Wiping the Slate Clean

The slate is clean.

You may notice that things look a little different around here. Websites change their look and branding all the time, so there's nothing new or particularly special about the current visuals. However, if you pop over to the Archive, you'll notice a lack of articles. I've been blogging since October 2009 and had stockpiled nearly 200 articles over that time. I decided they would not make the journey to the current rendition of SamSpurlin.com. I don't miss them and you shouldn't either.

My evolution as a writer and a coach has resulted in me wanting to clarify my message and refine the image that I put out into the world. When I first started blogging I was only interested in minimalism. My early articles were nearly all how-to posts about decluttering and simplifying my life. At the time, that's what I found interesting (and lots of other people did, too). I was proud of the contribution I was making to the relatively young minimalism "scene" but I wasn't writing anything particularly unique or earth-shattering.

That's not who I am, anymore. The last thing I want when somebody is looking at my website for the first time and clicks over to the Archive is page after page of list-posts and relatively weak attempts at talking about minimalism and personal development. Those posts have served their purpose of helping me find my voice and figure out what I care about. 

There's no reason that I should treat my digital clutter any differently than the way I treat the physical clutter in my life. I've gotten disturbingly good at refining my physical environment to the bare essentials of what I need to complete my work to the very best of my ability. There is almost nothing that represents any kind of physical or mental drain in my living space. For awhile, I haven't felt that way about my blog. I could feel myself having moved on from my original purpose and mission and yet almost everything from that period of my life was still hanging around in the depths of the archive. I had made fairly weak attempts at pruning the old articles in the last couple of months, but hadn't really stood up to the task of clearing it from my life like I needed to. With the re-launch of SamSpurlin.com and a greater focus on my personal development coaching, speaking, and more in-depth writing style, now is the best time to cut the cord and start fresh.

I hope you enjoy the new look and feel around here. I feel reinvigorated to build an archive of articles that truly represents my most up-to-date thinking and best writing.  Thanks, as always, for sticking around and please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Values Don't Make Your Life Better

For years I have been an advocate of articulating values as a logical first step when improving your life. I've written about it over and over and have used it as a starting point with most of my coaching clients. While it has always seemed to work decently well I've discovered I'm a little uneasy about using this method. The logic is that if you can articulate and describe what you truly care about, what I've been calling values, you can start doing things to make those more salient in your life. It's a simple enough idea that also seems logically sound. The problem, however, is that actually drilling down to your true values is not easy to do. There are multiple factors working against this kind of approach, including the fact that the whole idea of values is kind of fuzzy to begin with. I can say I value Family and you can say you value Family and the mental picture we're each drawing may be completely different. We both know what we mean and are happy with the description, but it's not the same thing.

The Case Against Values

Another major stumbling block when it comes to articulating values is the fact that there are powerful societal forces that say you should value certain things. I believe it was in Tim Brownson's book, How to Be Rich and Happy, that he described a situation where a husband and wife did a values articulation exercise at the same time. When Family didn't appear in the husband's top 3 values and it did in the Mrs' there was obviously a major point of contention. That may be a little bit of an unusual situation, but think for a moment about the things that society says you're supposed to value. Family is definitely one of those values that's supposed to be on everyone's short list. Other people feel significant pressure to include Faith/Religion, Freedom, Friends -- the list could go on. The point I'm trying to make is not that it's bad to value these things, but to merely ask how likely it is we are truly describing our values when we feel societal pressure to value certain things.

I think there is an underlying metaphor that we can examine between values and passion. I'm not sure I can go a day without hearing or reading the advice about "finding a passion." I used to be a purveyor of this piece of advice as well. Until I figured out it's basically pointless. The belief that everybody has a particular passion waiting for them somewhere in the world and it just needs to be uncovered like a treasure under a rock is not helpful. Therefore, the dominant activity when trying to uncover or find this passion seems to be flitting from activity to activity, from rock to rock, looking for that elusive passion that will fix all your ills. There's a driving force that if you don't like your situation then you just haven't found your passion yet. I've since decided that this line of thinking is mostly fallacious and that "finding" is the wrong verb to use when describing passion. Instead, we should talk about "developing" passion. The focus is on action and practice. I feel the same way about values. The traditional way of thinking about value places little emphasis on actual action, just like the quest for finding a specific passion. Values shouldn't be discovered but developed over time, like passion. Both of these constructs need a radical overhaul.

