our minds to wander can also give us opportunities to process emotions, Elisabeth Netherton, a psychiatrist and regional medical director with Houston-based Mindpath Health, said. Some of her patients keep their brains busy to avoid certain feelings, which then come flooding out when their minds slow down. Providing some time for introspection during the day can help manage those emotions and reduce anxiety. Although mind-wandering has been linked to increased anxiety and depression, the results of a 2019 study suggest that intentional mind-wandering can mitigate anxiety, depression and stress.

Counterintuitively, mind-wandering may also help us get more done. Although we’d never expect our bodies to run all day long, Olga Mecking, author of “Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing,” said, “we somehow expect our brains to be on 24/7.”  The high value society places on productivity means we often keep working, even when we notice ourselves slowing down or making mistakes. But by preventing such issues, taking breaks might make us more productive. Meanwhile, Dane points out that, if our minds never strayed from the current task, we wouldn’t remember the other tasks we need to complete. Research shows a link between mind-wandering and the fulfillment of goals.

Pam Moore writing in the Washington Post

It’s not time management, it’s attention management

In his book “When,” Dan Pink writes about evidence that your circadian rhythm can help you figure out the right time to do your productive and creative work. If you’re a morning person, you should do your analytical work early when you’re at peak alertness; your routine tasks around lunchtime in your trough; and your creative work in the late afternoon or evening when you’re more likely to do nonlinear thinking. If you’re more of a night owl, you might be better off flipping creative projects to your fuzzy mornings and analytical tasks to your clearest-eyed late afternoon and evening moments. It’s not time management, because you might spend the same amount of time on the tasks even after you rearrange your schedule. It’s attention management: You’re noticing the order of tasks that works for you and adjusting accordingly.

Adam Grant, writing in the New York Times

The Main Thing

Every morning just look at your calendar and ask yourself one question: “What’s the main event today?” I’m going to see six people. I’m going to do seven things. But of the six people I see and the seven things I do, what’s the main event?

In other words, what’s the most important thing I’m going to do today. Don’t make everything the main event because I’m not going to be good all day. I’m not going to be able to hit a home run every time I swing the bat. I’m going to have some fouls and I’m going to have some strike outs.

When you decide your main event, spend most of your time, most of your energy, most of your focus on it. You know what I know about life? You don’t have to be good at everything, you just have to be good at the main thing. If you’re good at the main thing, people will pay for you to do it again.

John Maxwell

Wrong Turns

With each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for (travelers) to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept this fact that they have wasted energy and time.

Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man

Licking the Earth

When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises, being known and praised, ostensible pleasures like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, ‘licking the earth’.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Death Ground

You are your own worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Since nothing seems urgent to you, you are only half involved in what you do. The only way to change is through action and outside pressures. Put yourself in situations where you have too much at stake to waste time or resources – if you cannot afford to lose, you won’t. Cut your ties to the past; enter unknown territory where you must depend on your wits and energy to see you through. Place yourself on “death ground,” where you back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive. 

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

A 'Not-to-Do List'

New Year's Eve is time to resolve what you want in the year ahead. Rather than creating a list of resolutions, Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, sits down and does the opposite. Before setting down any strategic objectives, he comes up with three corresponding things to stop doing. So if he decided he wanted to read more, he first determined to unplug the TV.

He suggests you ask yourself what you're:

a) passionate about

b) good at

c) able to make a living doing.

Then consider how you're spending time. How much of it falls outside those three factors? If the answer is most of it, a not-to-do list could be a valuable tool.

If-Then Planning

It's called if-then planning, and it is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal. Well over a hundred studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific actions to reach your goal (e.g., "If it is 4 p.m., then I will return any phone calls I should return today") can double or triple your chances for success.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently

Why is it so impossible to get everything done?

Several research studies have shown that people never get more done by blindly working more hours on everything that comes up. Instead, they get more done when they follow careful plans that measure and track key priorities and milestones. So if you want to be more successful and less stressed, don’t ask how to make something more efficient until you’ve first asked, “Do I need to do this at all?”

Simply being able to do something well does not make it the right thing to do. I think this is one of the most common problems with a lot of time-management advice; too often productivity gurus focus on how to do things quickly, but the vast majority of things people do quickly should not be done at all.

If you think about it, it’s actually kind of ironic that we complain we have so little time, and then we prioritize like time is infinite. So do your best to focus on what’s truly important, and not much else.

Angel Chernoff

Wasting Our Love

We may have a feeling of love for mankind, and this feeling may also be useful in providing us with enough energy to manifest genuine love for a few specific individuals. But genuine love for a relatively few individuals is all that is within our power. To attempt to exceed the limits of our energy is to offer more than we can deliver, and there is a point of no return beyond which an attempt to love all comers becomes fraudulent and harmful to the very ones we desire to assist.

Consequently if we are fortunate enough to be in a position in which many people ask for our attention, we must choose those among them whom we are actually to love. This choice is not easy; it may be excruciatingly painful, as the assumption of godlike power so often is. But it must be made.

Many factors need to be considered, primarily the capacity of a prospective recipient of our love to respond to that love with spiritual growth. It is unquestionable that there are many whose spirits are so locked in behind impenetrable armor that even the greatest efforts to nurture the growth of those spirits are doomed to almost certain failure.

To attempt to love someone who cannot benefit from your love with spiritual growth is to waste your energy, to cast your seed upon arid ground. Genuine love is precious, and those who are capable of genuine love know that their loving must be focused as productively as possible through self-discipline.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Immediate Living

Consider the difference between the person who has been toiling in the hot sun and is desperately thirsty and the wine connoisseur who wants to sample a new pinot noir from California. Both have a desire to drink something liquid, but the resemblance ends there. There desire of the first person is rooted in the raw structure of the body, which needs and craves water. No reflection or education is needed to have such a desire. In order to appreciate the difference between a pinot noir and a cabernet sauvignon, However, it may be necessary to have a cultivated taste, with an imaginative grasp of the vocabulary used to describe the subtle “notes” of the wines. The person who simply wants to get drunk every night as well as the person who prides himself on his refined and elegant taste in wine… are focused solely on the satisfaction of the desires the person happens to have and are thus in one sense “immediate.”

A person may know a great deal about ethical theory without having much in the way of ethical character. It is possible, then, for a person to be well-developed intellectually but existentially not developed at all, and therefore still immediate.

C. Steven Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction