When we make bad decisions, where’s the real point of no return?

Let’s say Meg decides she really want to go to Sweden, and she plans an incredible 3-week vacation there: great hotels, tours, plane tickets, the whole shebang. As she’s making these reservations, she thinks to herself “I probably can’t afford this–but I’ve always wanted to go to Sweden, and who knows when I’ll have the chance next?” Everything’s set. Once the reservations are made, is it too late for her to change her mind?

Two weeks before the trip she looks briefly at her finances and begins to worry about what will happen to her credit card debt if she goes. Is she really going to be able to pay all that money off? It turns out she doesn’t have it in savings, as she was kind of hoping she would. Now is it too late?

The day before she leaves, the anxiety is too much for her, and she sits down and runs the numbers. It turns out that the trip isn’t just a little out of her reach: it’s going to cause havoc to her whole budget–she might even run out of money while on the trip! And she hadn’t realized the hotel was going to cost that much, and should she really have booked the more expensive flight so that she didn’t have to leave at 5:30 in the morning? Is it too late now?

It may feel too late. When you’re driving away from the fast food restaurant or about to drop that angry letter in the mailbox or standing at the counter while the sales clerk rings up your purchases, it may feel as though you’re committed to the bad choice you’ve made, even if you now realize it’s a bad choice. For some of us (and this is completely typical of the old eating habits I’ve been painstakingly overcoming for years), you may be halfway through eating something, realize you’re not enjoying it at all, and still finish it because oh well, you already bought it and started eating it, and you don’t want it to go to waste, right? Because making you unhappy and contributing to your ill health is much less going to waste than throwing it away … uh, right?

Yet it’s never actually too late until it’s literally impossible to take whatever it is back. Even if it would take a lot of effort to backtrack, or if you lose money by changing your plans, or if you have to do something that seems random and embarrasses you, it’s better to reverse a bad choice at the last minute than to never reverse it at all. The day before Meg’s trip, she can say to herself “This is ridiculous: I can’t afford this, and I won’t even be able to enjoy the trip because I’ll be worrying about money the whole time.” Then she can call the airline and see if she can get a refund or credit for the flight, call the hotels and tours and cancel her reservations, and so on. If she’s past the deadline for getting much money back from the trip–for instance, if she got non-refundable plane tickets and the airline won’t give her credit toward future travel–then maybe it is too late, but if she just has to take a hit of a few hundred dollars instead of spending thousands she doesn’t have, then canceling (or scaling back to much cheaper arrangements) is still the right decision for her.

On the surface, this kind of reversal looks stupid: you go to a lot of trouble to arrange something, then you go to a lot of trouble to cancel it, and lose money in the bargain. The important thing to realize is that the value Meg was trying to get at the beginning was an illusion: the trip was not really something she wanted on those terms. If she took it, she would be less happy and less empowered than if she didn’t. Once she realized this, the value of the trip as she understood it changed. It’s as though you made arrangements to buy a nice car and then found out the car was a lemon. Would you still buy the car (and for the same amount) just because it seemed like it was worth more before you knew better?

There are two benefits to reversing a bad decision even after the bad decision has already cost you something. The first is that the bad decision hurts you less if you don’t follow all the way through with it. The second is that you give yourself a memorable and meaningful lesson. The canceled trip will, we hope, really stick in Meg’s memory, so that the next time she tries to buy something that she can’t afford, she can reflect on it and say “Remember when I almost bankrupted myself on that trip to Sweden I wanted? This is like that. Why don’t I steer clear this time?”

Is it ever too late to get a little smarter?

Photo by tricky

There are cinnamon buns on the counter in my kitchen, which I bought for my son. There is nothing preventing me from having a cinnamon bun, since it wouldn’t be grossly unhealthy to eat one, and my son isn’t necessarily entitled to every single bun. But I definitely have no nutritional need for a cinnamon bun and in fact am still working hard to lose weight, so while I’d certainly get a little pleasure during the few minutes it would take to eat one, in the long run I’m likely to get more happiness by not eating one. As low-key as the satisfaction of having made a smart choice is, together with freedom from a mild sugar crash and greater ease in getting more fit it has more enjoyment to offer me in the long term than the cinnamon bun.

But, of course, I wanted a cinnamon bun. I went over to the counter and looked at them, thinking something like “These aren’t really good choices for me to eat, but I can’t resist.”

