What Do You Want to Make Real in the World?
Often the question that drives people’s initial interest in productivity is: “How am I going to get everything done?”
For me, at least, that was true: I got to a point where my life was too complicated for me to manage it without a productivity system. And so I learned about systems for managing time and information and tasks and goals and projects.
These systems have allowed me to get a lot more done, than I could have without them.
But the danger is that we might too easily substitute getting things done — checking off tasks, chores, projects — for living a life of depth and resonance.
For example, I want to take a couple of hours for an adventure to visit a heron rookery nearby, so I can see dozens of Great Blue herons nesting.
But nesting season for herons coincides with my busiest time of the year.
If I tell myself that I need to get everything done before I take time to see this, nesting season will be over. I will miss the experience of seeing them. (And I still won’t get everything done; I can always think of more that I would like to have done, than I can actually do.)
Stop Asking Yourself How You’ll Get Everything Done
Most productivity and organizational systems are geared toward the world of work, paid or unpaid.
Few talk about managing your time so that you can pursue important relationships and activities that feed your spirit, but not your bank account. (Laura Vanderkam’s recent book, Tranquility by Tuesday, is one exception to this.)
But what we call “leisure activities,” non-work or chore activities, non-productive activities in the economic sense, are the very activities you might look back on as the most important to cultivating a well-lived life: a life where you’ve had rich relationships, where you’ve taken time to create things that gave you pleasure to create, where you’ve taken time to contribute your energy and efforts to make this world a better place.
Sometimes the belief that you must finish everything on the list, whether it’s paid work tasks or chores around the house, robs you of leisure time: “But I can’t stop working until I get everything done!”
Part of the solution for this is using time management techniques such as paying yourself first.
But part of it is also reframing the question.
Ask Instead: What Do You Want to Make Real in the World?
What if, instead of asking yourself, “What do I need to get done,” you ask yourself: “What do I want to make real, in this world?”
What do you want to make real?
What do you want to bring from your imagination, into real life?
What do you want to make real, that you can experience? Hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine? Having clean socks on a predictable basis (seriously, that is one of mine)? (Next level: having clean socks on a regular basis, while you are hiking the Appalachian Trail.)
What do you want to make real that other people can enjoy or use — learning to play music, starting a non-profit program, creating a useful app?
What do you want to make real, that makes this world a better place: provide housing for purple martins so they can keep migrating to North America; provide housing for human beings, so all can live with dignity?
We will all have different things that we deeply want to become real, in this world. We will all have different experiences and accomplishments that we hope to look back on, at the end of a well-lived life.
I personally believe that if everyone took one thing they wanted to see changed in this world, and worked toward making that one thing real; that we would all be much better off.
Making Things Real in the World Can Take a Lot of Effort; or, Almost No Effort at All
Lately my key productivity question to myself is: what do I want to make real, in this world?
What do I want to make real, today?
This can be very small! The other day what I most wanted to make real, was some clean socks. (Doing the laundry, a care task I dislike, is much more satisfying for me when I cheer myself on, saying, “You go, Anna, giving yourself clean socks, good for you!”)
I also want to write a book, which is a lot more work than throwing a load of wash into a machine.
To make my book real in the world, I’m going to have to put in consistent thought and effort over time. The same is true for making things real like starting your own business, learning a trade, socializing a dog to become a beloved part of the family.
But some things that are important to you, and that bring you a lot of joy, you can make real without much trouble at all.
Making Things Real is About Responding to Opportunities
When I was a child, I lived in the Southwest of the U.S., and in northern New England: places where cherry blossom trees don’t grow.
Every year during the spring I would see the Cherry Blossom Festival pictures in Washington, DC, and I thought that those trees looked like blooming clouds, banks of flowering clouds, on the banks of the Potomac. I dreamed of seeing them in real life.
It wasn’t until my thirties that I got to experience the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC, in real life rather than in my imagination.
That memory of walking under hundreds of flowering cherry trees, with dark rain clouds overhead playing up the lightness of those short-lived blossoms, remains one of the most vividly piercing things I have ever experienced.
By that time, we lived in an area where cherry trees could grow. However, our house already had such a large old maple shading the yard that we couldn’t plant other trees.
One day, a storm came and toppled our maple tree.
I was saddened to see it go, but realized that now our small yard had enough sun and space to plant a Yoshino cherry tree, just like the ones in Washington, DC.
And so we did.
Here it is!
It took less than a day to plant it. That was fourteen years ago.
Now, it is full grown.
I can see blossoming branches from my bedroom window, nodding in the breezes, with birds flying in and out of them, and wild solitary bees burrowing into the blossoms. Yoshino cherry trees bloom even before dandelions bloom.
Being able to see the cherry blossoms each spring, from a flowering tree in our own yard, from my bedroom window no less, is — for me — one of the best things I have ever made real in the world.
And it was hardly any work at all.
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References
Vanderkam, L. (2022) Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 ways to calm the chaos and make time for what matters. New York: Portfolio.
Byington, C. (2016) Purple Martins: The Bird That Relies on Human-Built Nests, Cool Green Science, 12 September. Available at: https://blog.nature.org/2016/09/12/purple-martins-the-bird-that-relies-on-human-built-nests/ (Accessed: 28 March 2023).