Values --> Action, or, Values <--Action?

The underlying assumption that I think most people make (and I have, too, for a long time) is that our actions follow our values. That we act the way we do because of the things we value. This seems logically straightforward. However, what if the relationship between values and action is more bidirectional than believed? In fact, let's think about the directly opposite view. Instead of our values driving our actions, what if the way we act drives what we value? That we think we value Family not because we've decided that Family is very important to us but because doing nice things for your family makes you feel good (both in the short and long-term) and therefore you associate doing nice things for your family as the "value" Family. The driving force in this relationship is the action, not the value.

I think personal development should be a very tangible activity and the ephemeral nature of values has bothered me for some time. There has to be a better way to think about living a life that makes you happy. Today, I'd like to propose a new line of attack in personal development: Instead of trying to articulate your values, articulate the activities that make you feel both "good" and "bad" in the short and long-term; systematically cultivate and seek the activities that make you feel good while cutting out the activities that make you feel bad. With this new approach we can now focus on action, on practice, and on progress instead of sitting idly and searching our memories, feelings and "values" that describe the way we feel. In the end, you can have the most perfectly articulated values but what actually matters is what you do. Action is the greatest manifestation of value, so let's shift our attention to how we can create more of it in our lives.

Identifying the Good

As human beings we are hard wired to seek pleasurable experiences and sensations. Delicious food, clothes fresh from the dryer, sex -- all of these produce pleasurable sensations. Are these the types of things you should be seeking out under my new value-less paradigm? Not quite. While there's nothing wrong with pleasurable sensations themselves (provided they aren't harming you or anyone else in the long-term), we are searching for a more nuanced definition of "good." A helpful starting point when trying to articulate the types of activities and behavior that we're after is to think about a day where everything seemed to go "right" and you went to bed feeling satisfied and happy. For me, it probably means I worked hard and made progress on work that mattered to me, had some kind of physical activity, interacted with the people to whom I'm closest, meditated and challenged myself in some way. That is the type of day that makes me smile as my head hits my pillow, exhausted, at the end. While I was working hard on a difficult project or working out I probably didn't feel euphoric like I might be when eating a thick slab of chocolate cake. The immediate gratification wasn't there, but the long-term benefits I knew I was cultivating by not procrastinating and by keeping myself healthy far outweighed the momentary discomfort.

You may have an idea of similar activities that make you feel fulfilled and aligned when you do them. Some sort of physical activity and eating healthy are common activities that seem to find their way on to people's "good" lists frequently. What other activities make you feel this way? If you're having trouble coming up with ideas, there's something you can do to make this process easier. For the next few days you need to become more mindful of how different aspects of your daily activity make you feel. There are numerous times throughout most days where I find myself saying, "Man, why don't I do this more often?" That's a good sign that I've just found an activity that I should try to systematically build into my life in a more robust way. On the flip side, there's usually numerous points throughout most days where I find myself saying, "This sucks. I never want to do this again." Again, this is the sign of an activity that I should actively try to remove from my future experience. It's not easy to remember to be mindful but the more you practice it, the better you'll get at it. If it's easier for you, you could spend a few minutes at the end of the day identifying the times and activities where you felt really good and bad in the past 24 hours. Write those down and after a week or two you should have a good list to work from.

Another route you can take for identifying the activities and actions that you'd like to build into your life is to look at people you admire and identify what seems to be making them feel good. The problem with the approach I described in the previous paragraph is that you're limited to the scope of activities in which you already partake. That's no good. Obviously there are a myriad of possibilities that exist beyond your current realm of experience. Looking to people you admire can give you ideas of activities for inclusion on your own list. Obviously, you can't just adopt other people's approaches without testing them for yourself. It's possible that something your friend finds fulfilling and "good" is quite the opposite for you. It's up for you to give it a try and make that decision for yourself, though.

