Paper Doll
Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Memento Mori and Appreciating Your Time
Pardon me, handsome stranger, would you happen to know the time?
I can’t find a trace of 1988 or ’89.
If you see the daredevil ghost of my youth go racing by (woah-yeah)
Will you flag him down and let him know I’ll be running a good ways behind?
A Tall Stand of Pines, ©1998 Jeff Holmes/The Floating Men (From the album The Song of the Wind in the Pines)
If you’ll indulge me, let’s start with the inspiration for this post. Last weekend, after five years of avoiding all large groups out of an abundance of COVID caution, I did something essential for my mental health. I saw my favorite band in concert two nights in a row.
I started seeing The Floating Men perform in 1993, and went to just about every gig near me until the last time they performed in Chattanooga, in 2010. I’d also seen them in Johnson City and Nashville, TN, and most memorably, for 30th birthday (with family and friends) in Atlanta.
Their songs range from keening heartbreakers to joy-filled romps, all with complex lyrics and reflecting a louche, delightfully misspent life. I am an old, overly cautious soul, so I’ve lived a misspent youth vicariously through those songs. Seeing The Floating Men’s live made me unceasingly happy.
The Floating Men, Barrelhouse Ballroom, January 19, 2025
The bandmates’ “real” careers took them all over the country, so it had been a long time since they played together. But the fandom, The Floatilla, remains loyal. When the band scheduled one Nashville show in 2024, it sold out in moments; they added another night, and the same thing happened; and a third night. No tickets for me. But for this year, they scheduled one (and then two) shows in Chattanooga, and five years of caution gently stepped aside. Echoing Robert Frost, I can only say, “And that has made all the difference.”
In Act V, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the erstwhile king bemoans that:
I wasted Time and now doth Time waste me.
King Richard II was indecisive, squandered opportunities, and was forced to relinquish his crown. Time was once a resource he could have directed, but once imprisoned, time became a force that eroded his life and meaning.
Last week, in How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity, I wrote about time tracking as a tool for mindfully ensuring that your actions align with your goals and values. That post focused on the minutes and the hours, the nitty-gritty of our lives.
However, I keep coming back to the expression, “The days are long, but the years are short.” We “manage” our time (our days), seeking out new ways to be efficient and get specific tasks done. But fewer of us are adept at working on the bigger picture, making sure that the larger aspects of our lives intentionally arc toward meaning.
Today, we’ll look at how we perceive time and ways to elevate our appreciation of the passage of it in order to organize a life that better reflects what we want. We’ll also review tools to help us achieve a more ongoing sense of mindfulness about the passing of the days (and years) of our lives.
APPRECIATE THE SPEED OF TIME
When Daylight Saving returns, and you Google (for the seventh time) how to change the clock in your car, do you grumble that it feels like we just fell back, and now we were springing ahead? But you’ve also sat in interminably long meetings, shocked that each glance at the clock shows only a minute has passed.
What time “is” and what it feels like can be very different.
Time is a precise, but in some ways, arbitrary set of measurements for something we have never fully understood. St. Augustine believed that time actually just “sits between our ears.” There’s no actual external, objective, universal time; our measurement of time has (mostly) become culturally accepted, but it’s just by collective agreement that we measure time in 60 increments of seconds, 60 minutes, etc.
(Admittedly, the 24-hour day is fairly fixed by the Earth’s rotations, but the number of days in a year is a convention. The Jewish calendar, for example, has lunar months, 28 days each; to make up for the “extra” time, there’s an additional month in a leap year.)
For more on the history, philosophy, psychology, physics, and neuroscience of time, I recommend In Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by Alan Burdick.
In a BBC article from September, Why Children Perceive Time Slower Than Adults, Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Belfast, notes that children’s comprehension of time is understudied. We know that tiny humans’ concepts of linear time are limited, and their understanding of time as a dimension (with a sense of duration) is slow to develop.
Adults, however, have both the vocabulary to mark spans of time and understanding of how time works:
- time is unidirectional and linear (outside of time travel movies)
- time is unified such that there is only one timeline (again, outside of fiction), and
- time is event-independent (meaning it’s objective, continuing while we sleep, and existing independent of human perception). Trippy!
But aside from vocabulary and complex neurology, why do kids experience time as moving quickly but it seems to pass more quickly as we age?
One simple answer, explained well on the Inverted Passions blog, is that we have a biological imperative for survival which prompts us to take note of anything that helps us make predictions regarding the future.
Investment legalese says “past performance does not guarantee future results,” but we know that things that worked for us before (or conversely, that caused awkwardness or danger) might happen again; our brains hold onto whatever helps us make predictions. But, when something novel happens, our brains stop and pay attention!
When you’re little, everything is novel. Every experience, whether the cause-and-effect of flipping a light switch or what a sneeze feels like, is new. That’s why we have granular memories of our youths through our college days, but why, other than our first days on a job or meeting our significant others, the rest of adulthood starts to blend fuzzily together.
Our adult lives are routinized; patterns repeat; life whizzes by. Yesterday is like tomorrow is like January 87th; it’s all the same. But we remember each day of our big vacations, doing new things in new places, perhaps with new people.
Predictability helps keep us alive, anthropologically-speaking, but novelty is what allows us to reflect on a life well-lived.
Predictability helps keep us alive, anthropologically-speaking, but novelty is what allows us to reflect on a life well-lived. Share on XMEMENTO MORI AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME
Are you familiar with the term memento mori? It’s Latin, meaning “Remember you must die.”
A reminder of the fleeting nature of life and our impending mortality may sound depressing, but it’s been used in literature, art, and architecture, and as a meditative practice, throughout history. None of us gets out alive, so we need to make our lives more about meaningful moments and less about to-do lists rivaling the length of CVS receipts.
Memento mori helps us realign our priorities — or at least take note when we are not living according to our stated values.
It’s worth revisiting Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel, where I wrote the following:
REVISITING FINITUDE: THE MACRO AND MICRO APPROACH
Our time on this rock is limited. A central tenet of Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is the ability to see the shortness of life, examine your goals and values, and maximize spending your time on what matters most. This isn’t some hippy-dippy philosophy that says that if we all stop worrying about work or making money, we’ll find ourselves in a vast utopia.
Rather, it notes that life is hard, life is short, and feeling like you only have a right to be here if you’re accomplishing things that make money — whether for your company or yourself (even, or especially, if you are your company) — leads to frittering away the most valuable commodity: life.
Tim Urban’s stellar Wait But Why blog broke ground in this arena. Allowing for a little more time on the planet than Burkeman, Urban posited that we might have 90 years of life, so 4680 weeks rather than 4000.
One of his most famous posts, back in 2014, urged readers: visualize your life in years, your life in months, your life in weeks, your life in number of remaining SuperBowls…to appreciate what you do with your time.
For example, I’ve got got 2860 of my weeks behind me. It’s tempting to use these kinds of visualizations for dismay; certainly they can lead to existential angst and even more productivity dysmorphia. “See?” one might yelp! “I have even less time to make the widgets! To earn the money!” And yet, as we’ve seen over the last two weeks, that attitude just leads to focusing more on the quantifiable value you create for others; we want to look at quality, not quantity.
But, we can still turn to Urban for guidance. As a follow-up to his macro look at the finitude of life, he developed a way to organize and examine our lives at the micro level in 100 Blocks a Day.
Inspired by Urban, nomadic programmer Jama of Notion Backups, has identified a way to pause and reflect, giving perspective on where you are, chronologically speaking, in your day (rather than in your life). Rectangles.app gives you a quick glance at how much of today has gone by, in ten minute increments, as of the point in your day when you click the link. Click later in the day, more boxes turn green.
For example, when I visited and took this screenshot, I’d made it through 93 1/3 ten-minute blocks in my day.
When faced with how much of your day has passed and how much is left, you might have the following reactions:
- Yikes, I’d better get cracking! (A good motivation if you’ve been staring at social media or playing a video game for hours on end, for sure.)
- Yikes, I’ve been working and working, and I’ve only written 17 TPS reports and attended 5 hour-long meetings! (A likely sign of productivity dysmorphia creeping in around the edges.)
- Yikes, all I’ve done all day is work. I haven’t talked to anyone I love, I haven’t exercised or gotten any fresh air. I haven’t laughed. (And here’s where the magic might begin!)
If you’ve been experiencing signs of burnout due to toxic productivity, give this approach a try. Click on Rectangles and think about the day you’re having. Maybe even text the link to a friend, describe your day thus far, and get a reality check from someone who sees you more clearly.
Expanding from how much time is in a day (1440 minutes) to how much time is left in our lives, memento mori yields perspective. There are digital and analog options for helping you do just that.
ANALOG APPROACHES TO MEMENTO MORI
The Meditative Marble Method
Purchase a bag of colorful marbles and display them in an attractive glass jar. Create a ritual such that each day (or perhaps weekly, on Saturday or Sunday), you remove a marble from the jar and think about what you accomplished and gave your life meaning the last day (or week). This isn’t how many blog posts you wrote or how many new clients you signed on, but the intentional awareness of meaningful time spent with your partner, child, or friends, or special things you did to make your life a little more worthy of reflection.
Now, move the marble out of the jar to somewhere else (like an identical jar). If you planned to use this ritual weekly, you’d need to buy at least 52 marbles; daily, you’d want at least 366 (to cover leap year).
Perhaps carry that day’s marble around with you in your pocket to give you a visceral reminder all day that your time has precious value.
Perpetual Calendars
In my prior television career, I sent a lot of faxes, and that meant a lot of cover pages, and you always had a field to write the date. Unless you’re time traveling, it’s not 1997, so we’re not sending faxes much anymore. Instead, most of us check our phones or give a shout to Siri to see what the date is.
Just as digital time feels vague and unmoored from the rest of the hour, seeing just today’s date doesn’t give a sense of how today relates to the rest of the week or year.
Something more three-dimensional may help you be contemplative about the days as they pass.
See the MoMA Sliding Perpetual Calendar, designed by Giancarlo Cipri.
