I'm trying to do too much
I often buy into the “you can do it all” bullshit and it never works out well. You must subtract things from your life if you want to add things in.
What I read: “You’re Trying to Do Too Much” by Scott H, Young. Posted June 2024.
I subscribe to Scott H. Young’s newsletter . I recommend it. I subscribe to numerous email newsletters and Young’s is one of the few I consistently open and read.
When Young’s post on doing too much crossed my eyeballs, all I could think at the time was “He’s absolutely correct. I’m trying to do too much.” It seems I keep adding to the list of things I want to do and projects I want to undertake, but rarely do I trim other things from my list.
What’s missing is that, given our finite time, every addition necessarily implies an equal subtraction.
It’s not like I don’t understand the concept of necessary subtraction. I wrote about the folly of constantly adding things to our lives without subtracting elsewhere in “Reducing To Improve,” and “Improving By Subtracting.”
That we as humans appear to have a default tendency to add rather than subtract should not come as a surprise to anyone.
In this hyper productivity worshiping culture we live in, it’s no surprise that our tendency to add and not subtract is pervasive. It’s how we’re acculturated. We’re consistently delivered the message that we “can have it all” which is total bullshit, but it’s bullshit to which we repeatedly fall prey.
There are so many downsides to constantly adding goals, tasks, responsibilities, commitments, and projects to our lives without taking the time to think about what we’ll need to eliminate to accomplish those things. As Young points out, this can have the overall negative effect of procrastinating. That procrastination might be on our least valuable tasks and goals, but it can easily result in us procrastinating on things that are truly important. The bigger the list, the more likely procrastination. The bigger the list, the more likely we’re going to pluck some relatively inconsequential task from it to quickly complete while leaving the heavier lift tasks to another time, and that other time often never comes.
It’s not easy to consciously trim things from our lives to make room for that which is important. But it’s worth the effort to try. We need to create space in our lives to accomplish the most valuable and important things on our literal or metaphorical to do list.
We can correct this bias in our thinking by temporarily flipping our perspective. Instead of seeing the vase in the middle, try to see the faces on the side. Instead of looking at the goals we’re trying to accomplish, look at all the things we do that suck up our time and energy and offer very little in return.
Young give this superb advice.
In our lives, that means stepping back from the automatic and the algorithmic—cutting back on activities that compel our attention rather than the things that we freely choose. The motivation here is not to live like a monk, devoid of modern entertainment, but to choose the things we pay attention to. Rather than scroll endlessly on Netflix, watch movies you’re actually excited about.
Subtractive efforts, on their own, cannot tell you what to focus on. But often they can help you realize that the things you need to focus on are already there.
Overall, I think I’m rather productive. I do much of what I want to do. I read a lot. I write a lot. I hang out with friends. I work on some solo and group projects. I help in my community. But still, I know how often I fall victim to easy distraction whether that’s too much time on social media, vapid and time-wasting entertainment, or some busy work task that doesn’t really move my life forward in any meaningful way.
In the article, Young talks about a Life of Focus course he and Cal Newport offer. I bet it’s a good course. While I agree that most of us would lead better lives if we consciously attempted to focus on what’s most important to us, I’m also not unrealistic. I know distractions happen and might even be a good thing sometimes as I wrote about in “Look Over There!”
I’m all for focus. I get that it’s important. But I don’t think eliminating distractions is realistic. If anything, we’re likely to continue to be more distracted by technologies, increasing amounts of information, and a world that grows in complexity each day.
At best, each of us must craft our unique ways we focus when we want to attend to something without the default assumption that the best way to do that is to chuck technology entirely aside. I mean, per this article, books are an information technology. Are we ready to cast books aside?
Modern technologies offer an abundance of new information storage, processing, and retrieval options. They’re not a distraction. They’re tools. At least that’s how I see it.
But I do think the ability to focus is the biggest human superpower an individual can foster and utilize. I recall a great quote I used in my book, The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling (paid link). The quote is from one of my favorite self-improvement books, Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It (paid link), by Alan H. Cohen.
The secret of genius is focus. If you can laser your attention on any subject or project, it will reveal its blueprint to you. George Washington Carver discovered 325 uses for the peanut and 100 for the sweet potato! Great geniuses are powerful focusers. Many have been called eccentric or insane because they put aside worldly concerns for the sake of their music, art, architecture, drama, inventing, or writing. But they are the individuals who change the world, while those with scattered attention wade through mediocre lives. Geniuses don’t fritter their precious minds on mass trends. They create the trends that alter the masses.
We can’t invoke the genius of focus unless we subtract enough of the unnecessary from our life to give that genius room to grow and thrive.
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