Stop! Halt! Broken idea detected!  “I can’t resist” is making the cinnamon bun issue into an absolute, as though it were an irresistable force like gravity instead of 1) mild hunger plus 2) most of a lifetime of bad snacking habits plus 3) a vague leftover sense of mild deprivation from childhood. Theoretically, staring at those cinnamon buns, I should still have a way out, even though I was strongly inclined to eat one.

Lately I’ve been trying to make a habit of pulling out whatever willpower tricks I have whenever I’m in a situation where I could make a bad choice, even if it’s a very minor bad choice. So I tried a few of the 24 anti-hunger techniques I could think of off the top of my head: “Have some tea (anti-hunger idea #11), or a piece of gum (#10),” I told myself. I don’t want tea or gum, I answered myself. I want a cinnamon bun. I actually reached for the container then.

“You’ll be happier if you don’t eat that!” I told myself in desparation (#2).

You promise? I answered. (I’m not making this up. I actually thought the words “You promise?” to myself. It was a little weird.)

“Yes, I promise,” I said. “So are we good?”

We were good. I stepped away from the cinnamon bun and drank some water (#12). It wasn’t even difficult to step away then. The effort had only had to go into coming up with a tactic that changed my thinking for that particular situation.

Changing my thinking worked because I like happiness, which was what I was able to offer myself. Happiness is good, and within pretty generous limits, more happiness is better. Apparently whatever part of me wanted the cinnamon bun was satisfied if it could trade it in for happiness. While I was surprised that this little mental conversation was sufficient to resolve the cinnamon bun problem for me, in general it makes sense. We always have a variety of dimly-seen forces prodding us to do things that ultimately we won’t be thrilled we did, but we also have available to us a wealth of secret mental weapons we can use to align ourselves with our own best intentions, including visualization, reframing, distraction, support, and others. If we get in the habit of trying a few of them whenever we’re faced with a difficult choice, sometimes we’ll surprise ourselves.

Photo by TowerGirl

We all have a limited amount of resources: limited time, limited money, limited attention, limited skills … and so naturally we economize. To save our resources we take choose things to do without, select more modest alternatives, focus on one thing instead of another, share with other people and so on. And these are necessary skills: being able to spend $20 less on a grocery trip or to free up an hour in your day for something important give us greater power, flexibility, and control in our lives.

Yet economizing is a tricky balance, one that’s easy to lose in either direction. For example, if I try getting a cheaper brand of something at a grocery store, sometimes it will be a good find, but other times we’ll discover we’ve just gotten a really good deal on something no one in the house wants to eat–and a good deal on something you don’t need is always a bad deal.

It’s this way with anything. Putting too much time into “productive work” at the expense of relationships can undermine those relationships so that the support and even reasons for doing the “productive work” gradually erodes away. The classic example of this is the workaholic whose family falls apart due to time not being put in.

It’s difficult to know how to balance all of these requirements. Heck, it’s difficult to even figure out a seemingly simple limit, like exactly how many calories to eat per day when trying to lose weight (because of needing to consider variables for amount of muscle and fat, height, build, lifestyle, types of food, amounts of weight to lose, and so on). This doesn’t mean that we can’t put limits to good use, only that it’s good to question the limits we put on ourselves to make sure they’re still serving the goals they’re supposed to. If this idea turns into constantly revamping tactics so that goals are never reached, it’s destructive–but if it turns into a slow process of fine-tuning our choices and priorities, it can speed us toward our goals more effectively and more enjoyably than if we try to economize too much or in the wrong ways.

Photo by wenzday01

Every once in a while, I have a day where enough seems to have gone wrong that I’m lodged deep in a lousy mood. Sometimes I’m not clever enough to be aware of this right away, so it persists until mindfulness finally kicks in with something to the effect of “You’re in a bad mood, and there is no reason for it unless it’s somehow helping you. Is it helping?”

It generally isn not helping. So I try to find my way out of that lousy mood using one of the techniques in this post.

The human brain is not very much like a computer. It changes its own structure constantly, stores information in locations scattered throughout the brain, and even runs two different systems (one neural and mostly cognitive, the other chemical and mostly emotional) at the same time. There’s more on this in my article about science fiction and the human brain at Clarkesworld.

But even though the brain doesn’t work the way computers do in many respects, it is capable of reboots: shutting down everything that’s currently running–including bad moods–and starting from scratch. However, reboots are not always easy. There are at least two things that get in the way.