The Sliding Perpetual Calendar is made of plastic (so, not particularly environmentally sustainable) and measures 12 high x 9.2 wide x 0.3″ deep. You can mount it to the wall or prop it up on its included pegs. Each day, slide the red dots down the chutes-and-ladders (OK, just chutes) to select the day, month, and date. It’s currently available from MOMA for $48 ($43.20 for members).
Make the changing of the date into a device-free daily ritual and an opportunity to be mindful and intentional about the activities with which you fill your life.
Any perpetual calendar with moving pieces will work for this purpose. Other options:
Vosarea Perpetual Desk Calendar is wood, so it’s a bit better for the environment, and measures 12.8″ wide x 5.9″ high. (There’s no information on depth.) While it takes up horizontal real estate, the footprint is minimal. Amazon has it for $18.19 with a digital coupon.
ComiHome Perpetual Calendar Date Desk Calendar measures 10″ wide x 10″ high and has a sleek, modern look. This magnetometer calendar has a circular ring for the month and day of the week, a horizontal plane for displaying the date, and three magnets for selecting each, manually. It comes in red and black, or black and white and runs $22.99 at Amazon.
Deerine Wooden Block Perpetual Calendar is an upgrade the old-school block/cube calendar. It comes in pink, green, blue, black, and wood-grain, and runs $13.99 at Amazon. It measures 5.9” wide x 1.92” deep x 4” tall and is made of wood.
Journaling
It’s easy for days and then months to zip by without giving any thought to intentions beyond getting through the day. It’s like how the calendar pages flip and fly off in old black-and-white movies to let you know that significant time has passed. In old photo albums, you can gauge the passage of time by the change of hairstyles and clothing. But to percieve the changes (or lack thereof) in ourselves, a snapshot isn’t enough.
I’ll admit, I’m not skilled at journaling or adept at looking at my life as a big picture. I’m more of a to-do list person. I often write the blog posts I need to read, so I suspect that’s why I’ve been thinking about memento mori.
There are numerous apps for journaling, but I believe we’re more likely to put in emotional effort and pour out heartfelt thoughts on paper. I encourage you to try an analog journaling method if you are able. Something as simple as a One Line a Day journal for capturing the most vivid or uplifting aspects of life might be a good start.
Use Visual Time Trackers
Print or buy a copy of the grid squares from the Wait But Why post referenced above and track your life in weeks by shading the squares.
CONSIDER YOUR MORTALITY DIGITALLY
These apps are designed specifically to encourage memento mori.
Death Clock
The Death Clock app, available for iOS and Android, uses your answers to a questionnaire about your age, sex, lifestyle habits, and nation of residency to predict a death date. It’s not quite as grim as it sounds. Death Clock is AI-powered to help increase your longevity by helping users understand the impact of current habits on life expectancy and encourage making changes to live a longer, fuller life.
Their makers describe it: “It’s like having a personal grim reaper, but with health tips.” The app is free, but some features require a paid subscription.
Life: Just One
Life: Just One, created by Julien Lacroix for iOS, was inspired by the Wait But Why post. It’s designed to help users recognize that their time is precious and make the right decisions by allowing them visualize the approximate number of years, months, and days they have left on this earth.
Atypical for apps these days, it pushes no notifications, has no ads, and there’s no sign-up. It collects no life data. The basic app is free, though the Pro level unlocks widgets, a “life in weeks” section, and full customization.
WeCroak
WeCroak was inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying:
To be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.
Each day, the WeCroak app sends five notifications to invite users to stop and contemplate death (and, by extension, the value of life).
Rather than coming at predictable times, the “invitations” arrive randomly and can arrive at any moment (“just like death,” their web site states). Upon receipt, users open the app to reveal a quote from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker on the topic of death and may choose to pair contemplation with conscious breathing or meditation.
The WeCroak app is free to use on a variety of platforms including Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple Vision and Android.
Additionally, WeCroak has subscription-based Leap programs, providing challenges to help “face impermanence in all its aspects and live better lives today.”
Life Clock
Life Clock is a simple, platform-agnostic website. Enter your birthdate and time, and the result is a swiftly moving digital readout of your age to 12 post-decimal point places. Click the right arrow to get your age in months to ten decimal places; click again to get your age in months; click again for your age in days, hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds.
You can even see your age in lunations (lunar cycles), dog years, fortnights, galactic years, kilometer light traveled, Poincaré recurrence times (a theorem which theorizes that everything that’s happening now will happen again in exactly the same way!), heartbeats, your age in Friends or Game of Thrones marathons, and more! The data isn’t deep, but offers perspective.
Related apps include 0280, Mori Master, Life Left, and Memento Mori Stoic Reminder.
Ask AI Bots to Play Jeeves
Super-techie? Let AI remind you that life is short and precious:
- Schedule Telegram to deliver daily memento mori reminder messages or affirmations.
- Learn how to make a reminder bot on Discord with dotReminder.
- Contemplate life’s impermanence with Memento Mori GPT-Reflective AI Companion
- Use a service like Replika or create custom bots.
ORGANIZE AND ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH YOUR VALUES
You know the story of the professor, the jar, the rocks and the sand, right?
Once you see your life racing by, you may be inclined to focus on the big rocks. In addition to applying all of the organizing and productivity lessons this blog shares weekly, try a strategic approach.
Audit Your Life
Identify what really matters to you. Sit quietly and write down your top 5 values: being more present in your children’s lives, leaving a professional, personal, or financial legacy, improving your health to live better longer, having more adventures, being creative, etc.
Look at your calendar and your bank account. Examine how you spend your three currencies: time, money, and attention.
Does your spending reflect your values? Are you giving time to your priorities or just whatever is loudest?
Look at how you spend your three currencies: time, money, and attention. Look at your calendar and bank account. Do they reflect your values? Share on XWrite a Personal Mission Statement
Channel your inner marketing director and figure out what you want your life legacies to be. Post your mission statement where you can see it.
Organize Your Life to Invest in Meaningful Experiences
What are your big rocks? If it’s time with loved ones, personal growth, and joy, do you have inviolable time for vacations, family dinners, or learning opportunities scheduled?
I’ve often referenced Laura Vanderkam’s book Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. Her Rule 6 encouragesus to have identify one “big adventure” (lasting perhaps half a weekend day) and one “little adventure” (lasting an hour) each week to introduce novelty.
As Vanderkam has explained, “We don’t ask where did the time go when we remember where the time went.”
What’s keeping you from scheduling adventures?
For five years, I had so few “adventures,” I can count them on one hand, twice meeting up with Nashville colleague Sara Skillen for day trips and last summer’s 1900-mile round trip road trip to see Paper Mommy and go to my college reunion. My two-night adventure of going to see The Floating Men was transformative, reminding me what I want in my life.
Revisit Your Audit Periodically
Memento mori isn’t a one-and-done proposition. Build time into your day, your week, your month, and your annual review to put more life in your life.
Memento Vivere
Author Annie Dillard said, “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.”
Actress Kelly Bishop (A Chorus Line, Dirty Dancing, Gilmore Girls) wrote in The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir, “Don’t cry because you think your best days are gone. Smile because you had them in the first place.” So make sure you have them!
Memento mori (“Remember you must die”) has a sibling concept: Memento Vivere — Remember to live. Make every moment count: through mindfulness, gratitude, engagement, a sense of purpose, and celebration.
The lyrics to the song at the start of this post are a little salty for a “family” organizing blog, but I want to share my love of The Floating Men with Paper Doll readers. You can find their catalog on Spotify and Apple Music, and lots of (mostly ancient) concert video on their YouTube channel. And for the first time since 2009, they’ve got a digital EP, #Reoverimagined, with new (joyous) songs and fun bonuses, including:
Thank you, readers, for this extra-long indulgence, and thanks to Jeff, Scot, and The Floating Men for more than three decades of reminding me to (really) live!
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Jeff Holmes & Paper Doll (left); Scot Evans & Paper Doll (right) — Barrelhouse Ballroom, 1/18/25
Paper Doll Post:
How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity
Have you ever reached the end of a day, collapsed onto your couch, and thought, “Where did the day go?”
Time is slippery like that—it vanishes into the ether when we’re stuck in meetings, running errands, or just hanging out and taking a truly shocking number of trips to the fridge.
Back in May 2020, I wrote Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? 5 Strategies to Cope With Pandemic Time Dilation. That post looked at how stress and the lack of novelty in our days (such as during lockdown, when every day is much like any other, or that mystery week between Christmas and New Year’s, where nothing feels “real”) can make us lose touch with our experience of time.
Conversely, how do you feel when your schedule is jam-packed with back-to-back client meetings, or there’s no breathing room between getting the kids to school and yourself to work and then reversing course at the end of the day and taking care of everyone else’s needs and you don’t have a minute to exhale? (Did you feel out of breath getting to the end of that run-on sentence?)
When we don’t have variety — it’s the spice of life, or haven’t you heard? — or we’re overtaxed without the chance to pause and reflect, time can cease to have any meaning.
That’s where time tracking comes in: it’s like a GPS for your hours, showing you exactly where your minutes travel without you noticing. Unfortunately, the idea of logging every little thing you do can feel about as appealing as untangling a drawer full of mismatched USB charging cables. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.
This past week, I’ve been participating in Laura Vanderkam’s Time Tracking challenge. (She has a free Time Makeover Guide and time-tracking spreadsheets in 15-minute and 30-minute increments, each in PDF, Excel, and Google formats.)
I’ve done Laura’s challenges each January for several years, and am always intrigued by how it impacts my productivity during the week even before I start analyzing the data. (More on that next week!)
Before we move on, I have to put in a plug for two of my favorite books Laura’s, her classic 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think and the oft-mentioned Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters.
Today, we’re going to look at the perks and pitfalls of time tracking and see how to make it work for you (without driving yourself loopy).
The Benefits of Time Tracking
If you’ve ever worked a job where your supervisor required you to report what you did with every moment of your day, you may be (understandably) disgusted with the concept of time tracking. When forced to track the minutia of your day for someone else to analyze it, you can feel judged, micromanaged, maybe even infantilized.
However, when you track your own time, it can be empowering. In fact, time tracking may reveal some surprising insights about your daily habits.
Yes, you may have scrolled your social media feed for far too many sessions for your comfort, but tracking your time might help you see that right before most of those digital mental escapes, you were dealing with cranky customers or a stress-inducing in-law, or you were sluggish post-meal.
