Returning at summer’s end from my computerless, Internet-less, cell phone-less, television-less vacation on beautiful Orcas Island, I suddenly realized my workspace was dysfunctional (see “What’s Wrong with My Desk?”).

Now I’ve fixed the problems, and today’s post, as promised, shares the solutions.

First, here’s the “before” photo, of one of the stupidest desk setups you’ll ever see:

There were two main problems:

1. Computer dominating desk
Positioning a computer smack in the middle of a desk is like installing a television there—except it’s worse, because with a TV at least I know I’m wasting time, whereas a computer creates the illusion of worthwhile activity, even while sucking time and attention away (see solution below).

2. Telephone and computer at same station
Having the telephone and computer at the same station assumes constantly sitting at the computer throughout the day. This is a dreadful violation of several of Clark’s Rules, something that I, being Clark, was mortified to discover (see solution below).

Those seventeen analog days revealed with stark clarity how my own work environment reflected a key theme here at Soul Shelter: the encroachment of technology upon our work and personal lives. I resolved to fundamentally redesign my work area. Here’s how I revamped it:

1. Separated computing from more important work
It’s taken an embarrassment of years to figure this out, but eliminating the computer from its central desktop position, where it can sap creativity, drain attention, and constantly interrupt was the single most important step. Now it sits on its own dedicated (small) desk, and using it requires getting up, changing seats, and turning it on (try as I might, I still spend too much time doing e-mail, checking Web sites, and responding to other trivia that lives only within the PC).

What a relief to make room for more important work: thinking, planning, writing, and editing! Here’s the “after” photo:

Now, all in-progress projects and reference works are in easy reach, and there’s plenty of room to spread out. Note, too, that repositioning the desk by a window affords a view of some backyard green. Nice.

2. Installed a dedicated, standalone, height-adjustable computer station
To deal simultaneously with the computer separation issue and my ongoing ergonomic challenges, I bought an ActiveWerks height adjustable electric table. The motor-driven legs adjust the tabletop height from 24 to 48 inches, providing two benefits. First, you can set your work surface at the precisely correct ergonomic height for seated computing. Second, you can set the table high so that you can stand while computing. Standing can help keep computing sessions shorter, and provide the postural and motion variety crucial to maintaining health (part of this variety is achieved by separating the computer from the main desk, so I have to get up and move around a bit when switching between computing and non-computing tasks).

Here’s what it looks like in a high position:

Now, readers, I know most of you, unlike me, can successfully control your Internet use and PC-fiddling, and therefore avoid my tortured love/hate relationship with computers. You may wonder, “Why in the world does Clark keep paper in binders all over his desk? Geez, I can make twelve hundred folders on my hard drive and call up documents with a few mouse clicks.”

You have a good point, and more power to you if you can work like that.

But there’s a reason more people are marveling at how their productivity soars when they work “off the grid” at the library or at a Starbucks. My intention is simple: to take myself “off the grid,” as much as possible, in my usual workspace.

Finally, a word about ergonomics.

If you start feeling even the slightest twinges of pain or discomfort from computer use, I urge you to act immediately. Get your workspace assessed by a qualified ergonomic consultant. Eliminate most of your typing by using the incredible NaturallySpeaking voice input program. Improve your work posture with a Nada Chair or a properly-designed work chair. Get a Wacom tablet or at least another mouse, and start sharing pointing and clicking tasks equally between your two hands. Make sure your chair, desk, and monitor are positioned at the correct height (many people unknowingly strain themselves simply by not having things set at the correct level). And if computers and the Internet are starting to strain your spirit, consider making some fundamental changes in your relationship with technology.

Well, there you have it—one way to fix a dysfunctional workspace (or more accurately, how I took a few steps toward fixing my dysfunctional workspace).

And on this, the first working day in my newly revamped space, I can testify to a soul-satisfying difference.

