Feel the fear and do it anyway. Yeah but do *what* though??

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" - Kierkegaard (a man with a lot of Big Feelings)

Honor’s been nerding out big time on ‘productivity / life planning / workflow’ books for the past month. Which means I’ve been nerding out by osmosis. And we’ve both come to the same realisation. Planning your life can actually be quite calming. Who knew?

I am not a planner by nature. To me, motivation has always been a delicate mix of anxiety, dread, and repeatedly snoozed iCal alerts.

Calming

I always thought tools like Getting Things Done and the Self Journal were for people who were just terrified of death and scrambling to leave a legacy. But after dipping a toe in this Type A world, I’ve realised that life planning can actually be a deeply gooey, existential activity. Well, for me at least.

What is life planning? In a nutshell it just means spending some time reflecting on what you want to achieve in the next few months, then structuring your days to help inch you towards those goals. 'Sounds awfully prickly, where's the goo' you ask? Step this way...

The essential anxiety

As proto-Big Feels Clubber Søren Kierkegaard said, the awful thing about being human is all that freedom of choice. Some have more freedom than others, but in general human existence is a glorious layer cake of How Things Are, What We Do About How Things Are, and Doubting Whatever It Was We Just Did About How Things Are.

(Tasty.)

This means most of us never know for sure if we are doing the right thing. Am I living a good life? Am I in the right job? Should I have kids or not?

Or as Honor put it on Instagram:

"Maybe that is just the essential anxiety? Maybe it's as simple and as terrifying as the constant, unshakeable question: am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing?

This question can go big: does life have meaning? What is my purpose? Or small: should I be writing this very thing on Instagram? Or should I finish this week's podcast episode?"

What Honor calls the “general everyday hum of anxiety”, so much of that for me is about the small stuff - the question of what I'm supposed to be doing right this minute. When I'm working, it means not being sure which task to prioritise. When I'm relaxing, it means wondering if I should really be working. And that small stuff rattles around my brain with all the urgency of the big questions - what should I be doing with my life?? - making each little decision seem like a really big deal.

Both Honor and I are self-employed, which probably amplifies things a little - many balls in the air, no one else to help determine which ones not to drop. But the few times I've held down a 9 to 5 job the essential anxiety has been the same: am I doing this right? Just with an added dash of, does my boss know I have no idea if I'm doing this right? 

In the end it's all about approval

Through this lens, all anxiety essentially boils down to that moment a little kid looks at their parents and silently asks, like this? Eventually we stop thinking our parents know how we should be living our life. So then who do we turn to for approval? 

Allow me to introduce your new life guru: Smug Past You. I'll explain how you can benefit from their wisdom, but first, why are they so great?

Smug Past You cares enough to have spent time thinking deeply about your future. To push past the inherent cheesiness of this very activity and set goals for you, in line with your interests and aspirations. Smug Past You also knows they don't have to do any of the actual work to achieve these goals (that's up to current you, sorry). Hence the smugness. But believe me, they've got your back. 

So how does Smug Past You communicate their plans for current you? In my case, Honor gave me a copy of the Self Journal, one of the many goal-setting tools / apps on the market. (Ok fine it was a copy of their free pdf which she printed out at OfficeWorks.) I suspect this was equal parts generosity and a desire to bolster her own attempts to commit to it herself. 

It's a little overwhelming at first, but the basic components are pretty simple. You think about what you're up to in the next three months, and pick one or two goals you'd like to work toward. Measurable things that, if you get there, will feel significant. Then each day you write down that big goal as a reminder, and next to that write in the things you want to get done that day.

You don't need to push yourself

What's interesting is how this process can take that big urgent question (what should I be doing with my life??) and calm it right back down to the much gentler, what should I be doing with my day?

I don't know how the makers of the Self Journal would feel about this, but we're finding that the big goals don't even really matter that much. Both Honor and I pulled some random figures out of the air when writing down our three-month ambitions (number of podcast listeners for Starving Artist, number of sign ups to this very newsletter, etc.), and within a month we've each tweaked the numbers, and abandoned some goals altogether. 

This is the thing though. I've realised goal-setting doesn't have to be about pushing yourself at all. It's about naming what's already pulling you. It's about seeing where your attention is naturally already going, and saying 'yes, that's where I want to be spending my time.' So it's fine if that shifts over time - you just name it again, by writing in a new goal.

For me, this has two clear benefits. One, I'm able to say 'no' to things that take time and energy away from whatever the big goal happens to be right now.

Two, when I'm working on things that are in line with that goal, I feel remarkably calm and focused, because I'm doing The Thing I Am Supposed To Be Doing. Maybe I would have done these things anyway, but this way there’s someone wiser than me ‘approving’ of what I’m doing, even if it's actually just Smug Past Me.

It's not fool-proof. I still find myself yearning for outside validation, snuggling back into the bony, luke-warm embrace of my newsfeed. And even when I'm right in the flow of things making great progress, none of this solves the essential uncertainty of life. But I'm enjoying Smug Past Me's gentle encouragement, and his blind faith in current me's ability to get shit done.