No one moment stands on its own, so tracking your time doesn’t merely show you what you’ve done, when, and for how long, but shows the pattern of your time usage. Whether your behavior is consistent or inconsistent over time can help you dig a little deeper than knowing you worked on a blog post for 47 minutes or that you spent an hour and a half at Target.
Let’s look at some of the ways time tracking helps.
Mindfulness and Focus
By virtue of measuring something, we bring our attention to it. Without attention to how you’ve been spending your time, there’s little chance of intentionally spending in more effective and efficient ways.
If I asked you what you did last Friday afternoon, you might recall a major event you’d been working toward, unexpected occurrences (whether positive or, more likely, negative), and annoyances (whether large or small), but remember little of the granularity of your day. Time tracking helps you identify, in as granular and detailed a way as you like, how you really spend your time vs. your perceived activity and time usage.
Once you mindfully pay attention to what you’re doing (or have just done, over the last half hour) and log it, it will be easier to highlight when you’ve been inefficient (e.g., fighting with a piece of software vs. having someone help you figure out what’s wrong) or areas for improving what you do, how you do it, or when you do it, and figure out what you might want to delegate, or stop doing altogether.
But you can’t go by your gut, because your gut makes small annoyances seem larger (especially if they are repeated over time) and as though they lasted longer than they actually did.
Tracking our time allows us to measure how we deal with all manner of experiences, and that focused attention helps us better predict our future time needs.
Prioritization
It’s not only a matter of catching yourself “wasting” time, or even spending too much time on the wrong thing. Time tracking clarifies which tasks consume the most time and effort; it’s your role to analyze whether the things taking the most time represent what’s the most valuable.
Are the unimportant things taking a lot of time, leaving you few high-focus and high-energy sections of your day to focus on what’s meaningful?
Do your actions and the use of your time match your goals and values?
Do your actions and the use of your time match your goals and values? Share on XOf course, not everything that takes the most time is the most important for you to accomplish, and vice versa. Time tracking, and seeing how much time you currently put into accomplishing certain tasks, can help you distinguish between what’s “urgent” and/or “important,” as we’ve frequently discussed when reviewing the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.
Only then can you “wasted” energy toward what really matters.
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Having actual numbers to back up your interpretation of what’s working (and what’s not) in your schedule is a game-changer. It will grant you actionable insights — prompts for what to do differently — to optimize your current routines and workflows.
When you time track, you’ll have a real-time account of where your time goes — towards what is:
- important and urgent
- important but requiring scheduling during your “deep work” hours
- urgent but unimportant and can be delegated, and
- what’s really so lacking in urgency and importance that it can be drop-kicked into Never-never Land.
In this way, time tracking supports goal-setting and monitoring progress over time.
Time tracking identifies how long tasks take, enabling better planning based on more realistic estimates of how long certain tasks will take to complete in the future.
Stress Busting
Oh, and those realistic estimates time tracking produces? They can reduce overwhelm* by showing you what you can reasonably do (and what you can’t) in the course of a day so that you’ll stop trying to ten pounds of sugar tasks into a five-pound sack of schedule.
If you can clearly see that you can’t get a blog post done in an hour when your kids are at home (or that trying to get it done in one long sitting will keep you from getting seven other things done), you’ll stop forcing yourself to live by unreasonable, unrealistic expectations.
In turn, this can empower you to set better boundaries (for yourself, and for others who demand or encroach on your time) and ensure you schedule breaks more effectively so that you’re doing high-focus deep work when you have high mental energy.
Accountability
A well-known saying is that what we measure gets done. If you’ve ever been in Weight Watchers, you know that they make you log everything you eat. When you know someone’s going to look at your seventeen logged mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on Thursday night, you’re more likely to put the bag back after your third nibble, and maybe lose some weight.
Similarly, while the purpose of tracking time is to get a realistic take on what you’re doing with your time, knowing that you’ll be judging your time use later may help you avoid self-soothing “time wasters” when you’re on deadline and need to stay on task.
Time tracking encourages greater tasks focus in real time. You’ll anticipate, note, and deter distractions when you’re aware of how every minute counts toward your goals. (And while you may not like the experience of judging yourself, it’s better than when your boss does it, right?)
The Challenges and Obstacles of Time Tracking
The concept of time tracking is a great one, but even great things can be problematic. We need to be realistic about how it can trip us up so we can avoid falling over Dick Van Dyke’s ottoman.
Time tracking can be a time sink. Remember that asterisk above about how time tracking can reduce overwhelm? It can, but when tracking your time feels like it’s eating into your day because you have to stop too often to note what you’re doing, you may get frustrated.
Time tracking can interrupt your flow. Some people try to track their time so contemporaneously with their actions that they can’t focus on their deep-focus or creative work.
Time tracking can be boring. There’s tedium in tracking everything. Time tracking can feel counterproductive if you’re taking time away from productive activities to note what you’re doing too many times in the course of an hour.
Time tracking may be used to procrastinate. If you don’t like what you’re doing, either at work or with your life, it’s easy to spend a lot of time fussing over color-coding or pretty fonts (or all the bells and whistles of a digital tracker) to the point where you’re not really leaving much time for the real work.
Perfectionism paralysis can be a type of procrastination. If you obsess over every detail of how you track your minutes, to the point that tracking your time causes you to stress about starting any task, very little of your actual work will get done.
Additionally, resistance to change can short-circuit your efforts in two ways.
First, for people who have mental roadblocks to starting a new habit, it can be difficult to train themselves to track their time. If you’re resistant to making the effort to track time, none of the benefits of time tracking can be reaped.
A second, more insidious problem is that the data you get — and the realization of what you’re really doing with your time (whether wasting it or giving too much time to others as a people pleaser, or just being stuck in crummy jobs or relationships) — may force an issue you’re not ready to deal with.
For time tracking to be meaningful, you have to ask yourself: are you ready to confront your inefficiencies or bad situations? And are you ready to make changes based on what you learn?
For time tracking to be meaningful, you have to ask yourself: are you ready to confront your inefficiencies or bad situations? And are you ready to make changes based on what you learn? Share on XFinally, the prospect of time tracking can trigger privacy concerns. If you’ll dillydally over selecting a digital time-tracking tool because of concerns over privacy, you have two alternatives: choose tools that respect your data boundaries or opt for analog tracking.
Make Time Tracking Work for You
So, how do you avoid those pitfalls?
Start Small
If you anticipate feeling overwhelmed by the practice of time tracking, know that you aren’t bound by any overly ambitious practice. Take baby steps.
For example, aim for a single-day experiment on a random Wednesday when you’re not anticipating major kerfuffles in your schedule.
Similarly, don’t feel like you have to start out with too granular a measurement. I generally track in 15-minute increments, but you might feel more comfortable in 30-minute slots. You’re not writing down the call you made at 1:02 p.m., 1:16 p.m., and 1:22 p.m., but rather “Made client confirmation calls” from 1-1:30 p.m. If that thirty minute slot of one category of activity yields enough information, so be it.
Once you’ve tried a one-day tracking effort, you could opt to expand, gently. For example:
- Try one tracking day per month, changing the day of the week each time. You get two chances at a “normal” Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and can either take two monthly breaks, maybe during summer vacation and December, or use some months to track weekend days to analyze how your personal time is flowing.
- Consider one time-tracking week each year. As noted, I do this as part of Laura Vanderkam’s annual January challenge, but you could do it each spring as a time management refresher, or to coincide with the fresh start of back-to-school each fall.
- Track just the time that you suspect is harboring your time gremlins and vampires. If you (and your team) are satisfied with all you accomplish during the workday, but you feel like you’re doggy paddling at home, then tracking your office tasks may not be necessary.
Pick the Right Tools for You
When I track my time, I do a week at a time on an Excel spreadsheet with columns for each day of the week and rows for each quarter hour, which I keep open but minimized on my screen.
You could use a pre-made tracker or create one for yourself. Or go really low-tech and draw or write out your daily blocks of time from waking to bedtime on a sheet of notebook paper or graph paper — or just track your work hours. (But remember, if you do decide to color-code or make it fancy, do that during your planned recreation time time and not during the period you should be doing the logged, tracked work!)
Alternatively, there are numerous digital time tracking software programs and apps, including:
- Rescue Time — This is the grand-daddy of time tracking software; I wrote about it seventeen years ago, when I first started blogging. Rescue Time will automatically track all of your computer-based work and then provide reports on your time trends. Rescue Time has solo and team plans, all paid (after a 14-day free trial).
- Toggl Track — This veteran platform offers free (for up to five users) automated time tracking, making it ideal for solopreneurs and freelancers, with paid versions for teams. It’s accessible from anywhere via computers or mobile devices.
- Timeular — If you want completely seamless time tracking that’s operating system-agnostic (it works on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, Linux) and an offline tracking option, Timeular may be for you. However, note that it’s paid-only (after a 30-day free trial). Timeular also has an AI tracker and a cool physical tracker (an eight-sided doohickey where you can assign and link facets of the doohickey to categories of work you do).
- Clockify — This time tracking software has plans ranging from free, basic, and standard, to pro and enterprise levels, with increasing variety of features. It’s more basic than Toggl Track, but also feels a bit easier to learn. Even the free level has unlimited tracking, reports, projects, and users.
- Harvest — This offers free, pro, and premium plans and is designed for freelancers. It’s available for all major operating systems (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, as well as browser extensions). While it’s simple to learn and has myriad integrations with other software programs, the free plan is fairly limited. (If you’re just starting to explore time tracking, though, simple is better!)
- Memtime — This has a pretty minimalist interface, so the simplified, automatic time tracking makes it super-easy to use. However, it’s only available for desktop use (so, no mobile tracking) and it’s a paid-only platform (after a 14-day free trial), so it wouldn’t be your best option for first-effort time tracking. Above the basic level, it offers a wide variety of software integrations. Note that Memtime claims, “We’re the only automatic time tracker that guarantees privacy by keeping your activity data offline.”
If you want something less corporate and more minimalist and mindful in a time tracker, you might want to look at Hourlytics (iOS-only) or Balance (MacOS-only). If everything you need to track is computer based, Monitup has an AI-based tracker, but if you’re cool logging everything on the phone, HoursTracker® Time Tracker works on iOS and Android.