The first is called “mood congruity”: this is the tendency of human beings to have trouble really imagining any emotional situation other than the one they’re already in. If you’re in a bad mood and you picture enjoying a nice walk outside, chances are it will be difficult for you to believe in your gut that the walk will be enjoyable–even if you have every reason to think it will be, and even if it generally has been under similar circumstances in the past. Whatever mood we’re in, we tend to imagine the future fitting the same mood. This is one reason the advice “Cheer up! Things will get better” often sounds so hollow. Mood congruity can be overcome, but it’s helpful to realize that the way our brians work, they’re a little limited at imagining an emotion while experiencing a contrary emotion.

Another barrier is that generally speaking, any mental control we have over our emotions happens by thinking (cognition), but cognition can change much more quickly than emotion, because so much of emotion has to do with chemicals like dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, adrenaline, and others. The chemical states that influence our brains aren’t capable of changing nearly as quickly as our thoughts. We can go from thinking about a horrible tragedy to thinking about a really funny joke and back all within seconds, but our emotional state would not be able to keep up. This means that any mental effort to change mood needs to be kept up for a minute or two at least to allow emotions to catch up with cognition. It also means that idea repair doesn’t have its full effect right away, a subject I’ll be tackling in another article soon.

Knowing the obstacles, what are the techniques we can use to reboot our brains? Well, computers can go through a “warm boot” (rebooting through software only) or a “cold boot” (physically restarting the computer), and the same is true of our brains. A mental cold boot can be accomplished with techniques that completely clear out what’s going on in our minds. Two excellent approaches for this are meditation (which narrows focus to a very specific subject while letting everything else kind of float away) and exercise (which creates a physiological state that tends to help us cut back to a minimum of thinking).

Techniques for warm boots change attention, immediate experience, and/or thinking. Idea repair is one very useful means to do a warm boot. Other methods include emotional antidotes; visualization; and getting into a flow state (or at least distracted by something interesting for a bit).

Regardless of which method you use, rebooting takes attention, effort, and a little time. However, it often doesn’t take any more than that, and while not every bad mood can be banished in minutes, many of them can.

Photo by rofreg

I’ve mentioned before in posts like Some Steps for Getting into a State of Flow how even as seemingly unappealing a job as doing the dishes can be not only easier, but in fact enjoyable under the right circumstances. Here are some specific ways to enjoy drudgery:

1. Get into flow. Flow is a highly focused state when we are working hard to do something exceptionally well, using all of our attention. Getting into a flow state requires knowing what you’re doing, having minimal interruption, having a specific (and challenging) goal in mind, and having some way to judge how well you’re doing. World-class violinists, writers, programmers, physicists, tennis players, and highly accomplished people with all kinds of other specialties get into it often, but it can be done as well with very humble tasks. How quickly can the dishes be washed, or how perfectly, or with how little wasted water, or how quietly? See Some Steps for Getting into a State of Flow for more information on this.

 2. If the task doesn’t require much attention, use the opportunity to focus your attention on something you really like. This was what I did today, listening intently on headphones to songs for which I wanted to learn the words. I was literally disappointed when I ran out of dishes to wash and had to stop. Some other activities I’ve done that have made dishwashing really enjoyable have been talking with a visiting friend, singing, helping with my son’s homework, talking on the phone (using a headset phone), and even watching movies on a laptop set up behind the sink.

3. Simultaneously do something else useful. Our brains are designed to pay attention to only one thing at a time, but if the chore in question doesn’t require much attention, it’s sometimes possible to get something else done as you’re cleaning dishes or dusting. An example of multitasking while doing the laundry comes up in my post How to Multitask, and When Not To.

3. Use the time to think. If your life tends toward the hectic, with few opportunities to reflect, allowing your mind to wander onto whatever subjects most interest you as you vacuum or clean dishes can provide a welcome respite. To do this, it’s necessary to give up on any kind of resentment about doing the dishes and to point your mind in useful directions if it gets caught up in unimportant details.

4. Meditate. Meditation means narrowing our attention to a very specific thought or experience. Focusing intently on just the sensory details of washing the dishes–the feel of the water, the splashing sounds, and so on–can provide a means of meditating that can aid relaxation, alertness, and serenity, and the same can be achieved with vacuuming or any other household chore that doesn’t require any significant amount of thought to accomplish. The trick with this is to get used to focusing the mind back on only the sensory details whenever it wanders onto another subject. As with flow, this isn’t a useful strategy in high-interruption situations.

Photo by Nicholas Smale

Getting Things Done by David Allen is by far the best book I’ve ever read on organization, and it also has a lot to say about productivity and peace of mind.