Beyond Hedonism

The obvious trap that must be avoided is lapsing into a hedonistic focus when it comes to identifying the activities that make you feel good. Hedonism is a school of thought that argues pleasure is the only intrinsic good. A hedonist does everything they can to maximize pleasure while minimizing pain. There are lots of possibilities of things you can do that will make you feel good in the moment such as eating four chocolate chip cookies or not working on a difficult project. In the short run, both of these choices may maximize pleasure while minimizing pain. How does my new approach to personal development sans values differ from pure hedonism?

The key term that I fail to use in my definition of good while hedonists latch onto with authority is "pleasure." A hedonist's primary focus is purely on pleasure. Pleasure is characterized by good emotions and sensations without too much concern about long term ramifications. In my approach to personal development, you're searching for activities that go beyond pure pleasure and tap into more long lasting sensations of "good." That's not to say that some of the activities you identify as positive components of your life aren't also hedonistically oriented. However, it's unlikely that the full roster of your good activities will all be hedonistically relevant. For example, lifting weights or running is something I've identified as an activity that makes me feel good. In the short term, when I'm actually sweating and breathing hard, I rarely feel like that final rep or final half mile is adding a lot of pleasure to my life. If I were a hedonist, it's unlikely that I'd partake in activities like that, even though I know they are good for me in the long run. While it may be difficult in the moment, I know the importance of staying physically fit and I know how good I feel after a strong workout. When seeking out the activities that you want to cultivate more mindfully in your own life, try to identify whether you're looking for immediate gratification or long term happiness. The more you can build your life around doing things that will benefit you in the long term and not just the short, the better off you'll be.

Arranging Your Life

The whole point of this entire shift in ideology is to place the focus squarely on concrete actions that have improved your life in the past or you have a strong suspicion may improve your life in the future. At the same time, you're systematically removing actual events and actions that have been detrimental in the past. The net result of this addition and subtraction should be a noticeably happier life that coincides more directly with what you actually care about. One caveat before moving forward is that this approach requires a decent amount of mindfulness to pull off successfully. Essentially, you need to be able to step back from your immediate experience often enough to notice what your emotions are when you partake in different activities. This serves as the backbone of this system and without it your lists are going to be flimsy and meaningless.

To begin, take a week where all you do is go on living your normal life while carrying a small notebook and a pen with you throughout the day. Your only job is to pay attention to what is making you feel good or bad as you go about your business and to write it in your notebook. This is going to feel weird at first, I know. There's no reason you need to stop doing whatever your'e doing to whip out your notebook and make a note, but try to just pay attention to how you're feeling when you do different things and make a note of it as often as possible. At this stage of the game, you're just trying to get a rough idea of the activities you want to cultivate and those you want to rip out by the roots.

After you've done this for awhile you should have two lists; one full of activities and events that make you feel good about yourself and one full of activities and events that make you feel bad about yourself. Now, take a few moments to look at your lists and add any other activities that you may not have experienced in the past week but you know they are something that's super positive or very negative for you. Helpful questions at this point include, "What makes me feel good whenever I do it?", "What should I do more of?", "If I had the time/money/energy, what would I do more of?", and "Lots of people seem to enjoy running/working out/eating a paleo diet/eating a vegetarian diet/volunteering/whatever -- should I try that?" As you can imagine, do the same thing with the negative components as well. You want to flesh out these lists as much as possible so they are salient and exciting.

