Do These Ten Things Every Day
Actually, don’t.
I hate feeling guilty about how I’m spending my time.
That guilt is one of the worst feelings to have and one of the most toxic headspaces to get into. That guilt poisons productivity and wellbeing. It’s everywhere.
Glossy mags in the checkout line, cute shareables on Facebook, a truckload of articles here on Medium: So many neat packages promising catchy little techniques that will help you waste less time, get more done, and be a happy, healthy, relaxed person who is also Doing It All.
Social media, smart devices, and streaming services get blamed for robbing us of our invaluable productivity. Everyone likes a good jab about how much better doing this or that would be than scrolling Insta.
OMG. Called out. LOL!
Time management is difficult. It’s not a one-solution challenge; it’s something we’re all going to struggle with, at least sometimes, throughout our lives. Have I spent time that I probably should have been doing something else staring into the television or at my phone screen? Yes. So have you.
But we need to dismantle the culture of guilt-tripping each other over how we’re budgeting our energy. It’s holding us all down.
I can’t count the number of talented, driven, brilliantly creative people who contract shattering guilt complexes about leisure activities because of a job or attending college. Some of the best writers I know struggled for years, or still struggle, with devoting time to writing fiction or reading for pleasure.
Having a constant battery of “little things” we can and should be doing to improve our lives is a one-way ticket to feeling bad that we aren’t.
“Take comfort in ritual.”
Let’s be clear. I have no problem with the Daily Ritual. I have plenty of my own. When I was a barista, many customers responded with a grimace when we knew their usual order.
“Oh, I’m so boring!”
My coworker, a friendly Buddhist with a salt-and-pepper beard and a great smile, always leaned over the counter and said, “Take comfort in ritual, my friend.” I usually told people that enough of life was uncertain that they deserved something that was a sure thing.
(As an aside, your barista loves when you order the same thing every day.)
Integrating things into your Daily Ritual can be a good way of building good habits or deconstructing bad ones.
It gets dangerous when people mistake their own ride-or-die for a habit that will be universally achievable and helpful.
Those things only amplify the internal voice that’s constantly telling us we’re not good enough.
What can we do to get away from these superficial “quick fixes” that feed time-guilt and rob us of enjoyment? For me, it’s about trusting a gut feeling and living by the phrase “take what you need and leave what you don’t.”
Below are a few things to consider when guilt and self-comparison reach into your headspace and the anecdotes from my life by which I keep myself in line. Or try, at least.
Revise your notion of scale.
Your “little thing” may be enormous for someone else. Someone else’s “little thing” may not even be feasible for you. Our energy reserves ambitions come in as many shapes as our minds and bodies.
Years ago, I got into a conversation about bread with a customer in the store where I worked. He was a soft-spoken young man who walked with a cane and dressed like a poet and had just gently chastised me for my off-brand pre-sliced wheat sandwich bread.
I told him I didn’t have time to make lunch with “real” bread.
“You just have to slice it.” He mimed a demonstration. “It’s so much better. Life is too short not to eat good bread. And all you need is a bread knife and a cutting board.”
I had a bread knife and a cutting board. I also had clinical depression and two jobs. I didn’t have a dishwasher. I barely even had a kitchen counter. Kitchen chores got away from me fast.
I flashed back to my morning, laying down my lunchmeat and spreading my good mustard (life is too short to not eat good mustard) on top of the empty part of the bread bag. I felt bad. Guilty. He made it sound so simple. Why couldn’t I handle something as simple as slicing bread myself?
This is why we can’t have nice things, Marie.
Don’t fill up every minute of every day.
A couple years ago, I was working with magazines. An article in a popular men’s services magazine that floated by my desk was listing ways you could have more time.
Great, right? Everyone needs more time. Only, the author had tallied up the minutes into days and years, as though these “wasteful habits” were taking notches off your life like a daily pack of cigarettes.
The activities targeted ranged from annoying things like commuting that you may or may not have a lot of control over to the stuff that is exactly why I want to make more time in my life.
Like spending time with friends.
The illustration for the article was a giant clock face in garish colors. It was like the incarnation of that evil feeling I described at the beginning of this article, that feeling guilty about what you’re doing because surely you should be doing something else. If you were smarter, more motivated, better, you’d be doing something else.
The feature also recommended being “engaged” in your downtime. Now, listening to a podcast or catching up on a book during your bus ride is great. However, downtime is allowed to be downtime. It won’t be downtime if you spend all of it stressing over how it would be better spent as uptime.
You don’t have to spend every minute feeding your brain, contributing to others, building your career, and being awesome. You have permission to put your feet up and watch that TV show you love precisely because it doesn’t ask very much of you.
Meet yourself where you’re at.
Just the other day, I was scrolling through yet another list of total-life improving tips that “everyone” could make time for. The demands were not small. On top of getting a full eight hours of sleep, regular full-body workouts were recommended and daily walks and writing sessions. Intermittently, something more abstract would pop up, like “be present”.
A quick tally made it clear that if I followed that recipe every day while also having just one full-time job, any level of commute or extra-workular responsibility would quickly mean I had just filled up every minute of every day.
And I don’t have a family to take care of. If you’re a parent, employed multiply, or working with a disability of any kind, I guess you just don’t count.
But these articles are never titled “10 Habits to Cultivate if You’re a Young, Fit, Male Professional Earning a Living Wage at a Job You Don’t, Like, Totally Hate”.
Don’t tell me what to do!
Finally, here are the things I actually think you should attempt to do every day:
Brush your teeth
Duh, right? But I can tell you, in the very depths of my longer depressive episodes, it gets hard. The brain fog and exhaustion are huge and, between them, you can feel very small.
Sometimes the basics can become a golem. It’s not a reflection on your value or your capacity to succeed.
Maybe, for you, it’s not a matter of staying minty fresh. But I bet there’s something that seems like a “little thing” that you struggle a bit with. Something concrete, that doesn’t fill your personal time, but that you do struggle a bit with. Find that thing. Define that thing. Commit to making it part of your Daily Ritual. Tell your barista.
Drink a little water
This is the much more chill version of how drinking eight or ten or however many cups will reverse aging and give you Spidey sense and telepathically convince your boss to give you a raise.
Do I feel better when I’m drinking more water? Sure. Do I do it? Very infrequently.
What I can do is make an effort to drink a little plain water regularly. The day will also contain coffee and other liquids, and if I’m very good at the game, some fruits and vegetables. Including a few sips of plain water here and there has an exponential impact on my hydration level is being better than “just off death’s door”.
You’re going to need a hand
Our own willpower doesn’t really carry us that far. However, when we put our heads together and build environments where we can thrive together with our peers, our power of collective creativity and change is remarkable.
Is there one thing you could do for another person that would allow them to work on something they loved for 30 minutes? What’s one thing another person could do for you?
