As a very distractible human being, staying focused on a single task has always been a struggle for me.
It was even worse when I was younger. I ran an errand for a teacher – something that should have taken 5 minutes at most – only to be yelled at upon my return for wasting half an hour getting there and back.
I have no recollection of what I did during that time.
Teleport to today, and I’ve picked up a few compensation techniques to help me stay on track. My imagination is one of my most powerful assets (if also a major reason why I get distracted so much), so I’ve learned to channel it into what I call the Purgatory Approach.
The approach is meant to counter a very specific demon of progress: Impatience. When we grow impatient, we stop enjoying what’s in front of us, and start projecting forward, to doing something we think we will enjoy more. This leads to a lot of half-assed projects.
I sometimes respond to this by imagining my existence has been pared down to doing this one thing – forever. Regardless of how it’s done, I’ll be washing those dishes, or mixing that song, for all time.
This is the state of purgatory: Think of a ghost doomed to haunt the same house, doing the same things, over and over. It doesn’t sound great, but it DOES get you out of your head and into what you’re doing. You can’t daydream about what you are going to do later, if it’s just more of the same.
Put another way, it teaches you to spend more time on doing the work well, so you can properly feel you’ve EARNED the free time that follows. The feelings of resistance that arise in the face of “work” lose most of their power when we look at them directly.
If you can go deeply enough into the experience, it creates an increased awareness of details you might have missed before. Time seems to run more slowly, but you don’t mind it so much. You start to get lost in the work, in the patterns and movement.
What you discover is the most unpleasant part about the task was your thoughts surrounding it. When your attention is focused on the task and not on the thoughts, you can actually find you enjoy the work.
And since it inherently feels better to do something well rather than poorly, you’re much more likely to take your time with it and produce something of higher quality than you would have otherwise.
From a career standpoint, it’s easy and tempting to create an artificial state of feeling-good-ness, by fantasizing about how great it will be once I’ve “made it” as a famous (and wealthy) DJ.
Having that vision works well for some people, at least as a goal to aim for. But that’s too far away for me, and the feelings of excitement inevitably crash into discouragement, as I am forced to face the reality that I have a LONG journey ahead.
For me and people like me, focusing on doing the thing in front of us well is the best way to keep moving forward.
By the way, this doesn’t mean we stop preparing for the future – we must still ensure we can handle survival. But whatever needs doing to keep us moving in the direction of better things demands our full attention. For who are we to say when the next opportunity will come?
We must believe in the good of what each of us are doing, the importance of putting one foot in front of the other, and having faith in where they will lead us. Like purgatory, the journey is only as unpleasant as we make it out to be.
Credits:
‘Woman in Black Tank Top Holding Clear Drinking Glass’ by cottonbro from Pexels
‘Woman in Blue Apron Holding Red Stick’ by RODNAE Productions from Pexels