Purposive Drift

Rationing effort

Other people's indispositions (to use Johnnie Moore's delightfully old fashioned term) are boring, unless one is suffering from a similar condition, when they become compelling reading. So I promise this will be the last entry meditating on my current state of health for, I hope, a long, long time.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, one aspect of my Bell's Palsy has been intense fatigue. While this is better than it was, it is still something I have to take account of when deciding what to do on any one day.

This form of rationing of effort is, I guess, an extreme form of something we all do everyday. But because it is extreme it thrusts itself into the centre of consciousness in a way that doesn't usually happen. When one's decision become, "Shall I go shopping for food or can I prepare the evenings meal with what we've got?" and it really is a choice between one or the other, it does highlight the kind of decisions about the distribution of effort and attention we make everyday.

Much of the time management stuff I have read over the years seems to focus on the criteria we use for making such decisions and seems to suggest that we should make important things the priority rather than all the other immediate demands on our time. But, what I have discovered is that daily, routine maintenance tasks have a much higher priority than such systems suggest.

Clearing the dishwasher, making the bed, buying the milk and so on all need to be done or one finds one's life falling into an unproductive chaos. Were I the kind of person who made a to do list, it is quite likely that I wouldn't include many of these routine activities and those that I did would have a very low priority. I suspect that many of the "unimportant' routine tasks in organisational life may be the same.

What, perhaps, is concealed here is that the routine maintenance of the fabric of life, including the seemingly trivial acts to maintain our relationships with other people, may be of much greater importance than we usually give them.

The question then arises that if we want to move in new directions how do we avoid being overwhelmed by the routine. One answer may be that given by John Cleese:

"I'm coming up on 60, and I'm wondering where my life will begin to go. I need to take a slightly different direction. I talked to a very wise man, and he said, 'If you're trying to find a new direction, don't plan it, because this [pointing to his head] has been planning your life up to now. You can't plan something new with the same old apparatus.' He said, 'Leave a gap. Leave a space, and just do things on auto for a while. Just see where these whims take you.'

It's like creativity. You have to follow it without knowing where you're going. If you try to control where you're going, you're back in the same process. It's like asking a piece of machinery that's broken to mend itself."

Or as I might put always try and leave yourself the time and space to do purposive drift.