I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it. It might seem like a stretch, but I really think the best thing you can do if you want to make art is to pretend you’re starring in your own remake of Groundhog Day. Yesterday’s over, tomorrow may never come, there’s just today and what you can do with it.
Austin Kleon, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad
You probably know that Groundhog Day is the classic Bill Murray film where he wakes up everyday on the same day in the same place — in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania on February 2nd — doomed to repeat this one day into eternity until he figures out the key to escape (which turns out to be, of course, love).
In a creative life and in most other kinds of lives, days repeat in the same way on end. Get up, write for a couple hours, take the dog for a walk. Do some home tasks, go workout, write some more, and maybe work on marketing and the publishing platform. Shower, afternoon blogging, time for dinner with the boyfriend. It is a bit Sisyphean, but it’s also where we can find meaning, in the day-to-day, in the days that repeat one after another, mostly the same, with just the living and the creating and the loving as tasks to complete.
Just keep showing up, day after day, that’s the solution, isn’t it?
In his most recent newsletter, recovering personal-development obsessive1 Oliver Burkeman writes that there is no golden secret to living your live the way you intend, productively, meaningfully, and (for creatives like me) creatively:
[Building] a meaningful life is much less about discovering the right set of practices or habits than it is about cultivating the willingness to step up moment after moment and just do more of the things that matter, for the projects and people and causes you care about most.
I keep seeking a daily and weekly routine that will finally turn me as productive as I want and yet the trick, if there is one, is just to keep showing up every day and doing things that matter.
Another piece to this meaningful productivity puzzle, Burkeman proposes, is the need for each of us to take ownership of our actions:
No matter how many guardrails for good behaviour you erect, however much you stack things in your favour, in each moment, it’s still you showing up for your life. And there seems to be something crucial about owning that fact – about actively committing and recommitting, again and again, to going in the direction you want to travel, instead of acting as a spectator to your life, watching to see whether the systems you’ve put in place perform as you’d hoped they would or not.
I keep having this idea that if only I can put the right systems, habits, and routines in place then I will start achieving what I want with my days and my hours.
No, Burkeman says, it’s not new systems and habits I need. I just need to do what needs doing:
What this means in practical terms (“What’s one thing subscribers to The Imperfectionist could do to put these ideas into practice?”) is grasping that the central moment-to-moment challenge isn’t one of building habits, modifying your personality, or realising your potential. Instead it’s a matter of coming back and back and back to the question of what you could do right now that would constitute living the way you aspire to live. I’m not really suggesting you consciously ask yourself that question thousands of times per day; I’m trying to encapsulate a certain kind of stance or orientation I can’t fully express in words.
This reminds me of Jung’s advice to “always do the next thing that needs to be done.” I don’t need better systems, or a refined daily and weekly routine, or to spend a lot of time worrying about habits. I just need to do the work day after day.
- His label for himself! ↩︎