Only you know what kind of tracking system — analog, basic spreadsheet, or digital app — will keep you committed to the experience.
Think Patterns, Not Perfection
It’s easy to note one-off times where you went down a rabbit hole on a particular research project or social media thread, but don’t beat yourself up over less-than-ideal time use.
Punishment isn’t the point! Instead, remember that one purpose of time tracking is investigating what doesn’t work so you can find what does.
Because of this, focus on trends. Are you always in a slump after lunch, distracting you from high-focus mental tasks? Maybe you need to schedule more physical tasks until you work off that post-lunch sluggishness, or try tasks that take less brain power.
Set Goals, Then Support Them
Your time tracking efforts will yield a wealth of information about what you’re doing that barely registers in your mind as a “task” (like picking up after your kids or straightening the company supply closet because everyone else leaves it a mess). You’ll see what’s taking too much time, what should be scheduled at different times (or delegated or given up on altogether), and where you have opportunities to do more things or do the same things differently.
Use what you learn from time tracking to help you set your goals; think: what gives you joy or feeds your values? Then schedule supporting efforts in a way to improve your productivity on the things that matter the most to you, whether it’s for money-generating work or happiness-generating life.
The Big Picture
I get why time tracking has a bad rap. If you ever had a bad boss like Gary Cole’s passive-aggressive Bill Lumberg from Office Space, you probably only remember the nasty edge of being asked to track your time.
We should reframe time tracking as a positive, empowering practice, just like practicing mindfulness, gratitude, yoga, or anything that benefits personal development. If we choose to see time tracking’s value as a learning tool about ourselves, rather than a rigid system leading to pejorative judgment, we can reap some pretty impressive benefits.
Time tracking doesn’t need to be done 24/7/365. And tracking your time without reflecting on what your data tells you is going to have fairly limited results. But periodic time tracking, with reflection and review of that data, will help you refine your routines so your schedule of what you do and when you do it can guarantee more wins. Just remember to:
- Find balance — Be just comprehensive enough in your tracking to yield good, meaningful data, but not so much that it becomes a source of stress or uses too much of your time. Make your system flexible.
- Embrace the unexpected — Be openminded about what you find. Even the act of tracking less-productive moments (hello, social media!) can teach you something about yourself and your needs — variety in your workflow, downtime, or maybe even for a different job or relationship that builds you up instead of draining your energy and causing you to self-soothe to inefficient levels.
Time tracking is your personal productivity GPS. Use it to help you read the map of your life, identify where you are, and travel the best possible path to your preferred destination.
Today’s post was about the literal passage of time — being mindful what we are doing with it — so that we can be more productive and self-aware.
But as I noted at the start, time is slippery. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “The days are long, but the years are short.” We spend a lot of time rushing to accomplish tasks, mostly for others but sometimes for ourselves, but our awareness of time (and the passage of it), both on a daily basis and as the infrastructure of our lives, can be murky.
Next week, we’re going to look at how we can do more to appreciate the speed of the passage of time to organize a life that better reflects what we want. I’ll also share tools to help us stay mindfully aware of the passing of our moments, our days, and our years.
Do you track your time? Share in the comments!
Paper Doll Post:
Paper Doll Celebrates National Clean Off Your Desk Day
January is National Get Organized and Be Productive Month. It’s sponsored by National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals (NAPO) and known lovingly to the professional organizing and productivity community as #GoMonth.
During GO Month, we celebrate how NAPO members work to improve our clients lives by helping develop functional environments, schedules, and attitudes to support productivity, good mental and physical health and well-being, and achievement of goals. Aren’t we nifty?!
But today, in addition to being almost the halfway point in Go Month, is its own special day. The second Monday in January is National Clean Off Your Desk Day.
While I’m sure you know that there are a lot of “created” holidays, I’ve always liked knowing how this event came to be. Anne Chase Moeller, daughter of the author of the original Chase’s Calendar of Events, looked at her father’s desk and was dismayed and overwhelmed by the clutter.
To be fair, there’s no documentary evidence that Mr. Chase was bothered by the condition of his desk. In general, most people, whether dealing with their desks at the office or playing the home version, aren’t particularly concerned state of their desks — at least, until they are.
Then, when a furry domesticated creature or the sticky jam-hands of a tiny human or an unexpected gust of wind lays waste to what little hierarchy and structure the desk’s owner created, concern sets in. More often, the problem is that the essential document or sticky note or not-yet-deposited check or instructions gets lost in the sedimentary layers on what was supposed to be a workspace.
Longtime readers of Paper Doll know that I value function over form, and will always place efficiency and effectiveness ahead of aesthetics. However, the desk area is one of those places where messy aesthetics are often a sign of dysfunction.
The truth is that a disorganized desk injects chaos in a person’s life even when they can find what they need, because they almost certainly can’t find it as quickly as they’d like. Disorganization anywhere can yield challenges (to put it kindly), but because our desks represent so many essential activities — financial, legal, professional, personal information management (from planning vacations to signing permission slips) — desk clutter may be the most agitating.
Today, we’re going to look at how ignored desk clutter can have a deleterious effect on physical and mental health, productivity, privacy, and reputation. We’ll also look at the different elements that go into “cleaning off” a desk.
A CLEAN DESK IS A HEALTHY DESK
Cleaning off a desk often means clearing it of whatever doesn’t belong, but it can mean, quite literally, cleaning it.
(If you’re squeamish, you might want to jump down a few paragraphs, because the facts about the germs on your desk might make you feel a bit ill.)
University of Arizona researchers under microbiologist Dr. Charles Gerba found that the average desktop harbors upwards of ten million bacteria, 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat. The average (North American) desk contains yucky levels of bacteria like Staph, E Coli, and Salmonella, (eek!) fecal matter, and viruses like influenza and yes, coronaviruses.
But it’s not just the top of your desk that’s the problem; the things on your desk, particular the items you (and others) touch the most often, that are covered in microscopic grossness. The biggest culprits? Look to your:
- Phone — They host approximately 25,000 germs per square inch. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your cell phone is off the hook. The germ party disco-ing across your phone is absolute off the hook with bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other creepy stuff!
Think about how often you touch your cell phone after touching just about anything else — elevator buttons, escalator railings, the keypad at the checkout counter, the ATM, etc. (And even if you never take your phone into the bathroom — and please don’t tell me if you do — you may be touching something that was touched by someone whose rest room hygiene is, shall we say, not optimal.
Sure, we’d rather not think of it, but be honest, when was the last time you disinfected your phone?
- Keyboard — One study at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago found that two different types of drug-resistant types of bacteria — MRSA and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE) — could survive for up to 24 hours on a keyboard. That Arizona University study took samples from a cross-section of 100 American offices and found that keyboards harbored 3,295 microbes a square inch.
- Mouse — Well, you’re only touching your mouse with one hand (vs. two on the keyboard), so I guess it’s not surprising that computer mice have about half the microbes, so only about 1,676 of those bugs. Yeah, that’s still a lot. (And no, using a your laptops trackpad doesn’t get you out of the dog house (um, germ house?). Ickiness abounds.)
By the way, a computer mouse is not the only mouse that might show up in a messy desk!
Beyond whatever you do to organize your desk, be sure to make time to keep it clean:
- Take everything off of your desk and put it elsewhere, whether that’s a spare table, a rolling cart, or a clean beach towel on the floor. (Don’t put anything directly on the floor, especially in an office where people are wearing their “outside” shoes and walking around.”)
- Unplug everything. Obviously, if you’re moving a desktop, shut it down safely first.
If you’re just cleaning your mouse or keyboard (and it’s not already wireless), disconnect it from the computer. Cleaning peripherals while they’re plugged in can lead to clicking on all sorts of buttons, links, and files, creating a completely different type of desktop chaos!
- Use a can of compressed air to clean the schmutz out of crevices and tiny spaces, like between keyboard keys.
- Use disinfecting wipes or a cloth and gentle cleanser to clean everything (that doesn’t require special treatment), like your:
- desktop surface
- office telephone (see below for cleaning your cell phone)
- keyboard
- mouse
- electronic gadgets
- printer/copier keypad
- stapler
- and all of the various doodads you use at your desk. I’m not going to tell you that you have to sanitize every pen on your desk, but since the onset of COVID, I’m sure you’ve noticed that doctor’s office check-in areas have little notes delineating the “clean” pens vs. the used ones.
- Check your computer’s manual regarding preferred techniques for cleaning and de-germifying the monitor and computer, itself.
- Follow your manufacturer’s directions for de-germifying your phone. Obviously, you known not to squirt it with cleaning liquids or submerge it water, but most phone-cleaning advice includes these notes:
- Don’t use bleach products. (Duh!)
- Disconnect your phone from the charger and any accessories first.
- Remove your phone from the case and clean it separately.
- Clear dust and debris from from the phone with a swoosh of compressed air and/or a dry eyeglass cleaning cloth or similarly soft, lint-free cloth.
- Make sure your phone is completely dry for several minutes before turning it back on.
- You can also use UV phone sanitizers, which come as wands or boxes. UV light damages the nucleic acid of viruses, making them no longer infectious. The PhoneSoap 3 UV Cell Phone Sanitizer and Dual Universal Cell Phone Charger is shown below; still, I find the entire concept a little Sci-Fi-esque and still win sanitizing wipes.
- Oh, and your office coffee mug? Take it home and run it through the dishwasher. Don’t use that mangy break room sponge that’s been there since who-knows-when.
Clean your desk for Clean Off Your Desk Day, but don’t only clean these spaces once a year. To keep germs at bay, try to clean your high-touch areas on your desk weekly (and after anyone uses your computer), and schedule time on your calendar to deep clean often, especially during flu season.
Pro-tip: don’t eat at your desk. Not only does it contribute to the germs in your workspace, but as I explained in Toxic Productivity In the Workplace and What Comes Next, working through lunch and not taking a “brain break” is bad for your mental health. Speaking of mental health…
CLEANING OFF YOUR DESK CAN SAVE YOUR SANITY
Clutter in our workspaces is similar to plaque in our arteries. It slowly builds up without us realizing anything is wrong until the flow (of blood, in our arteries; of clarity of thought, at our desks) is further and further restricted.
