Category: Lessons from Less

It starts with Yes.

When was the last time you said Yes to something you really wanted?

I’m guessing the last time you thought of something fun, fantastic –or even somewhat unreasonable — you quickly swatted the thought down and countered with a NO-based thought.

I can’t do that … I don’t have time.

I can’t do that … I’m not ready.

… I haven’t done _____ (insert some arbitrary barrier) yet.

… I don’t have enough money.

… I’m too tired.

When was the last time you said Yes to something important?

It’s a simple thought, really. It’s about an attitude change. What matters to you. What really matters?

Sometimes, saying Yes is really about saying Yes to the things that matter and No to the things that don’t matter.  Say YES to more time to yourself. To alone time. To exercise. To the things that you really want to do. To long-term goals over short-term pleasures. To helping others. To having less.

If you were the only person on this planet, and the only person with whom to spend the rest of your life, what would you do?

Where would you go? What would be important to you?

Perhaps you have a big, gutsy, terrifying dream. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you’re saying No before you’ve even begun, then you have no hope of getting to your dream.

The first part is Yes. So say yes to the possibility.

Enjoy the whimsical fantasy.

What would happen if you really said Yes to everything you actually wanted?

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This month, I caved and I started saying Yes to Saying No. This simple thought led me to a decision to take 30 days off – while still working – and deliberately choose to spend the next 30 days of my life as “30 days of less.”

Read the first post, “Yes + No, More + Less” about my decision to give up digital communication (for a short time), and give up a few other things in order to make more space in my life. I did this so that I can say yes to the things that really matter.

If you’d like to join me on the ride, or need help figuring out where to start, feel free to send me an email. You can also find me on twitter (soon! I’m taking a break right now), like this on facebook or subscribe to new posts.

Do you say yes to things that don’t matter?

Do you say no to things that do matter?

Why?

I’ve been playing around with the ideas of “yes” and “no” a lot lately. I’ve been saying yes a lot to things that don’t help me make progress on my goals, and I’ve had a terrible time saying no.

Saying No to the things that matter, and saying Yes to things that keep us busy. Before I knew it, I was a busy bee, doing … busy-bee things. Pointless things. Things with no direction or purpose.

Without priorities, we can’t build our habits. Without goals, purpose, and direction, we can’t cultivate our daily thinking and actions.

How can we change these habits? By breaking them, slowly. Habits take a long time to form and take an equally long time to unwind.

Before we can know where to go, we have to know what we want.

Before we can know what we want, we have to slow down. And listen.

30 days of less.

And so I’m trying to re-boot. I’m re-formatting my machine.

I’m currently undergoing the worker’s version of a retreat. I can’t take the month-long hiatus from work that I’ve been dreaming of, so instead, I’m doing an experiment: 30 days of less.

My retreat will happen in-house, at-work, in the days that follow.  This month, I’ve given up or significantly reduced several things that seem to be taking up space and time in my life.  In particular, these are things that are cultivating bad habits, or preventing me from achieving the larger goals that I have in my life.

The first 10 days I am taking a digital hiatus to reduce the distractions around me and focus on three things: wrapping up the 2010 year and reflecting, revising my bucket list and life-list of goals, and putting together a calendar and thoughts for the year to come: 2011.  (And perhaps I also spent some time starting my new e-book and dreaming and scheming up new projects!)

If you’d like to join me in a month of less, here’s my commitment:

Less wine. Less alcohol. My original plan is to go 30 days without any at all (and really, that shouldn’t be too hard), but I’ve been cautioned by several wise friends to start small and build up rather than try to tackle anything huge all at once. So the goal is less. And my target goal is 5 non-drinking days and 2 choice days each week (whereby I can continue to choose not to drink if I so desire).

No coffee (good lord). I’ve got the jitters. Luckily, I already started and so the worst is over (good-bye, headaches!)

No car (WHAT?) I’m in the midst of a big debate (with myself, mostly) about whether or not to sell my car. Yes, my new car. So, to test it out, I’m leaving it at work for the next 30 days and taking the bus instead.

Less (or NO) TV. I’m not a big fan of TV – I think it’s a waste of time and sucks you into other people’s stories, rather than creating your own stories – and so I’m going to try to live more carefully and watch less TV (I currently watch about 4 hours of TV per week.)

I’m doing this to stretch, to learn, to grow. To find out what’s a habit and what’s a necessity. And, above all, saying no to some things means that I say yes to the things that matter.

And I’m saying yes.

Yes to writing.
Yes to reading, slowly.
Yes to sleeping and resting.
Yes to being better at my job.
Yes to more yoga, and more reflection.

The journey started a week ago. My patience is already tried, occasionally. But I’m finding a lot of solace in the spaces I now have available. I’m thinking clearer, already, and I absolutely LOVE it.

I have so many notes to share with all of you.  It’s as though the more space I make for writing, the more easily I can do it – and the more I want to do it. Abundance grows when you give it space.

What follows are the Lessons from Less – I’ve broken these lessons into a short post for each, so you (and I) can savor them a bit.

Let me start this way.

I LOVE having things to do. I really do.

I thrive on to-do lists, activities, and fun adventures. I usually hate being bored at work, and at home, I invite people over for dinner parties like it’s my job. It’s so much fun.

That said, I’m experiencing something entirely new to me, and I’m not sure what it is.

I”ve recently had these extensive, terrifying to-do lists that completely overwhelm me. The notebooks on my desk literally leave me out of breath. I get anxious, scared, overwhelmed, and terrified. I look at my notebooks and the tasks that are – as always, it seems – not crossed off, and I start to freeze up.

And then, the weirdest thing happens. Once I start freezing up, I do nothing. I LITERALLY DO NOTHING. I stare – I just STARE! – at my notebooks and drawings and screens at work. I feel like a zombie because I look at my screen and click my mouse a worthless ten times each hour, more or less accomplishing nothing. I have been sucked into the vortex of procrastination, and the results are more paralysis and fear.