You may also enjoy:

“The Office Worker’s Guide to Staying Swamped”

“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer”

“How to Be Late for Dinner”

“Fixing a Broken Work Model“

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” – Henry David Thoreau

Here in the Pacific Northwest the tree-leaves that haven’t yet fallen are burning bright with reds and yellows. Over the last several weeks twilight has come on noticeably earlier, and with our clocks now turned back an hour, we find ourselves in full tilt toward the year’s shortest days and longest nights.

As autumn alters the structure of my weeks ahead, time is much on my mind. So I thought I’d offer a few simple if occasionally offbeat ideas for “stretching” time — not, mind you, in the quantitative sense of maximizing productivity, but in the qualitative sense of remembering and appreciating how rich and deep with life every fleeting hour can be if one seeks one’s fulfillment in each.

1. Log-Off, Disconnect, Unplug

In his book The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts makes an important point about the nature of time:

‘Duration’ is deep time, time experienced without the awareness of time passing. Until quite recently, people on the planet lived mainly in terms of duration time. Time not artificially broken, but shaped around natural rhythmic cycles, time bound to the integrated functioning of the senses, the perceptions. We have destroyed that duration… We have fractured the flow of time…into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price.

Given the way our ultra-connected, online existences splinter time into frantic parcels, one’s first and most reliable method of stretching time these days is to switch off one’s devices in favor of analog reality, to become electronically inaccessible, to deliberately remove oneself from the pixellated up-to-the-minute what’s-new-what’s-now? hubbub, and step back into the true Now of the natural world.

In other words, whenever possible choose solitary introspection over information acquisition, or face-to-face interaction over hyper-connectivity.

And once offline, consider each of the following.

2. Travel, or Just Go Someplace New to You

We’ve all experienced a certain strange sensation while walking up a path and back in a place we’d never been before: Always, on that first outbound walk the path seems much longer than it does on the return.

A similar thing happens, on a larger scale, when one travels — especially when one travels abroad. While plunged amid a different culture, and perhaps surrounded by an alien language, each week can seem a month, each month a year, and each year a lifetime in its own right.

In traveling, or just going someplace new, one puts oneself into the realm of the unexpected, where one’s senses and imagination are stimulated to a degree that simply doesn’t occur in everyday life. This has a profound time-stretching effect. In the thick of business as usual, on the other hand, one’s response to the world is largely habitual, and through the lens of habit time seems only to grow more scarce.

Try it. Go away and think nothing of a homecoming. Go as one likes to go by the sea in the night, farther and farther out under the many silent stars. Try it. –Rainer Maria Rilke

3. Undertake a New Project Whose End Is Nowhere in Sight

Write a novel (no outlines allowed). Research your genealogy. Raise a child. Volunteer at your community center or library or local tree-planting organization.

This point relates to my previous one, for the activities I just mentioned call for a new, often imaginative disposition. Each is an undertaking bound to break up routines of thought and behavior, and thus to take one out of one’s own customary sense of time.

4. Read Books About Other People’s Lives (Fiction and Non)

A wise and inspiring teacher (who happens to be my wife) puts it this way for her students:

We read to live a thousand lives with the one we’re given.

What could I possibly amend?

5. People-Watch

This is one of my favorite activities. I park myself at a busy spot (in my car or on a bench) and simply observe the various characters strolling or hurrying past, getting coffee, exercising their dogs, chasing after toddlers, waiting for the bus, etc.

The time-stretching benefits of people-watching are much like reading. Again, it’s all about exploring one’s own imaginative capacities.

I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms. I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die. — Hermann Hesse*

6. Meditate

This one’s probably obvious. But many people are unsure about what meditation really is. Think of it, if you like, as sitting and doing nothing — but remember that it’s got to be unadulterated inactivity accompanied by presence of mind, which is a very different state from the vacant passivity arrived at while, say, watching TV. Meditation, as I recommend it, means centering one’s focus upon one’s own pulse and breath, thinking about nothing else in particular. It means removing oneself from all stimuli save the flow of time.

It is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. – Charles Lamb

My previous two suggestions, reading and people-watching, could be understood as more active forms of meditation — but how often these days does one consciously free oneself to do nothing at all, to exist for a while fully separate (and still awake) from all pressing matters and all noise? To do so is to return to a core, and to bask in what Birkerts calls “deep time.”