We may not immediately perceive it, but clutter distracts us from our priorities. It’s already hard enough to pay bills, understand field trip notices, or plan business tasks without sensory clutter (noisy cubicle mates, Slack and text notifications, ringing phones, and human interruptions) obscuring our focus.
But tangible clutter on and around our desks (whether at work or at home) hides our priorities under sedimentary rock-like layers. The oldest stuff is at the bottom, the newest is at the top; but priorities, which are date-of-origin agnostic are ignored. What’s important is almost always hidden, so whatever is on top of the pile, no matter the priority, grabs our attention.
Every time you test three pens before you find one that does have ink and doesn’t leave blobs all across the page, your patience wears just a little thinner. Each time you must flip through every sticky note pasted to your monitor or floating around your desk to find a password so you can meet a deadline, your blood pressure increases incrementally. And just as with too much plaque in an artery, when there’s too much clutter obscuring your focus, there will come a point where the blockage completely halts all flow!
To overcome overwhelm, read my classic article, If You’re Drowning In Paper Build A Raft and then set phone or calendar alarms to remind you to periodically:
- File away reference information (digitally, like in Dropbox or Evernote, or tangibly, a file box or cabinet) and tuck action paper work in tickler file or in folders in a file riser.
- Clear your desk and put away projects you’ve completed
- Digitize as much of your loose paper information as possible
Of course, avoiding distractions that make you feel like you’re going to pop isn’t the only way to keep your desk time cheery.
Invest in office supplies that brighten your mood (like colorful folders or attractive computer risers) to incline you to stick with your organizing rituals. For examples, check out:
- Paper Doll Explores the Best of Desktop File Boxes
- Organize Your Desktop with Your Perfect Desk Pad
- Cool and Colorful Desktop Solutions to Organize Your Workspace
You can also add a few fun desk accessories, but again, the more you have on your desk, the easier it is for clutter to build up. My favorite desk accessory is my cell phone stand (purple, to match my iMac). It has the added bonus that when I’m using it to watch something on my phone, I’m not holding my phone in a death grip.
PICK FUNCTION OVER FORM TO KEEP YOUR DESK CLEAN AND CLEAR
When you keep your desk clear of crud, and organize what you keep on your desk, you’re more likely to be able to focus on essential tasks.
To start with the clearing aspect of cleaning off your desk, ask yourself two vital questions:
1) What do you have on your desk that you don’t need or want (and where should it go)?
Take a moment to look around your desk. (Go ahead. We’ll wait.) What’s on your desk that really doesn’t belong? What’s crowding you out of your space?
If it’s your desk at home, are there toys on your desk? Your desk is an extension of your brain. How can your brain focus on preparing for a client meaning if Mister Fluffy is sitting in the middle of your workspace?
Are there meds that you don’t want to forget to take? Be honest — are they reminding you to take them or have the bottles just become part of the atmosphere? Move them to the kitchen counter, next to the coffee maker, where you’re sure to notice them.
Are there books you intend to read but which have sat untouched for weeks? Months? If you really want to read, move your TBR (To Be Read) pile to a nearby shelf and schedule a 15-minute block every morning on your calendar. Start your day reading and you’ll make at least that much progress. Instead of hoping to find time in your schedule, make time to read (or learn a new language or write thank you notes).
Take the aspirational material off your desk but put your aspirations on your calendar.
Similarly, put stop piling your action paperwork on the desk. Put items in the right day slots in your tickler file so they’ll be ready when the assigned time arrives. For more on using a tickler file to organize your time and desk space, check out my classic ebook, Tickle Yourself Organized.
Don’t put things down; put them away! This is especially apt in the small, sometimes cramped confines of your desk. As the various posts above explain, you need to define specific homes for reference and research files in railed filing drawers/cabinets or shelved binders.
For organizing the rest of the loose papers on your desk, avail yourself of my guidance on developing a family filing system:
- Paper Doll Shares 12 Kinds of Paper To Declutter Now
- Reference Files Master Class (Part 1) — The Essentials of Paper Filing
- Reference Files Master Class (Part 2) — Financial and Legal Papers
- Reference Files Master Class (Part 3) — Medical Papers
- Reference Files Master Class (Part 4) — Household and Personal Papers
Don’t forget about the non-paper items on your desk.
How many pens and pencils do you have? Is your mug filled with pencils you never use (either because they’re stubby and dull or you’re just not a pencil pusher — I mean, user)? Are there thirty pens in various colors and thicknesses, but you only use a black Sharpie fine pen or a sparkly blue gel roller-ball?
Stop collecting crummy ballpoint pens from hotels, conference centers, and the bank. (Did you know those cheapie pens are purposely only partially filled with ink because they know people will take them and never use them?)
And even though we’re working on clearing your desk, there’s another important question to ask.
2) What might you want on your desk that you don’t actually have?
- Do you get up from your desk frequently to find information you want at your fingertips without Googling (or when your WiFi is out)? Get a bright three-ring binder and fill sheet protectors with essential info like emergency contacts or the configuration data for your wireless router. Create a printed cheat sheet for making those “funny” symbols for letters to your international clients and emoji to your friends. (Do you do international commerce? Make sure you know your $ from your €.)
- Are you constantly unplugging peripherals because you don’t have enough places to plug in your external hard drive, disk drive, or other noodle-y USB thingies? Get a charging hub to neatly corral everything.
- Store action items and office supplies based on my Rule of Proximity & Utility. In other words, the more often you use something (or should be using it), the closer it should be to you in the “prime real estate” of your desk.
But c’mon, you don’t need a dozen stacks of Post-It pads on the surface of your desk. Stage those office supplies in a distant drawer or cabinet where you can go “shopping” as needed.
DON’T BE INSECURE — CLEAN YOUR DESK TO PRESERVE PRIVACY & SECURITY
Your desk is clear of germs? Check!
You’ve created categories for your papers and found the right supplies and tools to tuck away what you don’t need on top of your desk? Yay!
Once you’ve gotten the supplies and gadgets back to your desk or tucked away and the files (more or less) sorted into their action, reference, or archived categories, really scrutinize the teeny pieces of paper that adorn your cubicle walls, filing cabinet sides, bulletin boards, and the other surfaces.
As noted, you’ll save your sanity by gathering all those loose notes and stickies and transferring that information to wherever it belongs, whether in digital or (organized) analog form.
But there’s a subset of loose pieces of paper that are particularly dangerous to your security. How long have those Post-Its bearing passwords been affixed to the monitor for all (from coworkers to cleaning staff) to see?
Who else wanders by your office? Customers, vendors, consultants? Friends and family of other employees, maintenance staff and colleagues? Gladys Kravitz?
Even in a home office, where only the UPS guy, babysitter and pizza delivery lady see your desk, it’s crucial to protect sensitive data from disclosure — whether that’s your Social Security number and bank data, clients’ proprietary information, or personnel files.
The more clutter in your desktop environment, the harder it is to know when something is missing or if prying eyes have settled on them, so it’s time to stop keeping your passwords on or around your desk. Optimally, you should pick a digital password manager, but even using a password notebook (that you keep tucked or locked away when you’re not at your desk) is better than nothing.
Get out of the habit of posting sensitive information on your bulletin board, stuck to your desktop, or on the periphery of your computer monitor! It’s tempting to scribble your new password on a sticky note and put it where you’ll see it, but it’s only convenient until the first time something goes awry.
KEEP YOUR DESK — AND YOUR REPUTATION — CLEAN
At work, do clients and colleagues sometimes seem reluctant to leave files or important documents with you?
Are family members dubious about leaving you documents to sign or checks to deposit?
The problem may be your desk.
Whether or not the impression is accurate, people commonly assume a cluttered desk represents a cluttered mind.
Yes, I know Albert Einstein said, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
And certainly his was a great mind. But this was what Einstein’s desk at Princeton looked like on the day he died in 1955.
If you aren’t Einstein, will you be given the benefit of the doubt, particularly at work? (And let’s just imagine how much more Einstein might have accomplished if he didn’t have to waste any time digging for the reference he wanted?)
While it’s important to be physically and mentally healthy and improve functional productivity and security, preserving your reputation by keeping your desk clear of clutter and your essentials accessible will better help you achieve your goals. (I mean, assuming your goals include being promoted, being appreciated, and doing a great job.)
It’s not just cleanliness and functional tidiness that impacts the judgment of others. Too many personal items on your desk can adversely affect your professional image. If more than one in five items on your desk are personal, like photos, toys and stuffed animals, banners, or goofy mugs, those in authority (or in a position to report to authority) might doubt your commitment or work ethic. A University of Michigan study found that “An extremely messy personal space seems to lead people to believe the owner of that space is more neurotic and less agreeable.”
And let’s face it, even if your desk is in a home office and there’s no promotion beyond Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, Vice President for Financial Affairs and Co-Chair of Family Strategizing, do you need the sub-conscious distraction and lost space due to “desk trinkets” that you probably no longer use or even actually notice?
For National Clean Off Your Desk Day, give your desk a refresh. If you need some motivation, Zoom or Facetime with a friend or pair up with your work (or actual) spouse. Play some motivating music (if it won’t disturb your colleagues or housemate), set a pomodoro timer, and see how much you can accomplish before Beyoncé or Taylor finish cheering you on.
Clean the schmutz, eject what doesn’t belong (and figure out whether to toss it or file it away), and only keep things on your desk that help you be productive or make you happy to be at your desk.
And then to celebrate your achievement (and the observance of Clean Off Your Desk Day), eat somewhere other than your desk!
What one thing will you remove from your desktop today?
Paper Doll Post:
How to Use Cathedral Thinking and Intentional Words to Organize Your Year
We’re not quite a week into the year. And yet, if you had resolutions, you may have already broken them. Vowed to eat healthy, but that boozy New Year’s Day brunch blew that plan out of the water? Planned to exercise daily, but those two days back at work wore you out, so you slept in instead of going to the gym this weekend?