The obvious next step is to begin making space in your life to incorporate some of the activities from your good list as much as possible. Depending on the content of your list, that will obviously look differently for different people and activities. The key is to make yourself commit to a handful of these activities as explicitly as possible. Put them on a to-do list, break them into smaller tasks, leave yourself notes around the house reminding yourself to do them -- whatever it takes to build more of these events into your life. In order to make this a sustainable change, however, you should try focusing on only a small subset of these activities at first. You're only going to set yourself up for failure and disappointment if you try to cram the entirety of your list into every day, or even every week. Some of the activities on your list are probably habits that wouldn't hurt to instill into your daily life, but some of the other ones are probably done no more frequently than weekly or monthly. I like to actually set some time aside at the beginning of the week to actually look at my lists and decide which positive activities I'm going to try to do over the next several days and which activities I'm going to actively try to remove.

Looking at and working with your good list is obviously a little bit more fun than thinking about all the things you do that you hate. However, I've found that removing bad habits and activities from my life is almost more rewarding than filling my days with activities that make me feel good. Take a look at your schedule or routine and identify where you can remove items that are on your negative list. For many people, possibilities include waking up too late to feel calm and collected in the morning, eating tons of fast food, spending money on stuff you don't need (or really want) and other hobbies or activities that bring little or negative value to your life. Again, just like with the positive list, you can't do everything at once, especially if you're dealing with habits. Pick one that you'd like to eradicate and focus on it exclusively until you've changed or removed it to your satisfaction. This isn't a race -- take your time and do it right.

Conclusion

I've covered a lot of ground in this article to essentially make a simple point; the more you do things that make you feel good and the less you do that makes you feel bad the better you'll feel about yourself. For a long time I advocated that the best way to figure out how to live a more meaningful and positive life was to take a long and hard look at your values. I've always had trouble with that approach because it's hard to wrap your mind around values separate from the influence of society at large. Instead, rooting your decisions in what you'll do to improve your life should be based on experience. Nobody except you knows what makes you feel good. Nobody except you knows what makes you feel bad. If you can mindfully identify which activities produce which emotions within you, you can systematically build your life around those activities (or around removing those activities).

What do your lists of positive and negative activities look like? I've posted the details of my lists on my Tumblr, process>product. Head over there to get some ideas for your own lists or click over to the Google+ discussion about this topic. You can always drop me a quick note on Twitter, as well, if you have any questions or comments. Thanks for reading and remember that subscribing to the RSS feed of SamSpurlin.com means you'll never miss an article.

Are You Making an Ass of Yourself With Assumptions?

Last semester I took a class called, “Foundations of Evaluation.” It was the first in a sequence of classes that are supposed to prepare me to be a professional evaluator. However, I quickly came to think of the class as “Critical Thinking 101.” Our professor was incredibly accomplished (his CV contains over 400 publications), incredibly blunt, and utterly mentally intimidating. We spent most of the class trying to pick out the fallacious thinking that leads to bad decisions and even worse outcomes. A huge part of that process was identifying and evaluating the assumptions used to reach a decision. It can be an eye-opening process to clearly see an assumption that has always been lurking just below your consciousness and yet directed your thoughts. It’s important that we identify the important assumptions in our lives and ask ourselves if they are truly justified.

Assumptions are often created subtly and without our active knowledge. The slow accumulation of life experience through observations of the world around us, conversations with our parents and peers, and the way we’re taught new information coagulates into the basic assumptions we use to help bring order to our world. For that very reason, assumptions are a valuable tool. They save us time and mental power when thinking about a situation and/or deciding what to do. We are able to use the assumptions we hold to bring sense to completely different situations that still have an underlying similarity. Having to make sense of every single situation or stimulus from scratch, without the help of assumptions, every single time we are presented with them would be a massive drain on our psyche.

However, the benefit of assumptions only hold true when our assumptions are truly valid. Otherwise, we are saving ourselves mental effort but coming to seriously suboptimal conclusions. In my case everything I do, from the writing on this blog to the focus of my schooling, is focused on one very important assumption. If it’s not valid, there’s a good chance I’m wasting my time. Is it true that we all have the ability to improve our lives in measurable and significant ways if we want to?