I suspect that this kind of sitting meditation is today, more than ever, confused with — and avoided as — boredom. But really, boredom is the opposite of meditation, for unlike meditation, boredom does nothing to renew and enliven the soul’s rich sense of time and time’s elasticity.

Here’s a final word for today on the subject of boredom, time, and time-stretching, written some eighty years ago by the great German novelist Thomas Mann:

What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony — uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When every day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. …We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time — and thereby renew our sense of life itself. **

*Hesse translation by James Wright

**Mann translation by John E. Woods

You might also enjoy:

“Let Us Begin”

“The Heroic Journey”

“Why ‘Time Management’ is Nonsense“

“The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.”–James Baldwin

An essential regard for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness lies at the root of the ongoing discussion here on Soul Shelter. Our search for — and our readers’ search for — ways to “balance fortune and fulfillment” is really a continuing inquiry into those ideal humanist values that seeded the American founders’ dream in Philadelphia some 230 years ago.

Now, in a mere eight days, we contemporary Americans will cast our ballots in the most suspenseful and consequential election in generations. It is, as I think we all recognize, a decisive historical moment. As such, it requires each of us to fulfill our duty as reasonable, informed, and free U.S. citizens, and weigh the merits and demerits of both presidential candidates in a manner beyond whatever our political reflex may be, beyond party lines — and beyond the influence of partisan case-making (in this instance, too, it is every bit as important to weigh the merits and demerits of the vice-presidential candidates). I believe if we do this, the better leader is sure to win, and despite the crises confronting us, our country is sure to benefit from his presence in the White House.

Unlearned views … are perhaps the more confident in proportion as they are less enlightened.

So cautioned Thomas Jefferson back in 1807. Heeding his warning, I’ve aimed to be a well-informed voter and not merely a smugly confident one. I cannot let Election Day pass without sharing several good resources I’m consulting in an effort to mark my ballot with the most reasoned and responsible vote for my country.

As prologue, here’s a quick summary of how I will employ the following resources to make my decision. My vote will favor the presidential ticket that has: a) the smartest, most rational and humane arguments; b) a predominance of facts to support its views and positions; c) the most apparent reluctance to “trim” facts or manipulate my opinion with purely emotional appeals. A ticket meeting these criteria is bound to provide the soundest leadership.

1. Tips for Discerning the Smartest Political Argument

Over at On Simplicity a few weeks back, blogger Sara provided a solid methodology for cutting through sound bytes to examine a political position logically and effectively. It’s a suitably simple approach, and one all too easily lost amid political chatter. A few of Sara’s best points:

• Are there any holes in the logic here?
• What’s the other side of the story?
• Are there any facts that support this idea? Are those facts being ignored? Misrepresented? Or are they incorporated usefully?
• Is this argument based on fact and philosophy or emotion?
• What does the opposition have to say?

In the final days before the election, I would amend Sara’s superb points with just the following slightly more explicit ones:

• Am I getting the whole story or quote, or just a snippet? Where can I find the whole story?
• What is this ad/assertion/media story encouraging most: fear or reason?

2. FactCheck.org

“Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams in 1770. Adams was a passionate apostle for a government of laws not men — a political conviction that suffuses the Declaration of Independence. “Whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion,” Adams said, “they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

The impressive website FactCheck.org operates on that same principle. I explore the site regularly. Its lively but stubbornly rational analyses of the many “facts” and figures thrown around in political debate (tax brackets, budget numbers, senatorial voting records) always strike me as weirdly, well … beautiful. Yep, real non-partisan analysis can be a lovely thing, for it can prove that despite the flinch-votes of some Americans (be it a flinch of fear, faith, or party affiliation), and despite the tacit political endorsements in much media jabber, a reasoned American respect for fact and history survives. By its own description, FactCheck.org

aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

3. George Orwell’s “Politics & the English Language”

I last read Orwell’s marvelous essay in those shaky, violent, bombastic days surrounding September 11, 2001. In the face of the endless swirl of political discussion surrounding us in the lead-up to the election, I’m revisiting it. With a scalpel’s precision, the essay cuts away the manipulative verbiage of political-speak, and decodes its real meaning — or lack thereof.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. …

If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. …

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called “Pacification.” Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called “Transfer of Population” or “Rectification of Frontiers.” People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called “Elimination of Unreliable Elements.”

