Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [103]
Once all these conditions are met, he can broaden his activities to gaining deeper knowledge of his company's products and of the tools he uses or might want to start using. He can also take this knowledge and propose improvements to his own and others' workflow. He may prepare a description of a longer-term project based on these ideas or continue working on an already approved such project.
When all is in order and moving forward properly, he can take time to work on professional growth such as the acquisition of new skills, participation in professional activities like conferences or publications, or other activities that he and his manager have identified as desirable for his continued growth and success.
It is very important to note that he can actually reach the bottom of that list—and be doing his job beautifully—with lots of mail in his inbox and lots of papers on his desk. Those things are not the measure of a job well done. However, they may be very distracting, so one of his priorities for ongoing professional development is to hone his skills at cutting the clutter to help stay focused.
Create your own high-level, prioritized pictures of “being on top of things” for your work and personal worlds, and then repeatedly check in with them from the top down.
Giving yourself a solid footing from which you decide what you need to do next will make the right things happen for you.
Driving your present choices from your long-term goals
Now back to those dreamy dreams I mentioned at the start of this section. Do the priorities you are currently following reflect them? Just as you repeatedly return to that solid footing when choosing your next actions throughout your day, you should also return weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly to the increasingly higher levels that represent your projects, goals, values, and vision for yourself.
Let the choices you make about what is important at these higher levels flow down and inform the lower choices. When this is working, you are giving yourself the tools to have your smallest actions serve your deepest dreams. Awareness of your hopes for yourself throughout all levels of the choices you make helps you recognize the most powerful opportunities for you when they arise. If you’ve already thought about what “better” and “best” look like, you can choose the right response when they knock on your door.
Onward!
The only genuinely subversive thing you can do is have more fun than other people. So get to it!
—Bill McKibben, environmentalist and writer
My Discardian life
As I look back on my life so far with Discardia in it, I find that one of the most valuable habits to start was, surprisingly perhaps, one of the smallest and most simple: Whenever I’m using something—a room in my house, my calendar, or my computer—regularly asking, “What doesn't belong here?” and then doing something about it. This question, along with all the other great deciding moments—Yes or no? Keep or donate? Commit to or move off my list? Finish or cut my losses now?—is at the heart of all the progress I’ve made.
Why is my home more pleasant than it used to be? It's not that I set out to clean the whole house more often; rather, it's the accumulation of lots and lots of almost unnoticed moments of tidying up, such as carrying an empty glass back to the kitchen, or moving a tchotchke I no longer love into the charity box. It’s throwing out that already configured install file sitting on my computer desktop, and clearing the small coins out of my pocket. It’s swirling water with my hand around the sink after brushing my teeth to clear away the toothpaste residue, and wiping the top of the stove with a sponge while I wait for something to heat in the microwave.
Why is my head less stressed than it used to be? My world hasn’t magically become free of all pressures