Do What You Like

It's as good an organising principle as any

Earlier this evening I drove home from Madrid. It is nearly two hours in the car, the last half hour blinking into the darkness, trying to stay alert as I navigated the tortuous bends that lead up into the Sierra de Gredos. Nonetheless, on arriving home, I found myself getting out my computer and setting about some work, even though it is Sunday night.

On the drive, the list-making machinery of the mind had kicked in with a vengeance and having opened the computer, I slid from noting down the things that had occurred to me in the car, to actually doing them. At no point did I make a conscious choice or deliberate decision - I simply fell into it. This is a familiar feature of twenty-first century life. A creeping tide of work, seeping into everything, an inability to disconnect, a failure to maintain any boundaries.

And yet it felt remarkably good. Without any effort, I got an awful lot done, and sometimes that can be delightful (and I say this as someone who wrote a book with the subtitle ‘you are not a to-do list’)¹. With no-one else at home, I was free to do what I liked. And I felt like doing some work.

That is the point - what I felt like. I still remember the afternoon in 1993 when Pepe Santiago, a colleague, computer nerd (and master of wine) enthusiastically showed me Microsoft Windows ‘Task Manager’. I was simultaneously impressed and confused - impressed by how orderly it made everything seem and confused by the fact that there was no place to include anything about how I felt. There were no buttons or tags for mood, energy or feeling. The software just enabled some former version of myself (which had, by definition, been in planning mode) to dictate what I should be doing now. The bastard.

I have no way of knowing what I want to do in any particular moment until I actually get there. That is as true now as it was back in 1993. And in the thirty years since Pepe’s excited explanation, nothing much has changed about the software tools either. This is something I have been banging on about for a while yet even so, I have yet to find any software that has a place for how I feel.

Nevertheless, how I feel is probably what matters most. My friend Johnnie Moore talks about ‘book-keeping mind’. The idea is that if you find the moment when you are in ‘book-keeping mind’ then doing the accounts becomes easy, even enjoyable, rather than dull or difficult. A chore becomes something to cherish (a stark contrast to the oft repeated advice to start with the thing you least want to do).

This evening I felt like doing some work. Catching that tide meant it came easily and quickly. I recorded the bones of this piece into my phone in a couple of minutes.² Allowing myself to do this will create space in the morning. I won’t have to drum up energy to do things I might not feel like tomorrow. Instead I can start by asking myself (again) what it is I feel like doing.

And effective though this has been this evening, I notice that there is also more to it than simply getting things done. It makes me pay more attention (and give more credence) to how I feel. If I can ‘notice more’ of what I feel and ‘let go’ of the siren song of ‘shoulds and oughts’ I not only despatch things more quickly but deepen the practise of understanding myself. This doesn’t mean I won’t make plans, or try to organise my time, but it does encourage me to hold whatever plans I make more lightly. Maybe asking myself “what do I feel like doing?” is all I really need to decide what to do…

1. I feel some clarification is necessary here. When talking about ‘Do Pause’ people often say “but I love my lists!”. However, the sub-title isn’t ‘Don’t keep lists’, it is ‘You are more than a to do list’. There is an important difference - it doesn’t say lists are bad, but invites you to consider that there is more to you, and to life, than getting things done.

2. It took some time to craft that into this piece, but by going straight to it, I quickly and easily created something out of almost nothing.