STACK THE DECK

August 4th, 2020

There’s nothing quite like no choice to make the next step searingly obvious.  This odd constraint is perhaps why the entire phenomenon of ‘jobs’ work.  As many have discovered this year, it can be quite difficult to create your own schedule in the absence of one given to you by work.  But with a job, the constraints of what needs to get done fall into place like marbles circling the funnel.  Sometimes the order doesn’t matter and it’s just a matter of getting things done and the pressure of everything that needs to get done makes choosing a quick, nearly whimsical event.

But remove all the constraints, give a person days and days off, and the decision to get up off the couch to get a jar of Nutella, or continue with the bag of chips can incur great deliberation.  Salty or sweet?  Is it time to switch?  … hard to say.

The remedy to such an unfulfilling existence of limp leisure is to invent constraints similar to those at work.  To stack the deck of tasks.  As is often said: if you want something done, give it to a busy person.  Such an individual has the pressure to keep in motion - the motivation is perpetual motion machine of emotion.  

It’s a paradox of productivity that the best way to exercise your choice about how to spend your time, is to give yourself no other choice.  This ensures that what you want to do, actually gets done, rather than let that idea, dream or goal remain in the hazy bucket of ‘someday’.