What I do

This assumption is the driving force behind the majority of things I do as a student and a writer. To start, everything I write on SamSpurlin.com only holds true if you also agree with this assumption. Personal development in general is predicated on the idea that focused energy in a specific direction will allow you to make positive changes to your life. If that’s not true, then I’m certainly wasting my time and effort writing about personal development. The same goes for my coaching. The people that I work with obviously all believe that there is action they can take to improve their lives. It’s my job to show them that action and give them advice for how to best use their energy when it comes to personal development. Lastly, the underlying basis of the entire branch of psychology that I’m currently studying is also predicated on the assumption that people can do things to improve their lives. Positive psychology looks at the human being and the human experience from an angle of growth. Developing happiness, mindfulness, creating positive relationships, and establishing new habits are all possible only if we actually have some control over our experiences as human beings.

The counter argument

I don’t want to spend the rest of this article beating on a straw man that doesn’t actually exist. Does anybody actually believe the opposite of my underlying assumption? Does anybody believe that we don’t have any control over our direct experience? There are actually plenty of arguments that espouse this position and they all boil down to one of two sub-assumptions; that we can’t control our genes and therefore can’t control the way we are and that we can’t control our living circumstances/environment. Let’s unpack each of these believes a little bit.

Genetics

Our genes ostensibly control the vast array of our physical and psychological characteristics. Therefore, how can we make the assumption that we have any control over our lives? We obviously have no control over who our parents are so therefore there’s not much we can do on the genetic side of things. If I’m genetically predisposed to be fat (or stupid, or smart, or shy, or anything) than what’s the point of expending energy to change that? All this talk about personal development is just an exercise in self-denial about how little we can actually control anything. Besides, if somebody does seem to improve their life with focused effort, then they obviously had the genes that allowed them to do it!

Environment

Personal development is a rich person’s endeavor. To be reading this article you obviously have access to some kind of computing device and an internet connection. That alone precludes the vast majority of the world from ever even reading this. Worrying about your happiness and trying to understand motivation are only salient concerns when you aren’t desperately poor and don’t know where your next meal is going to come from. Just as we can’t control our genes, we can’t control the environment into which we are born. If I happen to be born to a single mother of three in the inner city my opportunities are going to be much more limited than the only child of millionaire parents. It’s the sad truth but our position in life is essentially random and assigned to us at birth.

Others

Between genetics and environment, it’s obvious that we have no control over our personal development. Just think about somebody who grew up in an environment of abuse and extreme deprivation. They are unlikely to be thinking about personal development because they have much more pressing issues at hand — like surviving! Or, for example, take somebody who is extremely depressed. Or, somebody who is an extreme introvert. These are all things that aren’t under our control as human beings and prevent us from being more than we are. Personal development is the discipline of people who don’t have anything better or useful to do.

The case for assuming we can change our lives

I must admit, writing the previous couple of paragraphs from the perspective of somebody who believes we don’t have any control over our ability to grow and improve was surprisingly difficult. Every time I started typing a sentence my brain would scream, “No! That’s not true!” This just goes to show how powerfully this assumption is interwoven into the way I view the world. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is a logical or accurate assumption to have.

The keystone of my argument requires an explanation of the way I view personal development and how it may differ from how many people look at it. Personal development has always been about the process of growth, not the product of it. This may seem somewhat counterintuitive as I think most people get involved with personal development because they want to change something about themselves. It’s only logical, then, to be focused on some end state that is somehow better than you currently are. I don’t deny that personal development relies on some kind of change, but I do argue that an unwavering focus on some ideal state is not a good use of our time or energy. Instead, merely the process of growing, of improving, with no focus on some ultimate end, is the true benefit of personal development. Without this approach personal development becomes a Sisyphean quest of never-ending self loathing.

If we change our perspective on personal development from a quixotic quest for perfection to a uniquely personal journey of self-awareness and self-improvement we can eliminate a key threat to the assumption that people have control over their immediate experience. Whether you’re a multimillionaire living in the most ideal and perfect of environments or a victim of abuse in the most squalid of home situations, personal development is possible and equally necessary. Neither of these two fictional characters are shooting for the same level of personal development in any aspect of their lives. Starting points aren’t important or relevant in any way when making personal development an important part of your life. There is no ultimate end point that we’re all searching for.