You aren’t alone. In fact, the second Friday in January is known as Quitter’s Day because so many people have already tossed their resolutions by that day. Research by Baylor College of Medicine found that 88% of people give up their New Year’s Resolutions by the end of January; a large percentage of the remainder part ways with their resolutions before the end of April.
WHY DON’T NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS WORK (FOR MOST PEOPLE)?
It’s not that resolutions can’t work, but that people generally go about them in the wrong way.
Unrealistic Expectations
It’s cute when three-year-olds tell you they’re going to be princesses, basketball stars, or wizards. But if you’re a grownup and you “resolve” that you’re going to change who you are in some massive way, your ambitious goals may get in the way of reality.
If you set an aspirational goal that’s so ambitious that you can’t possible achieve it, you’re guaranteeing that you’ll be discouraged each time you hit a setback or your progress is glacial.
Think about what I wrote in Paper Doll Explains Aspirational vs. Inspirational Clutter. Just as when you fill your space with tangible aspirational clutter, filling your head with an aspiration to achieve something lofty without the any undergirding infrastructure guarantees disillusionment and falling short.
Black-and-White Thinking
It’s common to approach goal-setting with an all-or-nothing mentality.
“Either I will publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel this year (even though I haven’t written anything since college)!” or “I’m going to keep this house perfectly organized every day from now on (even though I haven’t seen my keys in three weeks)!” leads people to give up when they hit the first bump in the road, so they stop writing or putting things away.
Too often, people craft their resolutions as, “I’m going to completely change how I behave” and that means that the minute they revert to their innate habits, they declare a loss. (A hot fudge sundae doesn’t mean your diet is dead and buried; tomorrow, have a salad.)
We don’t need a new year, or a new month, or even a new day to continue on with our goals. As I talked about in Organizing A Fresh Start: Catalysts for Success, we can always find new opportunities to re-set.
Shame-based Motivation
- Are you a carrot or stick person? Are you motivated to win something for the glory or by fear of not achieving?
- Are you more likely to go after a goal because it’s something you truly desire, or because you’ve been guilted into it?
- Do you want to achieve something because it’s your dream, or because you’ve been conditioned through social pressure (or from your mother-in-law or your work frenemy) to do something?
If you only set a goal because someone makes you feel bad about who you are now (whether in terms of your shape, your status, or your accolades), that extrinsic motivation probably isn’t going to have staying power to get you out of bed to run on a rainy morning or to get your butt on the piano bench to practice scales.
If you’re focused on something negative and are shamed (or shaming yourself) into changing who you are, that self-criticism is going to prevent you from making any sustainable change.
And whenever we don’t meet our resolutions, that above-mentioned black-and-white thinking can lead to low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, and poor mental health.
Lack of Strategic Planning
If you rang out the old year by resolving to “lose weight in 2025” or even to “lose 25 pounds in 2025,” you were resolving to magically achieve something. You can’t really “do” a resolution.
This is why the concept of SMART goals is so popular, because they promise that if you sit down and define your goals by making them specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time sensitive, and strategize how you’ll take action, when, and how often, and are clear on your purpose, you’ll stand a better chance. I’ve written about that often, and back in 2014 in Achieve Your Goals: Modern Truths Behind the Urban Legend, I spelled out my alternative steps to really making your goals come alive.
Merely stating your resolution without spelling out the strategies and actionable tactics is a recipe for a pretty weak soup of achievement.
For more on the problematic nature of New Year’s resolutions, read:
- The Psychology Behind Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail (VeryWellMind.com)
- New Year’s resolutions often don’t last. Here’s why they fail and how to keep them, according to an expert. (CBS)
- Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work (And What You Can Do Instead!) (Forbes)
Instead, Make Real Change Through Intentions and Habits
Set positive intentions — When you do create goals, focus on whatever you want to achieve because the goal uplifts you, not because you’re trying to avoid something. (Will you be delighted, or will you only be avoiding a negative result? Unless you’re motivated by the stick, find the carrot…or the cookie.)
Have a plan, not a dream — Identify any obstacles you’ve faced in the past anticipate what may arise in the future so you can develop strategies to overcome them.
Set small, achievable objectives — You’re not going to put away everything the minute you are done with it, but you can set a timer for ten minutes before your lunch break to file away everything that’s piled up on your desk during the morning. Keep breaking down large aspects of change into ever-smaller, more manageable tasks.
In fact, if you really want to change your behaviors, I suggest reading (or re-reading) James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.
Clear’s book is one of the most approachable guides to making small behavioral changes so that you can replicated them and build on them to achieve what you want.
Treat yourself with kindness — Don’t beat yourself up over backsliding; use it as an opportunity to investigate what’s tripping you up and look for creative solutions. The goal is to catch yourself winning.
Acknowledge that setbacks happen to everyone; focus on progress, not perfection. (Perfection is boring! Figuring out why you always throw your coat on a chair instead of hanging it up or always procrastinate about refilling prescriptions gives you opportunities to win!)
Seek — and accept — support! — There’s a reason people say it takes a village and that no man is an island. Humans are social animals; we’re not meant to do it all ourselves. Whether you seek the support of family or friends, delegate lesser tasks to staffers so you can focus on improving your unique skills, or work with a counselor, therapist, or professional organizer who can provide accountability and training, don’t feel like you have to go it alone.
GO LONG; MAKE A CHANGE
I’m just not a fan of resolutions. I am far more enamored of changing habits. If resolutions work for you and help you make a fresh start, go for it. But if you struggle with resolutions, it’s OK. There are better ways to introduce change in your life.
Longtime Paper Doll readers know that I’m a big fan of using words to create a positive mindset. Once I have a vision for what I want my life (or my year) to look like, I can build a theme and see if each habit or action dovetails or departs from that theme. And we’re going to look at that in a moment. But I’ve recently been introduced two additional concepts for guiding your thoughts and actions.
Cathedral Thinking
Greta Thunberg has been quoted as saying, “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.”
Oooh, cathedral thinking! I’m picturing time-lapse video of a cathedral being built from the foundation upward as the people and the city around the area change and grow over decades and centuries.
I was unfamiliar with the term “cathedral thinking” before I heard Thunberg’s quote, and did some research. Officially, cathedral thinking is a mindset focused on long-term planning and thinking about the future rather than the present. Originating in medieval Europe, the concept developed from the fact that builders of grand cathedral began projects they knew would not reach fruition in their lifetimes; they were thinking generationally.
Duomo di Orvieto (Orvieto Cathedral) Umbria, Italy @2018 Julie Bestry
Cathedral thinking is a way to view the problems we face as challenges requiring effort — sometimes collective effort by that village — and an investment of time, and perhaps money, over the long haul. When you’re talking about building literal cathedrals, that long-term planning, investment in the future prioritization of sustainability can create a tangible monument to the work you’ve put in.
But ever since I heard Thunberg’s quote, I’ve been thinking about how cathedral thinking applies to building our future selves. Maybe our initial goals are short-term: to get our homes or offices organized, or to learn how to say no to obligations that don’t fulfill us, to go to the gym, or start eating healthy.
But none of these goals exist in a vacuum. We don’t want to lose weight because the number on the scale is somehow meaningful. We’re not decluttering (merely) so that our homes look more orderly. We’re not culling the energy vampire tasks from our schedules so we’ll have a more balanced work-life schedule. Those are the interim benchmarks; those are the foundations and scaffolding and various levels of the cathedral of our individual selves.
But our true cathedrals are who and what these habits will help us become. Better eating, exercise, self-care, stress-reduction, and organized spaces mean that we will be happier, healthier, and alive and vital for longer so that we can be with the people we love, doing the things we care about.
Anyone doing a reality check knows we don’t write books to become rich; almost no published authors are making that kind of bank; nor are artists. Instead, it’s about legacy.
James Clear suggests that we can change our habits by aligning them with our identity. “I am the kind of person who eats five servings of vegetables a day” or “I am the kind of person who hangs up her clothes” may not be true, yet, but it’s tying acts to the self-image to which one aspires.
As long as that identity isn’t so aspirational as to seem out of reach, it can override the tendency we all have to blow off our goals when we just aren’t feeling it; when we just don’t wanna.
Your aspirational goals are part of your legacy, and your legacy is going to take a lifetime to build. You are a cathedral. Start by laying the foundation, and keep the future generations (that is, iterations) of your identity moving forward.
Make a Change
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
We all struggle. Change is scary. Fear of failure, fear of success, and annoyance (and avoidance of annoyance) keep us stuck, year after year.
Recently, I was thinking about how, ever since the start of the pandemic, I’ve felt stuck. I work hard to stay safe, in terms of my health. I still wear a mask in indoor public settings and avoid crowds. But in the last six weeks, I’ve still had health issues; first, as I reported last month, I had a rough bout of vertigo; then mid-December, I had a cold (and it was, though lingering, just a cold). I petulantly resented that I’ve taken all of these precautions, have missed out on a lot of the joys of life in these years since 2020, and still got sick.
We all take precautions to protect ourselves professionally or personally, to avoid pain (the stick) but that often means we never get the carrot or the cookie. Eventually, as I wrote about in Paper Doll Says: Don’t Get Stuck in a Rut — Take Big Leaps, we have to get out of our comfort zones.
This was in my head when I had a conversation last week with the always-fabulous Deb Lee, productivity consultant, connector-of-humans, and amazing friend. Deb was talking about marketing and entrepreneurship expert Amy Porterfield, and how she often advises people to Do Something Different. You can listen to Amy’s podcast, #497: Do Something Different: A Method For Getting Unstuck, for a sense of how this philosophy, of doing something in a different way, can shake you out of your rut, blow out the cobwebs, and bring new ideas and new opportunities.
And it wasn’t just Deb quoting Amy. Within a day, my colleague and the best darned Evernote Expert you could want to know (and I’m saying that as someone who has been an Evernote Certified Expert for the past decade), Stacey Harmon of Harmon Enterprises, echoed the same idea. In her newsletter, she talked about how she chooses a word/concept of the year, and for this year, Stacey wrote,
“For 2025, I’ve chosen “Do things differently. Get different results.”
(In her newsletter, she talks about how each year, she creates a custom Evernote Home cover image containing her word or phrase of the year, overlying a photo that’s attractive to her and is in alignment with her goal. Read more about how Stacey tracks her word/phrase of the year in Evernote.)