4. A Definition of Patriotism

Whether you’re leaning toward or away from a vote for Barack Obama, his non-politicized but stirring speech on the subject of American patriotism, delivered in Independence, Missouri back in June, deserves the attention of all Americans. Read it here.

To conclude, I’ll balance today’s emphasis on fact and reason with a second resonant quote from the great writer James Baldwin, from his essay “The Discovery of What it Means to be an American“:

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

You might also enjoy:

“Looking Deeply, Proceeding On”

“The Happiness Issue”

“The State of American Happiness”

“What We Worship“

(This is an installment of CommonSensical, a periodic feature in which we offer timeless words from thinkers and artists new and old on the subject of pursuing fulfillment and protecting the soul.)

Envisioning and designing the University of Virginia in his later years, Thomas Jefferson imagined a haven of higher learning where students could come and go at will, seeking whatever knowledge they pleased and laboring under no expectation to earn a degree. In fact, degrees would not even be offered. It was to be a Utopian bastion of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Back in my days of institutional higher learning I was a student in the Jeffersonian mode (though I didn’t even know it). I hungered for knowledge but never really cared about obtaining a degree. Not a few of my elder relations and teachers chafed at this academic lassitude of mine, and amid our culture’s attitudes about university attendance I felt myself being branded an underachiever and pushed out of the system. Only the career-minded need apply. I never did acquire the coveted, gold-embossed, frameable, cardstock certificate.

Ultimately, despite the social pressure to either a) proceed lock-step along the academic path or b) admit myself a wash-up in the gutters of higher learning, my reasons for resigning my university career and not seeking a degree were my own. Maybe I was a young kook, but I came to believe that knowledge and culture could be found all around me at relatively little or no monetary cost (primarily through libraries, conversation, and travel), whereas a full and formal college education was sure to set me on a lifelong path of debt. I figured my self-expansion and edification could happen more economically and more effectively on my own terms and by my own methods of inquiry. I sought the most liberal of liberal arts education.

Maybe I’m still a kook, because now, years later, my convictions about the ready availability of knowledge remain pretty much unchanged. Devoid of a degree as I am, I have never stopped reading, inquiring, and exploring the world of ideas and facts. All this is not to deny, of course, that formal education is good in its way (and naturally some specialties — law and medicine most notably — absolutely require old-fashioned collegiate training). But I still believe deeply in the worth and merit of impractical learning — that is, learning not yoked with any particular worldly ambition — and I wish that this kind of “aimless” learning could find better cultural legitimacy.

In 1892 the thirty-four-year-old poet and classical scholar, A.E. Housman (1859-1936), gave a lively, stylish lecture on the subject of why human beings seek knowledge. It’s the best defense of “aimless” learning I’ve ever read. Here follows an inexcusably brief abridgment.

Housman kicks off with a retort to a contemporary writer who “define[s] the aim of learning to be utility,” and thus science to be the single most desirable subject of learning. Ah, but can any one type of knowledge really hold the claim of being better, or more beneficial, than another?

The popular view…is that the aim of acquiring knowledge is to equip one’s self for the business of life; that accordingly the knowledge most to be sought after is the knowledge which equips one best; and that this knowledge is Science.

… In short, the fact is, that what man will seek to acquaint himself with in order to prepare him for securing the necessaries of life is not Science, but the indispensable minimum of Science.

… In addition to the initial studies of reading, writing and arithmetic, [a person] needs to acquaint himself…with the indispensable minimum of those sciences which concern the trade or the art he earns his bread by: the dyer with chemistry, the carpenter with geometry, the navigator with astronomy. But there he can stop.

