Liberating reminder from today’s Daily Calm 🧘🏻‍♂️

A multitude of plagues beset us today, and one of the most pernicious is busyness. Somehow, we have allowed this to become a martyr’s badge of glory. We revel in how little time we have to ourselves as if this validates our importance, our inclusion into the elite. The few. The proud. The busy.

Symptoms

Three ramifications of this infatuation have forced their way into my consciousness lately:

1. Sacrificing the important on the altar of the urgent
2. Indulging in an addiction to meetings
3. Denying ourselves and others space for self-care

Sacrificial altars

When busyness infects us, we stop planning and stop thinking. We start reacting, and are constantly overwhelmed. This leads us to prioritizing based on pain, which will always lead us to pay more attention to immediate demands. Unconsciously, every time we do this, we are plucking our important work up and dumping it unceremoniously as a sacrifice to the urgent. The gods of busyness are never appeased, and we end up living our life fighting the fires we have lit on these insatiable altars.

Addiction indulgence

Meetings are the ultimate expression of busyness. Nothing says busy like a calendar full of meetings. We feel more and more important as we dash to and fro without pausing to think or prepare or work—we just congregate with other addicts and talk about working instead. Most meetings could have been a simple asynchronous digital conversation, but instead we crowd our calendar with evidence of our importance. Like so many other addictions, we reason to ourselves that all of these meetings are necessary—this is real work. We are having crucial discussions. And the cycle perpetuates.

Self-care denial

Tragically, one of the first casualties of this plague is the opportunity for self-care. Even contemplating considering time out for renewal feels heretical. We fill our time with “shoulds” and “have-tos” in order to maximize efficiency and continuously realign our paradigms with the highest priorities, and other empty nonsense phrases. Just as with our projects, we unconsciously budget for rework and recovery due to an urgent lack of time to slow down and take a careful approach now. Absent self-care, we become the doppelgänger of our battered calendar—an exhausted husk reminiscent of potential greatness.

Remedy

The rather obvious cure for the plague of busyness is to slow down. We must acclimatize ourselves to inefficiency, and embrace occasional boredom. There must be white space in our lives and in our minds. We must consciously step out of the urgent to consider the important.

One practical approach to facilitate this is to simply schedule time to think. Feign conformance by using the favorite weapon of the busy elite—the calendar—to thwart their designs. When regularly practiced, this thinking time will result in drastic changes to the way in which you spend your days.

There is little chance of exterminating a plague that so many are eager to experience. You cannot remain completely unsoiled as you trudge through the ubiquitous infestation of the workplace and world. But you can escape the clutches of comprehensive infection. Practice constant vigilance while granting yourself permission to take life at a slower pace. Success, while never certain, is imminently attainable.

Round 3 of drawing a phone background for my mindfulness practice (see previous). This time, I decided to focus on the things that I want to remember regularly—my family and my goals. 🧘🏻‍♂️

Inspirational start to the day from my Daily Calm 🧘🏻‍♂️

Gorgeous sunset this evening!

I loved this article this morning: Sunday Firesides: Dependence to Independence - The Art of Manliness

Unfortunately, many people don’t outgrow this phase of infantile dependence. They still primarily try to get what they want by manipulating others, by having a “tantrum,” by metaphorically quivering their lip or pooping in their pants and then waiting for someone to notice. They wait for a solution to their problems to arrive from the outside.

Maturing means growing in your capability to meet your own needs, as you become progressively more skilled, competent, and emotionally intelligent. And it means becoming less needy in general. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them oneself?”

I hope to improve this in my own life, and also to equip my children with these skills as they grow up.

Just what I needed to hear today in my Daily Calm 🧘🏻‍♂️

I think I’ll call my brother now. 📲 👋

My boys are beyond excited (and my 4yo daughter is terrified!) about the real life blood moon. 🌕🌎🔴🌑 I guess we’ve been playing Zelda: The Breath of the Wild a bit much. 🎮 😜

Great reminder from today’s Daily Calm 🧘🏻‍♂️

Note: I started this post last week, and then ignored the news for a few days. I thought that I would need to table this post as being no longer relevant. Sadly, I found out today that it is even more relevant than before.

I heard in the news on the radio that the government shutdown has become the longest ever. It seems that everyone involved is happy to have it drag on as long as they are able to blame someone else for it. This behavior makes me sick and a bit worried about the future.

It hit me that this kind of incompetence has become almost ubiquitous. We see people in positions of authority who appear to be comfortable with sitting back and looking for others to blame for their failures instead of working to create solutions.