Looked at another way, holding the assumption that you can improve your life in important ways allows you to be in a position of power when living your life. Each moment is a situation that can either add to or detract from your personal development. Even if you don’t have direct control over the circumstances of an event, you can always control your reaction. Taking this stance puts you in a position to have control instead of being buffeted about by the random winds of fate. In a world where my two options are believing myself to be a victim of my circumstances and thereby completely powerless to change them or having control (however tenuous that grasp may be) on my immediate experience I will always take the latter.

I will happily concede that some people are born into more advantageous situation than others, that some people are born with a higher genetic set point for happiness or intelligence, that growing up in an environment of abuse is something out of your control and likely incredibly detrimental to your personal development. Perhaps it is merely a function of my definition of personal development, but I cannot think of a single life situation where personal development is not possible or important. Personal development is not a product of our environment or life situation but a product of our minds and how we view the world. We can be imprisoned by circumstances, physical limitations, or injustice but if we retain the control over our ability to think then we retain control over our ability to personally develop.

It’s important to note that this assumption says nothing about whether or not you want to make changes. I don’t make the assumption that everyone in the world finds personal development important. That would be an incredibly fallacious belief that has no actual bearing in reality. My assumption merely says that anyone who decides to take action will find it possible to improve their lives in measurable ways. Part of my job as a teacher and coach is to show people the path that exists. I can describe the path’s location, clear it of obstacles, and give somebody a map but I can never throw them across my shoulders and take them down the path of personal development myself. The initiative and motivation has to be internally generated (how to go about generating that is a story for another time).

The Buddhism Caveat

Being interested in Buddhism made me start thinking about whether personal development is reconcilable with a Buddhist approach toward life. Is it possible to reconcile a commitment to perpetual personal development with the ideals and values of Buddhism? Isn’t it anti-Buddhist to never be content with where you are and always on the lookout for something better? I don’t know enough about Buddhism to fully answer this question, but I immediately am drawn to the practice of meditation as a metaphor for personal development. Meditating is something that is incredibly frustrating and difficult at first but gradually becomes easier over time. I think many Buddhists would say that they’re always trying to improve the quality of their ability to meditate. Indeed, unless an individual has experienced enlightenment, I’m under the impression that a lot of effort is placed into making meditation a better experience. This movement toward better meditation while simultaneously dropping expectations is analogous with any journey of personal development. The value is in the practice itself, the process, and not in the end-state it produces.

You can either believe you have control over your life or you don’t. For me, believing I can change the circumstances of my situation gives me power. It puts me in a position of strength and impels me to be engaged with the world, to not let it float by. The flip side of this approach is to give up all control or attachment and just “go with the flow.” I think it’s possible to be interested in personal development and not overly attached to it at the same time. That’s why I always focus on the process — on habits– and not the final outcomes of personal development. I try to let personal development, like eating, sleeping, or breathing, be a constant in my life that doesn’t require constant attention or rethinking. It’s just the way I’ve decided to look at myself and the world.

What assumptions do you hold about the way the world works? What assumptions do you hold about other people? Have you taken the time to think through these logically and possibly even change them? Our assumptions orient the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. I think it’s vitally important that we get them right.

Share your thoughts by joining the conversation on Google+ or dropping me a note on Twitter (@samspurlin). I’d love to hear about your own experience with making and holding important assumptions. If you enjoyed this article, you might want to consider subscribing to the blog via RSS. Lastly, I’ve started a sub-blog called process>product that is serving as a depository for my semi-formed thoughts and musings about personal development and life in general.