… A life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily. …Our true occupation is to manufacture from the raw material of life the fabric of happiness.

… The acquisition of knowledge needs no…justification: its true sanction is a much simpler affair, and inherent in itself. People are too prone to torment themselves with devising far-fetched reasons: they cannot be content with the simple truth asserted by Aristotle: `all men possess by nature a craving for knowledge.’ … This is no rare endowment scattered sparingly from heaven that falls on a few heads and passes others by: curiosity, the desire to know things as they are, is a craving no less native to the being of man, no less universal in diffusion through mankind, than the craving for food and drink. …The desire of knowledge does not need, nor could it possibly possess, any higher or more authentic sanction that the happiness which attends its gratification.

But now Housman pauses to acknowledge that “we see, every day of our lives, plenty of people who exhibit no pleasure in learning and experience no desire to know.” So is the human thirst for knowledge really as involuntary, and crucial to one’s survival, as one’s bodily thirst? Well, yes! The man who ignores his natural thirst for knowledge and chooses to wallow in ignorance may still appear to be a living, thriving human being, but…

…though the man does not die altogether, part of him dies, part of him starves to death: as Plato says, he never attains completeness and health, but walks lame to the end of his life and returns imperfect and good for nothing to the world below.

But the desire of knowledge, stifle it though you may, is none the less originally born with every man; and nature does not implant desires for nothing, nor endow us with faculties in vain.

… The faculty of learning is ours that we may find in its exercise that delight which arises from the unimpeded activity of any energy in the groove nature meant it to run in. Let a man acquire knowledge not for this or that external and incidental good which may chance to result from it, but for itself; not because it is useful or ornamental, but because it is knowledge, and therefore good for man to acquire.

… For knowledge resembles virtue in this, and differs in this from other possessions, that it is not merely a means of procuring good, but is good in itself simply: it is not a coin which we pay down to purchase happiness, but it has happiness indissolubly bound up with it. …The pursuit of knowledge, like the pursuit of righteousness, is part of man’s duty to himself; and remember the Scripture where it is written `He that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul’.

In fact, argues Housman, knowledge of some type will come to us all whether we like it or not — through the maturing process of passing years, through tragedy, through regret. This is the nature of life (”live and learn”). So is it not natural, then, to seek knowledge outright, and empower ourselves against avoidable regrets and mistakes?

It is and it must in the long run be better for a man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them; just as there is less fear of stumbling or of striking against corners in the daylight than in the dark.

… The pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures; the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the wear of time. And as a prudent man puts money by to serve as a provision for the material wants of his old age, so too he needs to lay up against the end of his days provision for the intellect. As the year go by, comparative values are found to alter: Time, says Sophocles, takes many things which once were pleasures and brings them nearer to pain. In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves, and desire shall fail, it will be a matter of yet more concern than now, whether one can say `my mind to me a kingdom is’; and whether the windows of the soul look out upon a broad and delightful landscape, or face nothing but a brick wall.

Well then, once we have recognised that knowledge in itself is good for man, we shall need to invent no pretexts for studying this subject or that; we shall import no extraneous considerations of use or ornament to justify us in learning one thing rather than another. If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason why it most attracts him is that it is best for him.

(Here I’m reminded of a past discussion on this blog, in which Soul Shelter Director of Fortune Clark introduced (COOT^TM), Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory. Tim was confronting a reader’s question: ‘Is education always a good investment?’ His response? “No. But if you have serious thoughts about going back to school, that’s a powerful sign that it’s a very good idea for you.”)

…Other desires perish in their gratification, but the desire of knowledge never: the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. Other desires become the occasion of pain through dearth of the material to gratify them, but not the desire of knowledge: the sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read we shall never come to the end of our story-book.…

(Read Housman’s lecture in full, here.)

You might also enjoy:

“The Value of Travel — One Household’s Mild Manifesto”

“In Praise of Salaried Employment”

“Soul School”

Ever wonder why some people complete in hours tasks that others drag out over days? Or why busy people seem to volunteer most, yet accomplish far more than their leisure-blessed counterparts?