When my friend Roger loaned the book to me, I was a little curious but didn’t expect much. I’d already had a pretty effective task management system in place for some time, and at best I was expecting Allen to offer a few ideas for minor improvements. It it did turn out to be true that most of the things he had to say in his book were things I was already doing, but Allen’s deep understanding of the subject offered me a wider, more useful view that was both practical and powerfully motivating.

Getting Things Done offers a way to look at and interact with “stuff”–papers, objects lying around the house, pestering concerns that keep surfacing in the mind, incomplete projects, dead plants, upcoming events, or anything else that’s fighting for our attention. Allen describes how to stream things into useful categories with a set of simple, familiar systems–task list, calendar, file drawers, etc. Yet the rules for the process he describes are not the familiar ones, because once something has been processed, you stop having to worry about it. Allen’s approach doesn’t just clean up and organize a physical environment: it creates reliable ways to know that you’re keeping track of everything and therefore creates a lot of peace of mind. Of course, this same approach does great things for productivity, and it yields unexpected benefits like increased reliability, management of stress, clarifying priorities, and improved communication.

My initial impression of the book was that it was mainly directed toward busy executives, and it’s true that these seem to be the people Allen mainly works with. However, he also understands perfectly well what needs to be done to deal with a home, family, or even vague set of aspirations for the future. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is trying to organize, get a handle on an overly busy life, create more serenity and confidence, or become more productive.

I’ve written recently on the site about several ideas that overlap with or draw on Allen’s:

• Relieving Stress by Understanding Your Inputs
• How I’m Keeping My E-mail Inbox Empty
• 4 Ways to Make Sure You Get a Task Done
• Are Creative People More Likely to Procrastinate?
• Effective Organization and Filing Are … Fun??
• The Eight Things You Can Do With a Piece of Paper
• Why Tasks Lists Fail

The Emotional Deprivation Schema
A few quotes from J.D. Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye can help explain what this schema is about.

“Sometimes I act a lot older than I am–I really do– but people never notice it. People never notice anything.”

“She bought me the wrong kind of skates–I wanted racing skates and she bought hockey–but it made me sad anyway. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”

Occasionally feeling like other people don’t understand, don’t care, and/or couldn’t do anything about it even if they did seems to be a normal part of the human experience. Feeling like this every day and all, though, can be emotionally debilitating as hell.

I’m not suggesting that everything that goes on with Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye is part of an emotional deprivation schema. As real human beings, our motivations are too complex to be meaningfully explained by any one concept, and to Salinger’s credit, Holden feels like a real human being to many readers. But Holden does us a favor in helping to show the emotional deprivation schema and some of its effects.

A person with an emotional deprivation schema might choose relationships with people who aren’t very capable of giving care, understanding, or support, and might act in ways that make it harder for even people who are capable to give these things. Such a person might provoke others or try to keep people at a distance (on the assumption that they wouldn’t really be able to get close anyway).

Overcoming an Emotional Deprivation Schema
Making progress with this schema first requires understanding how it’s working in one’s life: taking note of behaviors and choices that come from these beliefs and that can affect relationships. Techniques like journaling, talk therapy, and mindfulness practices can help bring these ideas out.

One way to tackle an emotional deprivation schema–or any schema–is to identify broken ideas and then repair them. Schemas express themselves as broken ideas, and repairing these ideas helps make progress in taking down the schema.

Since an emotional deprivation schema is a lack of faith in receiving attention, care, and understanding from other people, any experience that demonstrates people actually providing these things is worth paying attention to and building on. Even small gestures, when recognized as real caring or support, show the inherent flaw in the line of thinking that this schema promotes, and focusing on these gestures widens the cracks in this kind of mistaken belief in a way that can eventually break it apart.

Holden himself seems to have come up with a way to feel better about other people caring about him, which is to care about other people:

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

Unfortunately, this particular way of demonstrating that people can care for each other is a little impractical. Yet right at the end of the book, Holden finds a simpler, more practical way, which is just watching his little sister on a merry-go-round.

“I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.”

Photo by Fozzman

I recently noticed that I have the habit, sometimes, of living approximately one minute in the future. This is a problem. I’ll explain:

Of all the focus and motivation-related skills I could be developing, the one that helps me the most when I practice it and causes the most harm when it’s missing is mindfulness. When I take time to be aware of what’s going on around me, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking about what I’m doing, what’s really important to me, and from all that what choices suit me the best, I make some terrific choices. When I lose track of too many of these things for too long … not so much.