Although hers isn’t my phrase for 2025, I’m borrowing the inspiration to remind myself to spread my wings a bit more and embrace a larger life.
USE YOUR WORDS TO ORGANIZE THE LIFE YOU WANT
Most years, I blog about the advantage of selecting a word or phrase of the year to create your mindset. While resolutions state where you want to end up and goals allow you to spell out the habits that can get you there, words or mottos for the year are different.
Scrabble Tile Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Whether you pick a word or phrase or song doesn’t matter. Rather, all formats of these words allow to set your intentions for where you want to focus your energy for the coming year in a way that uplifts and expands instead of setting restrictions and boundaries.
Last year, in Toss Old Socks, Pack Away 2023, and Adjust Your Attitude for 2024, I talked about my approach to each new year.
In particular, I went deep and wide into the concept of the personal review, a method for reflecting on the year that’s ended to get a sense of what is really meaningful to you (in categories like health, finances, professional development, business, relationships, personal growth, and community) for guiding your approach to the new year.
I recommended the amazing Year Compass, for doing your annual review and for developing your hopes, dreams, goals, and plans for the coming year.
And I’d picked the word UPGRADE as my guiding word of 2024, but explained that it was battling it out with PRONOIA. I wrote:
Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it. Honestly, the first time I heard the word, I assumed it was made up. It’s opposite of paranoia; a person experiencing pronoia believes that the world around them conspires to do them good. Obviously, taken to extremes, it might seem like psychological or spiritual irrationality.
But Buddist principles haven’t been working for me, I’m still trying to get a handle on the Stoics I talked about in Toxic Productivity Part 2: How to Change Your Mindset. I feel the pull of a bigger change in my life, and I think “pronoia” dovetails with the idea of a life upgrade.
Thus, I keep coming back to the Carly Pearl song in which I first heard the word “pronoia.”
This year, I’ve decided to upgrade the word “pronoia” to be my personal life motto. The concept that the world conspires in your favor is just too inspiring to apply to only one year.
Once you do your personal review, you’ll know what you want to accomplish this year, and more importantly, why. Maintain the motivation and energy of your “why” with a word or phrase that reflects the overall concept you want your year to engender. It’s not about losing weight, or maybe even health, but a word that reflects beyond the literal to the the larger idea of how you want to feel. Maybe buoyant or lighthearted or delighted?
Consider:
- a word of the year
- multiple words (like a trio of words) of the year
- a quote or motto or mantra of the year
- a song of the year (or a song title, or a lyric)
Whatever you select is your personal theme for the coming year. Whatever you want to remember about your goals and your attitude is what this word or phrase or mantra will reflect.
But don’t just leave your word sitting there on a notepad. Your goal is the best product or service — it’s the business of you. Use your (organized) space to keep your attention on your intention for the year, the building of your personal cathedral.
Advertise your theme word(s) anywhere or everywhere it’ll catch your attention. Don’t let it fade into the woodwork!
Promote your theme to yourself wherever you need a little push to live in accordance with the values you’re setting for yourself. Display it:
- on a sticky note on the fridge or your bathroom mirror
- on a bookmark you’ll see each time you open or close whatever book you’re reading
- on a both sides of the door leading to and from your garage, so you’ll be reminded of it when coming and going
- on one of those fun little felt word board with changeable letters placed so you see it from your desk chair or wherever you spend the most time
- on the lid or door of the washing machine, to remind you that those “adulting” tasks deserve appreciation
- on the door to your closet so you’ll be reminded to dress and act in accordance with your theme
- as the title of a vision board, along with images reflecting the meaning of your motivating words, phrases, and songs.
- on the lock screen of your phone
- as the desktop graphic of your computer
- on whatever software allows you to customize your home screen (like Stacey’s advice for Evernote Home)
Don’t just engage your visual sense. Add an auditory component:
- Change your wakeup alarm on your phone to your theme song.
- Record yourself speaking your word or mantra (or have a loved one do it) and use the sound file as an alarm to remind you periodically at a point in the day when your inspiration is likely to flag.
- Recite your word or phrase every night before you go to sleep and upon waking. Make it a mantra.
Whatever you pick should soothe and motivate, providing you with clearer sense of the vision you want your actions to reflect. Picture it on a banner as you cross the finish line, or carved into the marble over the doorway of your personal cathedral.
Find Your Inspiration
You don’t have to rush to find your word or phrase. A year is 365 days and we’re only six days in. And if you find that the word your pick is ill-fitting, like a jacket that’s too tight in the shoulders, you can change it.
To get you started, peruse:
Choose a One-Word Theme: We Review Our 2024 Themes and Reveal Our 2025 Themes (Happier Podcast with Gretchen Rubin)
One Word Themes for 2025 (Gretchen Rubin)
How To Choose A Word Of The Year (Elizabeth Rider)
New Year Intention (Jonda Beattie)
246 Word of the Year Ideas for a Better 2025 (GoodGoodGood.co)
2025 Word of the Year Ideas (Morgan Harper Nichols has 60 great, often unexpected words)
2025 Word of the Year (and 100 ideas for yours) (Elizabeth McKnight)
Paper Doll’s Words of Intention
I’ll be honest — I’m not ready for 2025. I usually use the last two weeks of the year to do my annual review and find the right word or phrase for the coming year. But, as mentioned, I had the creeping crud from the week before Christmas until close to the new year, and haven’t yet found my word. I’m leaning toward ENGAGE.
I liked having a word and a song last year, and keep hearing Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days Are Over running through my head, but suspect it’s one of those songs where I’m not sure that the lyrics mean what I think they mean. I’ve noticed that Natasha Beddingfield’s 2004 hit, Unwritten, is playing everywhere lately, and feel like it’s speaking to cautious, perfectionist me:
I break tradition
Sometimes my tries are outside the lines
We’ve been conditioned to not make mistakes
But I can’t live that way
Songwriters: Danielle A. Brisebois / Natasha Anne Bedingfield / Wayne Steven Jr Rodrigues
Unwritten lyrics ©2004 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Whatever I choose, I’m considering the advice of Deb and Stacey, and remembering the words of essayist and novelist Susan Sontag, in her Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, where she emphasized courageously taking leaps and embracing change:
“I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.”
Do you have a word, phrase, motto, or song of the year to support your 2025 mindset?
Paper Doll Post:
Use the Zeigarnik Effect to Finish Off Your Unfinished Tasks
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
~ William James
Yes, I know I’ve used this quote here before, but it’s an important one, especially at this time of the year.
As I type this post, there’s barely more than a week left in 2024. As we look toward 2025, I can’t help thinking about what I didn’t quite finish this year. (Yes, even professional organizers fall short of our sometimes-lofty goals.)
THE ZEIGARNIK EFFECT: WAITERS AND THE CUSTOMERS WHO HAVEN’T PAID
Tasks left un-done scratch at the brain. There’s even a name for it — the Zeigarnik Effect.
As the theory of this phenomenon goes, people remember tasks that are unfinished or interrupted better than the ones they complete. Initially, psychologist Kurt Lewin recognized that waiters had clearer recollections of the orders of patrons who hadn’t yet paid for their orders. Once everyone paid, the waiters basically wiped their brains and couldn’t recall the details of the orders anymore.
This is why I am always so dubious of Law & Order episodes when the police track down a suspect by credit card order to pump the bartender or waiter for details. Invariably, although paid (and ostensibly tipped), servers seem to still remember all the details. Yet somehow these Manhattan waiters remember not only the patrons’ orders but what their dates looked like and the basics of the conversations they were having? Is the world of Dick Wolf a Zeigarnik-free zone?
But I digress.
The central concept of the Zeigarnik Effect is that once you start a task, there’s a “task-specific tension” created in the brain which keeps the task active. Basically, when you start something but don’t finish it, it’s like it’s still on the burner on the stove, and (assuming you’re not distracted by other things you’ve started), that tension pushes you to work on the task. Get interrupted again? The tension persists.
Once you actually do finish the work, the tension is relieved. Keeping that continuous tension up — having the task pop to the top of your To-Do list, putting a sticky note on your steering wheel, etc. — keeps the essentials of the task accessible to the part of your brain that says, “Damn, I really have to work on that!”
(Usually, men get the credit for women’s work, but in a striking rarity, the effect is named not for Lewin, but for Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who continued the line of research of her friend and mentor, Lewin.)
The Zeigarnik Effect keeps unfinished tasks sticky in the brain and work in several ways to get you across the finish line. Unfinished tasks can prompt you to finish them by acting on your brain in the following capacities. They:
- Serve as Mental Reminders — You naturally keep remembering things you started but haven’t finished doing. The unfinished tasks stay top-of-mind, prompting your brain to say, “Hey, you got interrupted (or got bored and wandered away) but this thing is still here! Don’t forget about it!”
Wooden Brown Scrabble Tiles Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels
- Boost Motivation — The next time you curse your brain for reminding you of an unfinished tasks, give yourself a little slack. This mental tension can increase your drive and magnify your focus to resolve those icky, lingering tasks. Sometimes, that motivation may just be, “Dang, I don’t want to be reminded of this again!” but that’s motivation in its own right.
- Build Momentum — My clients hear me say this all the time, but “Small victories breed success.” Even — and sometimes especially — when you take action on the tiniest of unfinished tasks, it can create a domino effect. Have you ever noticed that when you knock something off your list, particularly something that’s been hanging out there a little too long, it gives you the push to tackle more and larger tasks?
- Give You the Satisfaction of Closure — That “whoohoo!” you get from finishing something? It can make you feel like a bit of a superhero. It can work magic. That relief you get when something is no longer hanging over you frees up mental energy so you can set (and tackle) new goals.
Sidebar on the Zeigarnik Effect and ADHD
Of course, the Zeigarnik Effect is just a typical psychological phenomenon and may not hold up under all circumstances. For example, if you’re undergoing a lot of stress, whether at work, or due to illness, or an upheaval in your relationship, an unfinished task that has nothing tangible or digital bringing your attention back to it may just, in effect, escape your brain and fall out of your ears.
When I started to write this post, I wondered whether anyone had researched the relationship between the Zeigarnik Effect and the experiences of individuals with ADHD. They have, but it turns out some of my initial instincts were wrong.
