I am always reminding my daughter, who’s 4, to focus. Focus on the task at hand, remember the steps to get ready for bed or to get ready in the morning, just get this done and then you can play. Of course, one of the major problems with this (and maybe why I have to constantly remind her) is that I, myself, seem to have no focus whatsoever.
I have 20 projects going at once, all the time. I love to think about getting organized – I’m particularly fond of the FlyLady and GTD systems, and the Zen Habits blog – but once I set up a system, I never keep up with it for very long. The soft boundaries for my tasks make it harder – at the moment I’m in grad school, and I’m freelancing from home, and my craft projects are all half-done, and my writing projects are not even half-baked. There are conditions in my life, like fibromyalgia and its associated fatigue, that make focusing difficult too. But I need to find something that I can stick to – it’s so discouraging to keep thinking about it and never be able to do it.
Here’s my plan: clear a space (my desk), set things up so that it’s easier to stick to a system (a place for everything, and everything in its place), and just do a couple of things each day. I’ve found recently that it is satisfying to cross items off a list, so I’m making short, do-able lists (3 items) and only adding things to them if I finish what I’ve already got on there. I am also going to limit the time I spend on the computer / internet, which feeds my feelings of wishing my life were other than what is it or envying the lives of others as they’re represented online (even on the most superficial level, like: I wish I was more crafty, I wish my apartment looked different, I wish I were a real writer, I wish I could take beautiful photographs).
David Allen, the GTD guy, said that a goal is not the desired end result, but that it helps shift your attention, so that when you have a goal in mind, you’re noticing and thinking about whatever is related to your goal. Andrea Scher said that we aren’t used to thinking about what might be enough. In this world, in this culture, it seems like nothing is enough – but we each need to decide for ourselves what is enough for us and for our loved ones and for our own personal worlds.
The goal, then, is not to fight routine and commitment as a creativity-killer, but to embrace it as something that brings clarity and ease. And then, also, to know that I have done what I can in any given day, I have done enough, and to let it really be enough.
