He’s Just Had Coffee

Mornings are a fragile time. One of the ways I’m trying to adapt my practice to stay more balanced is to create a more tranquil morning and even a more tranquil working environment most of the time. Version 1 is a set of practices, some in my computer, some in physical space to establish and maintain some kind of tranquility.

1. Rise early I’d drifted into rising around 8.30-9am which means that the world is busy when I wake up, there’s less time to do things that aren’t urgent in the morning and I feel slack. I’m up at 7am currently and I’m working back to 6am.

2. Meditation I’ve been doing some kind of sitting practice to start the day for a while. Now that I’m in the Formation programme, I’m expected to “say the Hours”: a reading followed by a short session of sitting meditation upon arising, at dusk and before bed — at least. I’m using June Singer’s “Gnostic Book of Hours”, which is lovely and provides an excellent dip into the books from the Nag Hammadi find.

3. No Blogs or Email Until You Get Something Done I think I got this tip from Merlin, but it’s been floating around the ’sphere — when you finish with email for the day, close the program; when you finish reading blogs, close the feed reader. Don’t open either of them again until after you’ve done something off the task list at the start of the day. This means I don’t get trapped into the cycle of responding to emails first thing. This is new for me, I started two days ago. Good so far! Oh, that task list?

4. Maintain GTD David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” has been my favourite way to manage what I’ve got to do ever since I read his book. If I can stay current and on top of the core practices in GTD, I feel balanced, in control and able to do anything. It’s magic.

5. Don’t Browse. Walk. I have a habit that when I get restless at a task I decide to “take a break”, which means I slump in my chair and start crawling the web for fun. I’ve gradually realised that this restlessness is fairly physical, so if I take the cue and just get up, make a cup of tea, go for a quick walk into the back yard, or go buy milk, and then sit down again I don’t have to get trapped into the brainsuck of four hours of websurfing where I don’t remember where the time went. Of course, sometimes I’m not paying attention and I drift into surfing — often at the kinds of websites with… umm… lots of pictures. So to create that little mindful break, I’ve installed a Greasemonkey script in Firefox called “Invisibility Cloak” that lets me ban the big time-suck sites until after a certain time (mine’s set to 7pm).

So, we’ll see. I’m hoping to work pretty hard this year on several fronts, so staying calm and organised is going to be important. Ask me in three months if it’s working.

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