Many believe the answer lies in “time management.”

What nonsense!

I’ve tried to manage time. Once I decided to put the fourth of July into May. Didn’t work. Then I struggled to delay my 40th birthday for a few months. It steamrolled toward me anyway, moving at the precise rate of 24 hours per day.

Believers in time management may benefit by reading Getting Things Done, the David Allen bestseller which I’ve found useful, mainly for two pieces of advice taken to heart:

1. Buy and use only plain manila tab folders
2. Buy and use a label maker to create professional labels for all files and notebooks

The rest of Allen’s advice is no doubt helpful for busy, busy people overwhelmed with long and short-term directives, deliverables, family and civic responsibilities, and general information. A terrific overview of the GTD approach is available at the 43 Folders blog.

But for those who’ve achieved some success in being underwhelmed by administrivia, Getting Things Done seems too long by, well, about 257 of its 267 pages.

I prefer a simpler, “higher altitude” approach advocated by my London-based buddy Mark Fritz, an aspiring achievement guru who recently came out with his second book, The Truth About Getting Things Done.

The Truth’s key point is that “time management” is an illusion. Everyone gets the same amount of time, and no one can “manage” it.

Instead of trying to manage time, says Mark, manage your focus.

“I’ve coached a number of people over the past few years,” Mark writes, “and one of the key problems they face is confusing activity with accomplishment. With today’s business complexity and the flood of information deluging us hour-to-hour, many workers fall into an “activity trap.” They wind up reacting to everything that hits them all day long. They feel constantly busy and active, yet at the end of their day wonder what they’ve accomplished.”

So how to stop confusing activity with accomplishment?

“It’s all about changing from time management to focus management,” says Mark. “Time management is about fitting the most activities into the smallest amount of time. Focus management is about accomplishing your most important goals.”

For one Fortune 100 manager, changing from time management to focus management had a dramatic impact on what he and his team accomplished each week, says Mark. Two new habits made the difference:

1. Weekly Focus Review
This manager invested 30 to 60 minutes each Friday afternoon to list and review the key things he and his team needed to accomplish in the week ahead and weeks ahead. Then, he reviewed both his planned actions and actions he thought he needed to take (the ones he was thinking about but hadn’t yet written down), and made choices on what to do and what not to do.

Benefits of the Weekly Review: First, he clarified his Focus (important outcomes) and the key actions that would deliver it. Second, he went into his weekend with less stress, because he knew what needed to be done in the coming week.

2. Daily Focus Reminder
The manager started each day by reviewing his Focus: the key outcomes and actions he defined during the previous Friday afternoon Weekly Focus Review. He knew priorities often change, and that refining and keeping clarity on his Focus was key.

Benefits of the Daily Focus Reminder: First, the manager reminded himself of his Focus before the pressures of the day started. A clear Focus helped him make wise “yes/no” choices on actions throughout day. Second, he had a chance to refine his Focus based on new priorities that were beyond his control.

The Weekly Focus Review and the Daily Focus Reminder provided clarity that led the manager to better choices on how to use his time: What to do and what not to do. It also helped him guide his team toward better choices.

The way to stop confusing activity with accomplishment, says Mark, is focus management, not time management.

So, if like me, you sometimes find yourself struggling to accomplish goals, give the Mark Fritz approach a try. And stop trying to make Christmas come in July.

You may also enjoy:

“Daunting Task? Learn to Whip It”

“Jack London on Upward Mobility”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“

(The following is a post from Sara, author of the always thoughtful blog, On Simplicity. We quite like Sara’s practical and life-affirming approach to the complexities of hyper-material modern existence, and we’re sure our loyal readers will too.)

A while back at my blog, I asked my readers for their definitions of simplicity. Many included the importance of having less, but enjoying more. When it comes to actually giving stuff up, though, it can be easier said than done. In that spirit, here are five ways you can make it easy to enjoy a life with less stuff.