Since the Zeigarnik Effect says that that people remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones, I figured that people with ADHD might have so many simultaneous thoughts and unfinished tasks that newer unfinished tasks would push older ones off the burner. Nope. Or at least, not always.
Actually, the research shows that there’s sometimes a heightened sense of unfinished task recall in individuals with ADHD. Even with all my professional work with organizing clients who have ADHD, I still figured they’d forget more of their unfinished tasks. In actuality, the research shows that the brains of people with ADHD often keep unfinished tasks active, which has just as problematic an effect as forgetting — it increases mental clutter.
So, it’s a good news/bad news situation. The Zeigarnik Effect isn’t making people with ADHD forget their not-yet-completed tasks; it’s just filling their brains with a lot of blinking lights about those tasks. And that “mental tension” that’s supposed to be good for remembering creates real, human tension (that is, stress), that hurts productivity. Ouch.
Luckily, research also indicates that planning is a particularly effective mitigation strategy for reducing the stressful aspects of the “mental tension” of the Zeigarnik Effect. According to Harnessing Two Horsemen of Productivity Havoc, the kind of detailed planning we talk about here at Paper Doll HQ all the time really helps.
Florida State University researchers found that when people with ADHD were allowed to create their own super-specific plans for completing their unfinished projects, the distracting Zeigarnik-esque thoughts went poof! As we talk about here all the time, planning is powerful; it frees up your mental resources and quiets all those Zeigarnik beeps and boops in your brain reminding you of what needs to get done.
But there’s a hitch. I suspect it works for people for ADHD much like it works for those of us without ADHD (especially when we’re overwhelmed), which goes back to why we’ve got unfinished business at the end of the year.
The Zeigarnik Effect has our brains full of stuff we have yet to finish. So we look at when the thing has to be completed, and think, “Aha, I’ll make a plan to attack it.” The problem is that, too often, we either see no deadline (so we don’t feel any pressure to complete a task) or we see a deadline far on the horizon — perhaps several weeks out — and our brain convinces us that it’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, we have plenty of time, and we procrastinate. Oops.
So, be sure to embrace the advice in Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination when planning your attack on whatever is incomplete.
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t entirely wrong about ADHD and forgetting. In one study on the impact on prospective memory — that is, the ability to remember to perform an intended action in the future — researchers looked at activity-based prospective memory in people with ADHD found that the Zeigarnik Effect can influence how unfinished tasks or “intentions” remain active in memory.
Their findings suggests that the ADHD brain sometimes puts uncompleted tasks in a state of “suspended activation,” which can adversely impact task recall and completion upon waking up. (This points to the idea that if your unfinished task is going to remain unfinished overnight, you’re going to need more support than if you just have to remember to take the pot off the stove in the next five minutes.)
For what it’s worth, whether you have ADHD or not, research shows that intentionally starting a task, even for the briefest bit of time, can increase the likelihood of returning to the task again and completing it.
ZEIGARNIK YOURSELF INTO FINISHING THE LINGERING TASKS
We can’t finish everything.
Finish Line Photo by RUN 4 FFWPU
I know, that’s a shocking comment on someone who comes here each week to tell you how to organize and be productive, but it’s the truth. It’s why I don’t believe in Inbox: Zero, or Laundry Basket: Zero, or any other Task:Zero mentality.
Seriously, the email, like the laundry, keeps coming. Unless your family members are all about to become nudists, the laundry will always be piling up, and while you can try to keep up with it, like all those inbound emails, when it comes down to it, email and laundry aren’t why you are here on this planet.
Finish what you can, and what you must, and get on living your life. The goal is to have more time to focus on what matters most to you, not to have the emptiest in-boxes.
As we head into the final week of the year, I encourage you to finish up as many of the small, hanging-on tasks you can, just so you can go into the new year unencumbered and more revved up for the tasks and projects about which you feel passionate.
- Make a list — Santa isn’t the only one who is busy making lists and checking them twice. Grab a pad of paper or your phone (because you’ll want to be mobile) and walk around your house (and if applicable, your office) and make a list of all of your unfinished tasks and projects. The Zeigarnik Effect means that a bunch of these tasks are in your brain already, or at the periphery of your focused thought, but some tasks may have edged others off the front burners. Write them all down.
- Delete what doesn’t matter anymore — I know, this feels like failure. But it’s not. Before you can really prioritize what matters, you have to let go of the things that really don’t matter anymore. It doesn’t mean those things never mattered (though they might not have), just that dragging them around with you is doing yourself a disservice.
If it’s been three months since your friend’s birthday, give up the belief that you’re going to time-travel back and send her the perfect card. Forgive yourself (as she’d forgive you) and send her a New Year’s card with all the good gossip about why your life has you so frazzled. You remembered her birthday is September 20th. You just forgot that September 20th was September 20th when September 20th came around.
If there was a grant you were going to apply for, but the deadline has passed, or a work opportunity that you never quite got things together to pursue, forgive yourself and move on. The universe will present new opportunities. Not all unfinished tasks have to be finished. Focus on the ones that shine a light on what fits your values and goals in your life and at work.
- Break down the list into smaller component pieces. — You’ve heard this before: projects are not tasks. You can’t DO a project. Divide every item on your list into small, actionable tasks. This will reduce your sense of overwhelm, making it easier to start…and then to finish.
- Identify your priorities — Let’s face it, some lingering tasks are more vital than others, and the amount of time they take to accomplish isn’t always the key factor.
There are big things you may not have finished. There are small ones, too. Spend one 25-minute Pomodoro to see how they rank. It’s OK to revise your priorities. You don’t have to create a list of 72 ranked items, but get a highlighter and pick out what will give you the most bang for your buck.
If you started it and still value it, see the next bullet. If you didn’t tackle it at all but want to keep it on your list, dig a little deeper and define what the obstacles have been so you can tackle the tasks with awareness.
What are the most important ones to start so you can finish? Do those first!
- Commit to a time and place for taking action — Someday is not a day on the calendar. If you don’t schedule when you’re going to work on a task, you’re not going to start working on that task.
This is where time blocking comes in handy. You don’t have to schedule working on that 2024 bookkeeping task for 3:15 p.m. this Thursday. But if you have a block for doing financial tasks every Thursday afternoon, it’ll be easy to slot that bookkeeping into a cozy spot on your schedule. Revisit my past posts on time blocking to get thinking about the kinds of blocks you need to tackle your overhanging tasks:
Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity
Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done
Paper Doll Shares Secrets from the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2022
Highlights from the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit
I have previously written a lot about activation energy and its importance in getting you over the hump when motivation isn’t doing the trick. William James had a nifty quote about this, too:
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
We can’t wait to be inspired. Sometimes, we just have to take out the trash, replace the light bulb, or call to complain about a mistake on the bill, whether we feel like it or not. But it’s easier to do if there’s a slot on the calendar for household care or dealing with problems.
- Celebrate every win — There’s a reason why so many of us write down things we’ve already done on our task list for the day, just so we can check them off. Having done something, and particularly something that’s been hanging over us for a while, is an accomplishment.
Acknowledge each and every completed task. It will reinforce your sense of satisfaction and motivate you to keep taking action. Nobody is saying you have to shout it from the rafters (though that would be cool), but perhaps go out for a nice meal to celebrate and see if you can spot a server doing a great job remembering all the orders.
Once you have it on your schedule, give some thought to where you’ll work on this task. Find the right environment, or create a virtual one to get you in the mood. I’m already tickled to use this 12-hour Gilmore Girls-themed video so I can finish my tasks at Luke’s Diner in Stars Hollow.
You might prefer a Yule Log video like the ones that used to run on television on Christmas Day. Youtube is full of them, and there’s even a playlist of the best. But if you’d like to feel like someone is cozily keeping you company while you check items off your list, perhaps Nick Offerman’s ten-hour Yule Log might be the way to go.
FINISHING UP
In James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter from Thursday, November 14, 2024, I was introduced to Emily Dickinson’s poem Forever – is composed of Nows – (690), on the power of the moment.
Take advantage of the upcoming moments in the quiet lull between now and the end of the year. Use these moments to get started. You don’t have to DO THE THING, but you can plan to do the thing.
You don’t have to rebalance your financial portfolio to make your retirement more accessible. But you can call and make an appointment with your financial planner, or with a certified financial planner if you don’t already have one. (And hey, my colleagues at Eddy & Schein Group have even put together some guidance on Wrapping Up Year-End Personal Financial Affairs regarding with whom you should be speaking, and about what, in terms of your money life.)
Perhaps your hanging-on task is spending down your flexible spending account (FSA). If your employer permits it, you can carry over up to $640 of unused funds from 2024 into 2025, but why not get your goodies, now? You set aside money, pre-tax, for healthcare stuff; don’t let it go to waste because you forgot to check what you could buy. Look up how much you’ve got left in your account, and then Google your options. For example, Yahoo Tech has 35 Surprising Things You Can Buy with Your FSA Money. (Seriously, did you know you could buy an Oura ring with your FSA?)
You were supposed to pick a new dentist or doctor or schedule that mammogram but just never found the time? OK, don’t kick yourself. But look at your insurance website or app to find out who is in-network, and schedule. (Well, yes, you’ll then sit on hold for a bit before you get to sync up your nifty 2025 calendar with a provider’s schedule. But it’s not going to take as much time as learning calculus. For what it’s worth, I learned just enough to pass the class in college and then, Zeigarnik-style, let all that unnecessary knowledge fall out of my head. You will not be shocked to know that it’s all been OK.)
Go through the unanswered emails in your inbox and send replies, even if the reply just says, “The year got away from me, but I appreciate you contacting me about [whatever], and if it’s still something you want to discuss, let’s get on each other’s calendar’s for late January.” Or you can say “nope, but thanks anyway.” Whatever you do, you’ll feel like you moved forward.
Make a list, chuck the tasks that no longer really matter, pick the ones that will be most satisfying (emotionally, financially, or practically) to complete, schedule time to do them, and give yourself a resounding “HUZZAH!” And if you could use a little accountability, feel free to share in the comments section: what overhanging task might you complete in the next week?
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