Control Your Environment

In a recent interview with Leo Babauta, Tim Ferriss makes the interesting observation that it is easier to control your environment than to control your behavior. This has interesting implications for all those new year's resolutions that are probably already starting to weaken by now: they often involve trying to change or control behavior, which is hard to do, and so they fail.

How might it look to control an environment instead of a behavior?

• Diet: Clear all dessert out of the house (control the environment) instead of trying to control your impulse to eat the chocolate cookie dough ice cream sitting in the freezer.
• Time management: if web surfing takes away a lot of your productive time, try not even opening your web browser (control your computing environment) unless you absolutely need to check something for the project you are working on.
• Exercise: try parking in the most distant parking lot everywhere you go (control your environment), which will force you to walk more. It may not train you for a marathon, but this simple practice will certainly get you moving more.
• Attention management: if you've resolved to spend more time with a partner, kids, or other loved one, make a house rule: no electronics (Blackberries, cell phones, landline phones, Nintendos, etc.) at the dinner table, and everyone has to sit down to eat. This controlled environment will force you to converse with those around you for at least the time it takes you to eat, and thus you can avoid the modern affliction of being "home alone together" (because everyone is in their own separate electronic universe).

Are you struggling to keep up a resolution? Think about how controlling the environment around you might boost your chances of success in changing your behavior.

Theory vs. Practice

I realized while leading a discussion about the Theology of Enough on Sunday that at some point, one must move on from merely thinking about priorities and the concepts of living in the present tense, and start actually taking concrete steps toward doing something about it. As fun as it is to sit and think about simplifying life, and reducing commitments, and rearranging priorities, and all the other indicators of present tense thinking, eventually something must actually be done about it. And that is when I realized I need to do more thinking about practical application.

What does Present Tense Living actually mean? How will you know you are actually doing it, or moving toward it? How do you overcome hurdles that get in your way of executing it? This will be my focus over the coming weeks, trying to develop a framework for living. I think it will be less than a 12-step method, but more than just "think about it."

Out of illness, a lesson

Nothing like a good bout with bronchitis to force me to slow down, and to throw into sharp relief what in my life really is a priority. It's amazing how many work projects and meetings turned out to be "optional" after all--no one wanted a coughing sicko there, and now I find I'm not out of the loop at all upon my return--and so it make me wonder how much of my usual workday is just busywork and unnecessary. There were a couple of important deadlines that did need to be kept, and I submitted my work from my quarantined office at home, and the world moved on. The true priorities rise to the top when you have limited time to work.

I listened to Leo Babauta's interview with Merlin Mann last week, and Merlin makes the point that if you have to ask yourself if something is a priority, then it is not. Priorities are obvious and clear. A good point to remember the next time you sit down to devote 30 minutes to re-prioritizing your to-do list instead of actually doing work.

Over-leveraged Time

As society works down its overload of financial leverage, I am amazed by various experts advising a "back to basics" approach to life: saving (a little at a time); investing (cash first, then riskier markets); career (focus on doing your best at the job you have now); dressing (more formal business attire is coming back). I will be interested to see if a simpler approach to time management becomes similarly faddish.

I believe our time has become as overextended as our finances. For too long, busy-ness has been a badge of importance; leisure has been equated with lazy. As a result, we don't sleep enough, we degrade our work through multitasking, and we stress ourselves out trying to lots of things competently rather than focusing on a few things and doing them well. The result: life feels like a 24-hour race. The rat race.

I don't know how a time deleveraging might look. Will people begin working fewer hours? Seems doubtful when one is trying to avoid a layoff. Will volunteer hours suffer? Perhaps, though people may substitute time for cash donations to causes they really care about. Will TV watching decline? One can only hope.

For me, I've vowed to identify and try to stop the time wasters that eat out chunks of my day, often without me realizing it. Blog reading on esoteric subjects; long conversations about non-business matters with co-workers; endless trying of new productivity tools instead of actually being productive. None of these things is bad in and of itself, or as an occacional diversion. But I sometimes find that they become the point of my day, not a sideline to it.

Control them, and I'll have more time for the things I really want to do: talk with Sylvia, play with the kids, read, improve my golf game. I shouldn't feel I have to "borrow" time to do these things I love; by breaking my bad habits, I can make them the focus of how I spend my time. I will be the richer for it.