Treading Water Only Delays Drowning
February 18th, 2008
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Photo by A_of_DooM
Let’s say you’re looking for a thrill, so you jump into a lake. What a rush! But now you want to swim to shore, so that’s what you’re going to do.
But first things first. You’re in the middle of the lake, and you have to keep your head up. So you start treading water, and you find that it’s not too hard to keep your head above the surface. You feel confident that you can keep going, and decide to take a little break and relax for a while.
After some time, you’ve started getting tired, and you remember that you originally wanted to swim to shore. But you’re feeling awfully cold now, and can’t motivate yourself to swim. You have enough to deal with just keeping your head above water while you’re so cold and tired. So you decide to wait for a better time.
Eventually, you start to resent your situation. How did you end up in the middle of the lake in the first place? What did you do to deserve that? This isn’t fair. You don’t want to be in the lake, you want to be on the shore. But you have to spend all your energy just to keep your head up and stop shivering. You can’t possibly be expected to swim now. That will have to wait until later.
But when later comes, you’re now so tired that you can no longer tread water. And so you drown.
Did you really not see that coming? When you stand back and look at the situation objectively, it’s perfectly obvious what was eventually going to happen. And yet when we’re the one in the lake, it looks very different to us.
After you race against a deadline at work, have an argument with your boss, fight traffic on the way home, pick up your dry cleaning, pick up the kids, and do whatever you have to do, do you feel in the mood to:
- Research a potential career change?
- Begin a new exercise program?
- Work on your novel?
- Study a foreign language?
- Take up yoga?
- Rethink your investment strategy?
- Look into starting your own business?
- Learn self defense?
- Plan a trip around the world?
- Start any of the projects you really want to do, but never find time for?
Of course not. You’ve put so much effort into just getting through the day that you don’t have much energy for anything else. If you manage to put any effort at all towards a new project, you probably won’t get very far.
If you want to write a novel, maybe one day you spend a few minutes of your free time thinking about it and even manage to write a whole paragraph. Then you decide you’ve done enough, so you relax for the rest of the day. The next day, you don’t have time to work on it. The next day after that, you try to remember where you were going, and eventually write another paragraph. Then you forget about it for two weeks. When you come back to it, you have no idea why you wrote what you did, and you start over with a new idea. And then you’re too busy to work on it the next day.
When you do this, you’re just treading water, and eventually you’ll give up and drown. If you don’t want to drown, either don’t jump in the lake in the first place, or start swimming to where you want to go.
This means that if you’re going to do something, you should really do it. If you only do it a little bit, you’re not going to get to where you want, and you’ll only waste time that could be better spent elsewhere, while deluding yourself into thinking that you’re actually getting something done.
We only have enough time to do so much, so before starting something new, decide if you really want to do it. If so, figure out how much time you need to devote to it, and come up with a schedule. Will you work on it every day? Five days a week? Will you work on it early in the morning, late at night, or some other time? Make a plan for getting the job done, and decide what you’ll need to sacrifice to make the time.
It’s really helpful if your new project is something that’s fun for you. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do something that’s not fun when you’re low on energy. But if it’s fun, it’s much easier to sacrifice other things to make the time.
You’re probably spending significant amounts of time on things like TV and pleasure reading because you need these things to recharge your batteries. But if you’ve decided to start a blog or learn to tango, then presumably these activities are fun enough that you’ll have no problem diverting some time from TV or reading. If your goal is to find a new job…well, the search is probably not going to be fun, and it will be hard to make time for it. Still, instead of just pretending to look for a job, it’s better to bite the bullet, make the time, and get it done.
There are many great productivity tips out there, but I think it all starts with making the decision that you want to swim instead of treading water. Realize that if you tread water for too long, there’s only one possible outcome. Keep that in mind, and you’ll be much more motivated to start swimming.
February 19th, 2008 at 2:28 am
Hunter,
Great analogy. Too often we don’t make time for that which we want to accomplish. And making time, often means we must “steal” time from another activity.
Each of us has 24 hours a day, how we use that time, will determine what we can accomplish.
Thanks for writing such an inspirational post on setting priorities.
Barbara’s last blog post..New Commenter Becomes NBOTW
February 19th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I’m working on my fourth novel. And I’m the primary means of support for my family (though not yet with novels). You just have to decide to do something, and do what it takes to make it happen.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Barbara, I like how you say “make time.” Too many people say they can’t “find time,” like it’s going to automatically come to them if they look in the right place. We all get the same 24 hours a day.
Curmudgeon, congratulations on completing three novels! I know that as a written work gets longer, it gets exponentially more difficult to write. I have a hard enough time just writing a thousand word post, so it’s tough for me to even imagine writing a novel. But like you said, you just have to decide to do it, and do what it takes.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Someone once said the most important thing
about being successful is deciding what you
want to be successful AT.
February 21st, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Terry, I hadn’t heard that before, but I like it. Some people will disagree, saying “anyone can decide they want anything, but that doesn’t make it happen.” However, deciding what you want doesn’t mean making a vague wish that it will fall into your lap. If you’re not doing something to make it happen, that means you never really decided you wanted it.
February 21st, 2008 at 10:38 pm
If you think you can, or if you think you can’t–in both
cases you are probably right.
It’s the person doing the thinking and what the thinker
thinks about that matters.
I like your site.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:20 pm
I now use “30 day improvement sprints” to learn new things or to make an improvement in an area that needs work. It’s easier to commit to 30 days than a lifetime and this also helps me cycle through various improvements throughout the year.
An interesting point about energy is that you can actually have more energy at the end of the day if you intersperse the right activities in your day. Effectively, you need to play to your passions and work on your unique strengths.
If you have less energy at the end of the day, you need to first figure out whether it’s physical, emotional or mental. If it’s mental, there’s a good chance a good chance you are either doing too much prefrontal cortex work w/out enough breaks or that you are working on something that’s not an innate strength. Your working memory is limited — so checklists help — that’s one reason why the Air Force uses them.
The other thing to pay attention to is whether it’s the people or tasks that drain you and you need to know which people or tasks are your catalysts. If you are drained during the day, something as simple as having lunch with more of your catalysts can give you the boosts you need.
JD’s last blog post..Sustainable, Healthy Commitment
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Thanks for the compliment, Terry!
JD, currently I find that I have the most energy from 7 PM - 2 AM, so it’s certainly possible for people to peak at different times. And I find that my energy during the day depends on what I’m doing. If the pace is either way too fast or way too slow, I get run down much faster.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:56 pm
My pleasure.