1. Use what you do have.

Go through your music collection and make a playlist of forgotten favorites. (I love doing this!) Pull a favorite book off the shelf and give it another read. Pull a passed-down antique out of the closet and give it a place of honor. Using and enjoying what you do have gives you a feeling of abundance that’s incredibly uplifting.

2. Keep a list of free and fun things to do.

You could take a photography walk, teach the dog a new trick, snuggle with a loved one, incite a family wrestling match, write bad rhyming poetry, take a nap, or dance to the radio. The more items you can dream up, the more fun you have at your fingertips.

3. Start seeing empty spaces as packed with freedom.

Celebrate every empty shelf, bare wall, and exposed square foot of flooring as the ultimate victory. If freedom equals happiness (or at least a big component of it), then not having something just brings you closer to your personal nirvana.

4. Engage all five senses.

Don’t just put on your shirt in the morning. Take a second to feel the weave, to take in the color, to smell the freshness (it is clean, isn’t it?). Okay, you don’t have to taste it, but you’re starting to get the idea. Same with your food. Don’t just eat it; savor the smells and sights of a delicious meal. By packing the mundane with meaning, we create a luxurious lifestyle out of nothing at all.

5. Make a list of the things you get in return when give things up.

My list includes freedom, peacefulness, and room to think. Keep the list at the bottom of sock drawer and reference as needed. It’s a powerful reminder of exactly why I’m not filling my drawers with endless new things.

You might also enjoy:

“Simplify, Simplify”

“On Moderation”

“What We Really Need to be Happy“

“A thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to.” — Tao Te Ching (XLII; 96)

Earlier this year, the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland was closed for updates which included deepening the fiberglass waterways to accommodate today’s obese passengers. The Small World boats had scraped to a standstill a bit too often of late, slowing lines and resulting in complaints.

There’s no denying it: Americans are getting girthier.

Generally these days, we Yanks aren’t too good at moderation. While certain episodes in our national history (frontier settlement, The Great Depression, and the lean times of rationing during WWII) remind us that ours is a heritage of toughness and sacrifice, the modus operandi in our contemporary age of prosperity entails eating, shopping, driving, working, and being entertained — all in excess.

This puts us in stark cultural contrast to other thriving western nations. Take France, whose people work less, vacation more, and enjoy higher rates of personal fitness. Most coffee drinkers in France, heirs to the world’s finest café culture, find the demitasse espresso sufficient for their morning pick-me-up. In the States, on the other hand, we demand triple-shot double-grande caramel macchiatos. And where the French café-goer takes his coffee in cup and saucer because he values sitting as much as sipping, the American gets his grande on the go, the enormous paper cup a product of his perpetual motion (and a wasteful one at that).

We lack moderation not only in our styles of ingestion and consumption, but in our tireless ambition. Success is the holiest deity of our national cult — and our fixation upon success is, of course, good and bad.

I am certainly not without ambitions. Abundant opportunity and good ol’ fashioned bootstrapping self-reliance appeal to me as much as to the next guy. In fact, I’ve spent the last eight years, virtually without pause, in thrall to my own dreams and aspirations. I regret none of that time, and have achieved my own modicum of success — and an even greater deal of fulfillment. Hard work and dogged perseverance certainly have their place. (I’m enjoying Tim’s new Entrepreneurship thread as much as our readers are).

But recently, while chatting across the back fence with a neighbor about our impending parenthood, my wife and I were the beneficiaries of some lovely (and unconventional) advice: “Lower your expectations.”

With this wise directive our neighbor, a fulltime parent of two youngsters, was encouraging us to be realistic about our own goals once our baby arrived — in other words, to practice moderation in our personal ambitions. Lower expectations, our neighbor advised, would help us “stay sane,” and would keep us in the moment.

The advice, so wonderfully unique, has stayed with me. I’ve long advocated moderation where the dining table, the wallet, the automobile, or the church was concerned. But as for practicing moderation in my vocation, I could do better. I could strive to better balance work and life. I could take care to see that my passion doesn’t become compulsion. And what better time to seek such moderation than during the first months of my first-born’s life, when there’s so much happening that I don’t want to miss?