4 Productivity Lessons I've Learned From the Most Intense 4 Months of My Life

Like a bear slowly awakening from hibernation (despite the fact it’s early January) I’m finally emerging from the productivity slumber I’ve been locked in since the end of my first semester of graduate school. I had huge plans of getting up early every day to work on my own projects, write articles for SamSpurlin.com, and plan the TEDx I’m in charge of. While I was able to get some of these things done, my writing output has been close to nil for the better part of three weeks. At first, I was frustrated with my apparent lack of productivity. How could I possibly stand to waste all of this free-time that is so incredibly hard to come by during the semester? I needed to be working hard to get everything done that I don’t have time to do while engaged with the duties of a grad student. Luckily, I decided to give The Power of Full Engagementa re-read early in December. I already knew this on a subconscious level, but this book helped me reaffirm the idea that renewal is just as important as productivity. In fact, without powerful renewal I’d never be able to ratchet up my productivity over time. With that helpful reframing, I’ve been enjoying my time at home and slowly warming up the productivity engine once again.

As a first foray into writing in about a month, I think it makes sense to take a little bit of time killing two birds with one stone. I think it’s vitally important to spend time reflecting on the past in order to improve the present and it’s also vitally important that I just get my fingers moving again.

Graduate school is an intense period of time in a student’s life. I worry that I mention it too often on this blog, so I’d like to take a little bit of time using it as a source of more general insight. My experiences are unique, but I suspect what I’ve learned over the past 4 months is not. Over the course of the next couple of hundred words I’d like to share with you my greatest takeaways from my first semester of studying for my master’s degree in positive developmental psychology.

Don’t waste mental power

Mental power is a predictably important resource when you’re a student. Graduate school demands that you have a huge amount of mental power on hand at almost all times. It may seem silly, but I was very, very grateful that I instilled some habits in my life over the past couple of years that freed up mental power for more important activities. For example, I have an extremely minimal wardrobe that requires zero thought to address each morning. I know that I can grab either pair of my shorts or pants and any of my shirts and look like a respectable human being. Other habits such as my implementation of Getting Things Done, how I manage reference information (Evernote, simple filing system), and the way I use my computer have all allowed me to use my mental power on more important questions. All of this seems terribly inconsequential, I know. However, Every little taxing decision or thought that isn’t directly related to something important represents a tiny drain on my psyche. Deciding what to wear every morning or deciding how to manage a new piece of information in my life are tiny decisions that happen many times every week. By having a system in place to take care of these items automatically has been a huge boon over the past couple of months.

Do you have a set system in place for when you receive a new piece of information (say, in an email) that requires your action? For me, I hit two buttons, type a sentence or two, hit enter, and know that a task has been safely captured in my task management software. It requires almost no thought and I don’t have to wonder where my to-do list is or if I’ve forgotten something important. Are you happy with the tools that you use on a daily basis or does something about them make you angry? I got tired of using crappy pens so I did a little bit of experimenting and discovered a pen that I love to use. I visited Amazon and purchased a box of them that are now currently residing in my desk drawer. I know that I always have an excellent pen at hand that won’t make me rue the idea of writing. Think about anything you have to do over and over in your life and ask yourself if you have a system in place. Don’t waste mental power on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Don’t get sucked into the self-harm equals commitment approach

Graduate students can be kind of weird. Myself and the rest of my cohort are all high achievers when it comes to school. We come from backgrounds where good grades and academic achievement are valued. However, sometimes it seems like the appearance of hard work is valued more than the actual results of that work. In a nutshell, just because you spend 10 hours a day at the library does not mean you’re more committed. There were times over the last semester where I found myself getting sucked into this mentality. It’s easy to find someone who appears to be working harder than you and the initial impulse is to try to match their apparent commitment by spending more time buried in a book or tucked away in the library.

I’ve worked hard over the past five years or so developing the work habits and the productivity systems to allow myself to complete a large amount of high quality work in a shorter amount of time. I don’t have to spend as much time in the library as some of my classmates and that’s okay. It’s okay to spend a lot of time in the library, as long as that time is truly needed. The problem I have with the graudate student mentality is the idea that the more harm you cause yourself by foregoing sleep and working long hours the more dedicated you are as a student. That’s stupid. Not sleeping is stupid. Graduate school requires your brain to be working at top capacity and that is never possible if you’re operating at a severe sleep deficit.

