Tag Archives: tasks

Leave a little undone

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Student leaders at my school planned a movie night and I ended up leaving school a little after 9pm last night. After I got home I decided to have a hot tub. With headphones on I slowly submerged myself, got comfortable, and put on some focus music on my meditation app. Why focus music? I was planning to do a meditation, but I was too tired and decided to reflect on the week rather than meditating, or listening to a podcast or to my book. I thought about a couple exchanges I had this week. One was feedback from a student. I love being in a school where students can give me candid feedback. In fact, we discussed radical candour and I have to say that the feedback he gave was very insightful. The other reflection is one I won’t share, because it would be too easy for the people involved to know that I was talking about them, and it’s not appropriate for me to share. 

That second reflection came shortly after I restarted my hot tub (after the 20 minute auto shut off). I thought I was going to sit for another round, but minutes later I felt too hot and that I was done. Yet, there I was pushing myself to stay in a bit longer. That’s when I realized that I was battling myself for no good reason. I was done, but I had just restarted the hot tub, and in my head it was my ‘duty’ to stay in it longer. This of course is a ridiculous thing to think, but I thought it. Then I reflected on how often we do this to ourselves.

We push to finish… almost everything.

  • Crappy movie? Watch it all anyway. Why? Maybe it will get better? Or ‘I’ve invested this much time, may as well see it through to the end’.
  • Eating a meal? I’m stuffed but there are still 4 more bites… May as well finish my plate. Or, ‘I don’t really want fries, but it was part of the meal deal, so may as well eat them’. 
  • An online survey. A game of solitaire when you know you aren’t going to win. A boring book. A career. A course you thought would be interested, but turns out to be boring and unfulfilling. 

There are a lot of quotes and adages about sticking with something, showing grit and fortitude, and not being a quitter… but there is a difference between quitting or giving up, and being smart about recognizing when something is no longer benefiting you. This is especially true for things where the only person expecting you to finish is you. Why force yourself to finish a book that you know you’ll end up being disappointed reading? Why stuff yourself with those last 4 bites? Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to leave a little bit undone.

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As an aside, the Northern Lights were out last night like I’ve never seen them before. (See my Facebook post.)

Distractions and interruptions

Sometimes a work day feels like a constant flow of distractions and interruptions, and while I spend the day busy, it seems that little that I hoped to accomplish actually gets done. For the last couple (rather productive) days I’ve noticed a pattern of distractions that I seem to create for myself that slow down my ability to really get things done. Here are two of them:

1. I’m working on a task and some information comes to me (a message or a person) related to another task… and I task switch. At this point, I start on the task that distracted me, even though it isn’t something I can accomplish without more information or work, so it isn’t something ideal to do in that moment. However, from there I let other tasks or distractions keep me from prioritizing or completing the task I was on before the distraction.

2. I let incoming information, emails or Teams messages, derail my attention. That isn’t to say these messages aren’t important, simply that if I didn’t let them distract me, I could have been more effective at getting my original task done.

I have a job that tends to be filled with constant distractions and interruptions. I can’t allow these to derail those moments when I actually have time at my desk to get things done. There is often only a few precious times in the day where I have time to focus on a single task and feel a bit of flow as I get something done… when these moments come, I really need to ensure that I’m not creating my own distractions and task switches. This is a sure fire recipe to having a very busy day, and still nothing feeling completely accomplished.