Procrastination feeds the problem, and I’ve been procrastinating big time.

Here’s the clincher.  I’m even working with a great mentor right now – someone fabulous who is giving me lessons in life design and life coaching – and I’m even procrastinating on replying to their emails. Those are marked as “to-respond” in my inbox, and I ignore them. Daily.

(For people interested in this kind of thing, I would highly recommend Jen Gresham, Jenny Blake, or Brett Kunsche as three starting points. These people are fabulous. As a future life-coach-in-training, going through the exercises over the past year – and figuring out what’s working and what’s not working in my life – is phenomenal.) That said, I’m still procrastinating.

My sister, on our holiday trip to visit my Dad’s family in Southern California, remarked how strange it was that I was sleeping in late, staying up late, and not being my usual self.

I wish I could say that I have it all figured out, but I don’t. I’m working on it. I struggle. I fail. It’s a process. Learning new things excites me and it also terrifies me. I struggle to constantly challenge myself to grow, but sometimes, dammit, it’s REALLY. FREAKING. HARD.

(Sorry for swearing!)

I haven’t experienced this paralysis before.  What follows after the onset of paralysis is a defiant middle-finger attempt to ignore the pressure of the things I have in front of me.  I stay up late, drink copious amounts of coffee, and struggle to get one simple thing done. The addition of facebook and gmail and twitter and blogrolls builds, so that I spend an hour (or two!) each day mind-numbingly consuming information from friends

(and, although I love it all, I must admit that most of it is irrelevant. I don’t care that you’re at the airport, or that you took a pretty picture, or that you have announced to the world that you drank a glass of wine. Sometimes reading facebook is like digging through a pile of garbage to find an engagement ring: I’m thrilled to hear about the engagements and the glories, but the moment is ruined by all of the clutter it’s surrounded by).

But it’s not your fault. It’s my fault.

My tired, sleep-deprived, task-oriented, goal-setting crazy Sarah Peck self has done this, to myself. (Good lord, she’s talking in third person again.)

How can I write this? How am I writing, right now? I don’t know. I don’t understand it, to tell you the truth. The only thing I can do is listen to the voices in my head. And listen to what they tell me to write.

what voices in your head?

(Shut up, you know you’re there.)

… and I am slave to follow their whim and fancy. I listen to them more and more, and lately the voices tell me to stop working, stop busy-ing myself and just tell stories and dammit, get the stories out quicker.

I know that I want to be a writer – a better writer, a fiction writer, a researcher – and sometimes, I feel so deflated by pre-occupying myself with other things during the best parts of the day (hello, mornings, sorry I missed you again – it’s been too long) and by the time I get to the evenings, I’m tired and the voices and stories in my mind have relegated themselves to the virtual couch.

As I sit in front my computer at night, I try to coax them back out and say, please, come out, let’s do some writing! And they slouch sideways and har-umph back at me and whine, why didn’t you play with us when WE wanted to play? We’ve been talking to you all day!

They’re like little goofy gremlins who clamber all over my brain during the day (Oh Sarah, please focus) – and then when I finally, exhaustedly, turn around and shut down my design computer and write out the task list for the next day, they recoil and squeal and laugh and run away from me, devilishly encouraging me to chase them in their whimsical, adventurous play-field that is my writing brain.

So I’m paralyzed and I’m overwhelmed and I have a bit of writer’s block –

You don’t have writer’s block! You’re just too busy doing stupid stuff and chasing someone else’s dream of success.

(Yes, I know, gremlin, I know).

So I did what every smart twenty-something does.

I called my parents.

My mom said that she was insanely proud of me.

And my Dad gave me some good advice.

I love parental wisdom.

My dad’s advice, for any entrepreneur, is that you only need to do 5 things every day to make sure you’ll make it.

1. sleep
2. eat well
3. exercise
4. be social
5. get the work done.

It turns out you can’t do # 5 without the other 4 things. You need sleep, good food, exercise, and interaction with others to really get good work done. For some reason, I’ve been burning the fire without putting the fuel in, and the lack of sleep and good nutrition makes for a poorly-run Sarah machine. This engine needs an overhaul.

Burnout, it turns out, is a condition of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest in the things around you. Characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy, the people subject to burnout are often slow to realize what’s happening, and may find themselves overwhelmed by stress and workload, and thereby unable to mitigate the problem.

Hmmmm.

The other piece of advice I got from my Dad was this:

What’s first?

Time is a limited quantity. We can make more money and have more stuff – heck, even make new friends – but we can’t make more time.

So instead of listing everything – list only what’s first. What’s the first, and only thing you want to get done? What’s the first thing you want to get done today, right now, and this week? How do your short term actions play into your long-term goals?

It’s time for some life-editing.

What’s first, for me, is rest.

Rest comes in many forms: more sleep, less work, and less procrastination. Which brings me to:

A digital hiatus.

And so, I bid adieu, for a short hiatus. I am taking a ten-day digital hiatus from social media and email until January 3, 2011.

(To keep myself honest, I actually de-activated my facebook account.)

I need to be making a conscious effort to spend less time on things that don’t matter and more of my time re-fueling the tank. Because I have some great stories and writing itching to get out of me. And I’m not any good to you – or to me – if I can’t write. So I must rest.

I will be responding to emails if and only if they are productive to my current projects. But I need time to think, time to sleep, and time to be. I will be writing, thinking, scheming and dreaming.

The next 10 days are mine. I hope you enjoy yours, too. Feel free not to email or call – and see you next year!

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Also, you can find me on twitter. I’m terrible at twitter. Maybe you can help?

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas, everyone. To a great 2011.