No Wasted Time

I recently had two insights related to the concept of no wasted time.

It is part of my 2018 goals to be more "productive" with my time, which is to say to be aware of the voice and the emotions that make me want to "turn off" and go veg out to tv, YouTube or Facebook instead of doing things that I will feel regret over in the future for having not accomplished. I realized a couple of weeks ago that spending an hour watching my DVR'd shows is not "veg time" or even wasted time; it is an explicit course of action, and not necessarily one whose intent is to ignore other tasks but to take that time to tune out and by passively entertained. The fault, if any, in that decision is not in the ignoring of other, higher value tasks but in the choice to withdraw from presence. The latter is accompanied by the ignoring of other, higher value tasks, but I was not making the choice with the intent of having lack of something but gain of something, and that gain was mindlessness, non-presence. So the key to uncovering why shit wasn't getting done isn't to focus on the "why do I ignore these tasks" but on the "why do I choose non-presence".

My second insight came recently when I was on my daily stand-up conference call with my team, and I was doing work on my laptop while on the call as I always do, when my name was called for my update. As I scrambled to get to my notes from whatever app I was using at the moment, I became aware that I had no idea what anyone who had spoken before me had said, so even though I could relate my updates from the previous day, I had no idea if I needed something from anyone else nor if I needed to update any specific person or project with my accomplishments. Simply put, in my decision to "multi-task" (which is a real computer concept but a bullshit concept for humans) I had made an explicit decision to be less productive. I'd made an emotional decision tied to my desire to complete the task I'd been working on instead of putting it aside and thereby chose not to make the decision to be present in the stand-up. In a sense, I associated being engaged in the stand-up as "wasted time" and continuing on my current task as "higher priority" when the truth is effectively communicating with my team was the higher priority in that moment.

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