Are you taking time to take care of yourself? Those periods of renewal that I talked about at the beginning of this post are vital if you want to be at the top of your game. It can be easy to use something very visible (like sitting in the library) as a representation of how hard you’re working. That’s an overly simplistic metric of productivity. Instead, resist the urge to keep up with the proverbial Joneses and let output be your measure of productivity. That’s what truly matters, anyway. If you can create the output that you need to in a fraction of the time it takes someone else, be happy, humble, and willing to use that leftover time to take care of yourself. Self-care is the secret to keeping that high level of productivity functioning.

Do things that scare you

Even going to graduate school in the first place was an example of doing something that scared me. I was moving across the country and away from everything I knew as a native Michigander — a community that loves hockey, a career, my friends, and family — to roll the dice on something completely new. So far, that has been one of the best decisions of my life. Once in California, I didn’t shut down my life coaching business. In fact, I expanded it. Trying to run a business while being a full-time student is scary but worth it. When the opportunity to organize a TEDx conference presented itself, I applied and was selected to fill the position. It has been an incredibly stressful, monumental, and scary project. But it has been worth it. I’ve been filling my time for the past four months identifying projects and activities that scare me and doing my best to do them. It’s redundant advice, I know, but searching my horizon for fear and barreling toward it has been one of the best things I’ve done.

Is there something you’ve thought about doing that scares you? What is it about this thing that you find so scary? Is there any way you can lean in to this project and get a taste of how scary it really is? Before I took on the TEDx organizer position I volunteered for the conference that we put on in September. It gave me a taste of what it takes to organize something like this and gave me a taste of the fear before jumping in feet first.

Use your energy/time wisely

This is similar to my first point, but I think it deserves its own section. I like doing things from beginning to completion, no matter what. I quickly realized this is stupid. Studying for tests is a specific activity aimed at learning what I don’t already know. Reviewing information I already understand is an utter waste of time. My old way of doing things was to always start from the beginning of the content and work my way methodically through it. I finally learned to attack my studying in a more intelligent way by focusing on the information I didn’t know and ignoring what I already understood. This cut my studying time down significantly. Maybe I’m late to the party by doing this but it seems like lots of my classmates took the study-it-all-regardless-of-what-I-know approach.

The other side of this equation is making really tough decisions about how I’m willing to spend my time. If the difference between getting an A or a B is an additional 5 hours of studying, I’m probably not willing to make that investment. It’s not because I don’t value good grades or am afraid of hard work, I just know that there are better ways I can spend those 5 hours. I can write an article for this website, I could spend some time working with a life coaching client, or, believe it or not, I could get some more sleep. It’s a sign of maturity to logically assess where you’re spending your time and refusing to let your circumstances dictate your action, instead of the other way around.

How is your time arranged? Do you control how you use your time? Obviously, there are plenty of demands and responsibilities that require us to invest our time into activities that are beyond our scope of control. That’s fine, but what about activities that are under your control? Are you happy with how you spend your discretionary time? Can you remove some activities that aren’t providing any value in your life in exchange for something that does? I don’t have a TV in my apartment at school because I know it would be another drain on my already precious discretionary time. There are things I value more than television that I would rather spend my time on. There are things I value more than a 4.0 — like growing my business, exploring my own research interests, and taking care of myself physically and mentally.

I'm no expert...

I don’t want this article to appear as if I’ve mastered graduate school after my first semester. I certainly haven’t. There are still many aspects of being a grad student that I haven’t mastered. For example, I haven’t taken care of myself nearly as well as I should be. My workout routine has been sporadic at best and after my meditation retreat in September I’ve only meditated a handful of times. It’s hard to balance everything I value with everything else that is demanded from classmates, teachers, and others just as I'm sure you face a huge array of forces that pull you in multiple different directions.