One of the problems is that we have come to equate experience, or time in position, with competence. We often promote the wrong people—someone who does well as an individual contributor gets promoted and immediately starts on the management track. These people then stay in management and begin to be considered as competent just because they have management experience.

It seems to me that a major cause, if not the root cause, of this failure is that we skew evaluations in favor of measures that are easy to quantify. Competence is hard to measure, but years of experience is easy, so we settle for that. In order to fix the issue of living with incompetence, we need to get better at evaluating intangible behaviors.

As cathartic as venting can be, I want to make sure that this is not just a gripe post for me. My biggest takeaway from my thinking about this is to focus on improving my evaluation skills. As a father, and as a manager, I want to find ways to mentor and help others grow in meaningful ways. I want to make sure that I never contribute to this culture of living with incompetence, but instead work to be part of the solution.

Really enjoyed the latest episode of Release Notes 🎙 @joec In my new app Carrier, I took a different approach to the free trial. You can see it in the third app screenshot in the store. Basically, I show how much they can use the app without upgrading. May be worth trying…

I took my six-year-old with me to the gas station to get drinks for our sick kids, and he walked up and down the candy aisle. “I wish we had gone to a boring store like IKEA, and not one that had stuff that is so tempting to me and cheap. (Whispers) Write that down.”

I just bought a new bag for my iPad, and started by going to the Release Notes show notes to find the company recommended by @joec. Can’t wait for it to arrive! There is a good chance I will be spending way too much money at this site. 😬 💼

When you’re trying to post every day, some days all you can post is that you want to post…

📖 🎧 Dad Is Fat

By Jim Gaffigan

As I was changing the baby, Micah (age 6) came over and asked, “What does his shirt say?”

Me: “I’m the boss. Until Mom comes home.”

Micah: “Hahaha. I wish they had a men’s size of that.”

Me: “Oh yeah? For whom?”

Micah: “For you! Cuz you’re the boss. Until Mom comes home.”

📖 The Sculptor

By Scott McCloud

🎥 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Solo date

Six-year-old to my wife: “The house is kind of pretty messy. Why don’t you ask your kids’ advice about how to keep it clean?”

As a father of six, I feel qualified in saying that however many kids you have, that number is hard. Take one away, and life is so much easier.

We were at a friend’s house recently for games, and the topic of kids came up. They said they wanted to learn from us how to handle their four children. Their youngest is a year and a half now, and life feels overwhelming at times. They thought we would have some answers since we have been through the phase of having four children.

This is a situation we have encountered many times over the years. People seem to assume that because we have so many children and are still alive, we must be experts on how to parent perfectly. They seem incredulous when we sympathize with them, as if we are patronizing them with their paltry number of children. The truth is that we have found reality to be exactly what we tell them. No matter how many children you have, that number is hard to the point of being overwhelming. If even one child is removed from the situation, whether at a friend’s house, or staying with relatives, everything feels much easier to manage. Put another way, n number of children is hard; n-1 is easy.

Because we have so many children, this results in us saying things to each other like, “What do people do with only four children? This is so easy!” We try to be careful to only say this between ourselves, so that we don’t offend people who are barely getting by with their four children. In reality, we are not more any more accomplished than they—we are just conditioned to a harsher reality.

The human body, including our mind, has an amazing ability to adapt. We see this when we are working outside on a snowy day and find ourselves sweating despite freezing temperatures. Whatever we routinely do becomes our new normal.

We have to be so careful of comparing our situation to someone else’s. We have a societal obsession with comparison that almost always results in a sense of defeat and despair. We never live up to what we see in someone else, especially when we compare our unedited life with their highlight reel.

The most important lesson I have learned from these n-1 moments is that what is hard for me is always different from what is hard for someone else. I need to exercise compassion, both for other people as well as for myself.

“Mom, I had the same plate of noodles that you had. The exact same as you. But I didn’t have sauce, or meatballs, or peas. And it wasn’t in a plate. It was a bowl. But it was the exact same as you.”

–Four-year-old

📖 🎧 Listening to Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin?: The Arc of Love from Audible. Just finished couple one, and even though their life situation is so vastly different than ours, I got so much value from it.

Starting to get a lovely little corner of serenity next to my bed thanks to my great wife and my four-year-old. The off-centeredness of today’s framed quote addition is a real challenge for me. I’m sure that’s the point, but still. Hard. 😆

When you do X in situation Y, I feel Z.

A powerful framework from Esther Perel for better communication, particularly between couples.

Crazy week and crazy day. Still reeling a bit. Hoping things settle down soon. #adulting 😒