We live about 4 miles out of town, which means I have 8 minutes and 30 seconds to get to the gym. It takes me 16 minutes, give or take 20 seconds, to get to the main parking lot in Sinks Canyon from my house. I can get from the cliff back to the car and then back to work in 24 minutes. It takes me 40 seconds to park my truck, grab my stuff, and get upstairs to my desk when I pull in to the parking lot.
All that being said, I hate knowing these times. I know these times because I am always pushing my schedule to its limits. And the end result is that I often short-change myself because I have committed to being somewhere at sometime, and usually for no good reason.
It's not like the things I am racing to get to are not important...often it's a meeting or a work shift or picking up a child. It's that I don't give enough time to myself to see important (as opposed to urgent) things through.
Have you ever tried to assess a year-long training plan in just ten minutes? Write an article and publish it before breakfast? Tried to do anything creative or thoughtful with a hard deadline? I have. The results suck.
It shows up in my training, too. An over-ambitious session planned to fit in the next hour. And then I have to answer a text or use the toilet and it throws me off. Someone chats with me in the weight room, and I can't even pay attention to them because I am obsessed with the time slipping by.
And so I do a shortened session, hate myself for it, and throw the rest of the week off trying to make amends.
All because I have optimized to get more done. Which, ironically, causes me to do a poor job of most of the things I try to optimize for.
I read Arnold Schwarzenegger's book, Be Useful, a while back. As a kid of the 80s, I loved his action movies, but have always been impressed by his drive to succeed. And above all the lessons he tries to underscore in the book, I liked one statement the best:
"All there. All in. Every time."
It was about being present for each rep of an exercise. For each page of the book. It was about deciding what to do and then sticking. And it's exactly what I don't do when I am chasing my to-do list.
Looking up from my desk, I have a stack of planners full of to-do lists from the past several years. Many of those items from years ago are still half-done. As I sit here, I am understanding more and more that getting things done is not the goal. Doing things well, even if there are fewer of them, is where the magic is.