The question of how well mindfulness works has a lot to do with how much effort and attention go into it, so the problems come for me mainly when I let my attention be taken up too much by other things.

Recently I was doing my best to apply mindfulness to how I eat. This probably sounds like a relatively unimportant, navel-gazing exercise, but since eating is one of the things that in the past I’ve done least mindfully, for me it’s something that I benefit from working on regularly.

What I noticed about myself was that while I was eating something I enjoyed, I wasn’t paying the most attention to the bite I was actually eating. I wasn’t even paying attention to the next bite: no, the bite I was focusing on was the one two bites ahead. Somewhere deep down I seem to still have a concern that the food will all just run out all of a sudden. And who knows? Someday I may live in a time and place where there’s a famine and there isn’t enough food. For an adequately employed American in 2010, though, that attitude is ridiculous.

And yet, I began to notice that whenever I was on my next-to-last bite, I stopped enjoying what I was eating and felt as though I had no food left. This is while I’m still chewing and have another bite to go, mind you. I was living two bites in the future, and even when there was still food two bites away, it wasn’t food I was eating–all I was enjoying then was the fact that there was still food available.

I don’t eat like this all the time, or even necessarily most of the time. But when I’m not paying attention and letting my least useful long-term eating habits get the best of me, there’s a disconnect between me and my food–which may explain why until the last couple of years, while I ate healthy food, I didn’t have a good sense of how much I should eat or when. That’s changed with effort and practice, fortunately, but some of the attitudes that gave rise to the problem in the first place are still present, even though they’re diminished.

The problem of living a little bit in the future can crop up anywhere: watching the clock during the work day and not being willing to be happy until it’s time to leave; working on a project and not allowing a sense of any accomplishment until the project is done (if then); and so on. If you find you’re having trouble enjoying something, it can be useful to pay attention for a moment to where your focus is: is it on what’s going on now, or is it on some imagined payoff, deadline, beginning, or end?

That’s not to say we should always live in the moment: always doing that is neither wise nor practical, and I talk about the reasons this is true in this article. But living slightly out of kilter with the moment often isn’t a good strategy either, and sometimes all it takes to be happier and reduce stress is to set the clock back a minute or so.

Photo by rockmixer

Here’s a common idea of what willpower is. Does it sound familiar?

You’re faced with a choice, like french fries versus carrot sticks or cleaning the house versus dropping onto the couch and watching TV. One of the choices is the one you’d like to actually do now, and the other one is the one you know you’ll wish you had chosen later. So a battle commences between the good choice and the bad choice, and according to this line of thinking willpower means using plain force of character to conquer the bad choice and make the good choice win.

The problem with the idea that willpower as a struggle against bad impulses is that it lines the situation up so that a lot of the time, we lose. People who successfully make the good choices, the choices that lead to long-term happiness instead of short-term pleasure, are not fighting those same fights and winning: they’re pulling the situation apart and preventing the fight from ever occurring.

Just how this works begins to come clear when we look at the kind of thinking that goes into each approach. Let’s take the example of cleaning the house versus watching TV. With the fighting approach, some typical thoughts might be “I really should clean the house, but I don’t want to. I just feel like flopping down on the couch and watching TV. But I need to clean the house! Then again, I’ve had a lousy day, and I deserve at a little rest …”

These kinds of situations lend themselves to generating broken ideas, which tend to derail good choices. Also, thinking about a good choice vs. a bad choice as a struggle tends to lead to focusing on the negatives of the good choice, which is exactly the reverse of what we want, because it makes it harder to care about the good choice.

What’s the alternative? Focusing on small steps toward and attractive things about the good choice. An example of a small step: “Maybe I could just start by putting the books away. That should only take a few minutes.” Something attractive about the good choice might be visualizing how it would feel to wake up the next morning to a clean house or thinking about what kind of music to play while cleaning the stove. Anything that makes the good choice more appealing, interesting, or absorbing, and anything that launches us down the path of starting to act out the good choice, makes the good choice noticeably easier.

It’s clear that as humans, we like to think about pleasant things and don’t like to think about unpleasant things. If we direct our energies toward thinking up pleasant things about the smarter choice rather than toward brainstorming the reasons we don’t want to take that smarter choice, not only are we much more likely to take the smarter choice, but it will be easier and less tiring to do so. This is part of what I talk about in my article “Does Willpower Really Get Used Up?” Willpower seems finite if it’s a force we have to bring to bear in fight after fight. If instead it’s a different way of looking at things, why should it ever get used up or diminished? In fact, the more we use willpower in the sense I mean it here, the better we get at it, and therefore the stronger the willpower gets.

