There is a handwritten note on the big whiteboard in our home office space that reads "Interruptions are The New Normal."
Every time I see it, I'm reminded of just how much time I waste on stopping whatever I'm doing to do something else; then stopping that something else to do something third... only to back up to the second thing and then eventually back up to the original thing.
We live in this world where it seems like everything is broken into smaller and smaller bits, and even then we still have to break away from those small bits to attend to even smaller bits that get in the middle of what we were doing.
The whole idea of focus and concentrating on a single thing for an extended period of time so you can not only do something really well but stay on task so you can complete the project in decent time... seems to have become lost in the mists of history.
I suppose the thing I find frustrating about it is the fact that life actually is taking longer than it used to. What I mean is... relatively "plain" tasks have become complexified by interruptions to the point where they no longer seem plain.
The irony of that is that we have all these alleged "helping tools" everywhere, but the mere process of setting up and maintaining those helping tools is distracting us so much from the core task we were trying to shorten that we actually end up with far less time to deal with said core task.
It all reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend many many years ago in which we were primarily discussing having a "Plan B" in life, and even having a plan C and plan D. Because life is uncertain, and it's good to have fallback options, right?
Jules pointed out that the risk of bringing too many "other possibilities" to the table is that we end up spending so much of our time focusing on making sure that plans B, C and D are viable and sound, that we end up with almost no time at all left over to spend on what was supposed to be Plan A.
Then we end up with somewhat lackluster results from "plan A," but not because it was a bad plan, but because we really didn't have time to be "all in" on it.
Jules's life structure was pretty much the exact opposite of mine. She was either all in on Plan A or not participating at all. She only jumped into things she felt good enough about that she didn't feel compelled to focus on "fallback options." As a result, she was either wildly successful at what she undertook or she crashed hard. There was no in between.
Personally, I have always tended to be pretty solidly anchored to the middle of the road. And I have also generally set up lots of contingencies to back me up if the middle of the road isn't working out.
In some sense, one of the risks associated with middle-of-the-roading is that you end up becoming really skilled and efficient at doing and maintaining things that may not be all that important.
In retrospect, I am sad to admit that I have missed out on some really good opportunities because I was too involved in setting up "crash landing pads" in case those opportunities failed, and I basically ended up missing the boat, so to speak.
Of course, some people are simply impulsive by nature, while others are more deliberate.
In many cases, we have nobody to blame but ourselves... but I have also come to recognize how the truth of the statement from our whiteboard serves as an illustration of just how much I have interrupted MYSELF out of better life outcomes... by focusing on contingencies, rather than the "main event."
Thanks for reading, and have an awesome weekend!
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Created at 2023-06-02 23:30 PST
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