In other words, instead of likening willpower to a muscle we tire out with use but build up over time, we might want to think of it more as a language we learn, as a skill that gets stronger the more we use it, without having to fight ourselves. After all, if we’re fighting ourselves, who is there to lose the battle but us?

There are at least three good times to target a new life goal:

1) When a person doesn’t have a goal at the moment and decides to improve life by getting one
2) When the goal or goals a person has already been pursuing turn out to be no longer necessary or not as high-priority as they once were (or once seemed), or
3) When work toward a current goal has gone so far that everything needed to keep on track for that goal has become habit, or in the case of a goal that’s a specific project, when that project is finished.

Should I always have a goal?
It’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone who has achieved every goal that would ever do them or others good–which suggests that if it’s practical, it’s probably worth having a goal nearly all the time.

But there’s that limitation, “if it’s practical”: is it always practical? Probably not absolutely all the time: if a person is dealing with a major crisis in the family or temporarily working 80 hours a week to deal with a short-term problem, there’s probably so much time, attention, and energy going into that short-term problem that long-term goals would wither from having too little effort going into them.

At the same time, for many people it feels like there’s always a special situation or problem going on: financial crisis after financial crisis, or having to work 80 hours week after week, or constant breakdowns in an important relationship. Even though these can be real crises, the fact that they’re continuing over a long period of time probably means they’re systemic problems: in other words, there’s some underlying difficulty that probably needs to be addressed if these crises are going to stop. Addressing that underlying difficulty would be a goal.

What if I need to pursue two or more goals at once?
Often there are battling needs in our lives that present multiple, top-level priorities, all of which need to be addressed at the same time. Right?

Actually … no. The idea that priorities “need” to be addressed is a broken idea, because “need” is absolute. “Needing” to be done doesn’t mean a thing necessarily can be done, or that it’s the highest priority, or that absolute devastation will occur if it’s not done. A more effective way of looking at things that seem to need to be done is to phrase them in terms of actions and consequences, for instance “If I don’t get the house cleaned before my friends come over, they will see my house dirty” or “If I’m late paying that bill, they’ll charge me an extra $25 and call to ask me where the money is if I don’t call them first.” This is instead of “I need to clean the house!” or “I can’t miss paying that bill!”

The reason I’m pointing to this problem of thinking of priorities as needs is that with rare exceptions, we really can’t take on more than one significant goal at a time. Successfully pursuing a goal means changing habits, devoting thought to the subject, and pulling time and energy away from other tasks. It’s true that if someone has a lot of extra time all of a sudden, for example due to recent retirement, it might be possible to pursue more than one goal at a time, like getting fit and starting a consulting service. Most of us, though, have lives that are already full of other things, and even if some of those things aren’t necessarily a good use of our time, in most cases we’re used to doing them, and it will take a lot of focus to change over to doing something different.

The upshot is that even if there are several really pressing problems to address at the same time, the most effective way to deal with them will be to decide which will pay off the most extravagantly if it’s done first. For instance, if you are constantly overcommitted and don’t have enough money to pay your bills, both of those are pressing problems, but in many cases it will make sense to deal with the overcommitment problem first, because if that’s addressed effectively, there will be more time to address the financial problem, which may in many cases require extra time if a solution is going to be worked out.

Making multiple goals into one goal
There actually is one approach to choosing a goal that can accomplish multiple major life priorities at the same time, which is to focus on process and organization instead of on the goal itself. For instance, I could adopt a goal of trying to do a very good job of making every choice, however small. Practicing this goal would mean things like regularly thinking back over good and bad choices made to try to repeat the good choices and improve on the bad choices; becoming more mindful of thoughts; and possibly adding healthy improvements to life, like meditation or more exercise.

A goal like this could simultaneously help in a lot of areas of life: eating better, making better use of time, improving relationships, spending money more wisely, and so on.

Other goals that serve multiple purposes include communicating better; getting very good at tracking, organizing, and prioritizing tasks; and improving mood. If there’s more than one thing you really want to accomplish in your life at the moment, ask yourself: is there any kind of practice I could learn that would benefit all of these areas?

New Year’s resolutions and other big goals
As we move toward 2010 and (for many people) New Year’s resolutions, I’ll be looking at ways to make and keep a resolution that will really make a difference. This article is the first in the series. The others will be posted over the coming week, right up to New Year’s Day, on my regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule.

Photo by simonsterg