So I’m working on it. I’m reminding myself, daily, of the value (counterintuitive as it may be) in sometimes lowering my expectations, in not demanding so awfully much of myself.

Lao Tzu, the sage author of the Tao Te Ching, puts it this way:

Too much store
Is sure to end in immense loss.
Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know when to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.” (XLIV; 108)

I’m hardly alone in my wish for moderation. This subject seems to be in the air these days. In “Leaving Work to Watch the Sunset,” a recent segment on NPR’s This I Believe, journalist Laurie Granieri gives an eloquent testimonial about her search for moderation in her professional life. It’s well worth a listen.

And over at the Art of Manliness blog, you’ll find another fine piece on “The Virtuous Life of Moderation.”

Here’s to heeding Lao Tzu and “knowing contentment…”

You may also enjoy:

“On Slowness”

“Happiness is Turning Off The Computer”

“Let Us Begin“

On a mild evening recently, I stood in the cooling air holding my week-old child in my arms, and watched his tiny face relax to the touch of the breeze. For both of us, the moment was strangely powerful. I was amazed and privileged to witness this little person’s first twilight sensation — and to have helped him experience such a thing. What’s more, while observing him, and feeling the breeze on my face, I sensed an innocent wonder reawakening within me.

It might as well have been the first time I’d felt such a breeze. I was experiencing the world anew, because my child was. In that moment, he’d helped me bridge the distance between my blasé adult self and a much younger, less complicated version of me.

We all have an inner child whose freshness and awe can continue to renew and enliven us even as our bodies age. If it doesn’t, perhaps we’ve become numb to the best things in life.

Put another way, our inner child helps us plant our feet firmly in the mysterious abundance of each single day — at least we should hope it does, otherwise we may be missing out on something essential.

In his unaffected rural style, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote on this very subject more than two-hundred years ago:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

As I observe my infant son in these first wondrous weeks of his existence (also my first euphoric days of parenthood), each hour brings potent reminders of Wordsworth’s poetic truth. The Child is father of the Man.

How many of us can truly say that the sight of a rainbow awakens for us, like Wordsworth, the same indescribable elation it awoke in us as children? Though the vision itself remains the same, we see it with different eyes. Duller eyes, maybe.

For most grown-ups, this is a fact of life. But remember the magical glow of primary colors back in your youth? The joy of warm beach sand or prickly lawn grass under your toes? The breathtaking effect of fresh snow? Do the potent immediacy of these sensory marvels become so lost upon us that they have only the hollow sound of cliche when called to mind?

Why should our senses dim as we grow older? Why should we lose our childhood reflexes of wonder and awe?

Well … it simply happens, even for those who strive to stay alert, observant, open-hearted. It’s a fundamental problem in life. It comes with the territory of assuming adult responsibilities — and especially with leading high-paced and heavily scheduled modern existences. We become accustomed — and occasionally even indifferent — to the gifts each day brings.

Aging and amassing experience by the year, we grown-ups tend to believe ourselves well-practiced in living. While in truth our every moment is new, we feel we pretty much know what’s coming, and rarely is it something we haven’t seen before. This morning is a morning like most others. This breeze is a breeze, no big deal. In many ways, this nonchalance is demanded of us. We’re led to believe it’s what qualifies adulthood. We’re expected to know what to expect.

But my tiny newborn, still unpracticed in life, exemplifies the value of experiencing the world afresh, the value of being a beginner. And while it’s almost second-nature for grown-ups to regard inexperience as a detriment, to think of being a beginner as a condition to overcome quickly, my boy reminds me, his awe-inspired father, that every day is indeed something unprecedented — and therefore, whether I choose to admit it or not, I am always a beginner.

Another poet I admire, T.S. Eliot, put it another way in his “Four Quartets”:

There is, it seems to us,
at best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking valuation
Of all we have been…

The child is father of the man. In every moment, the pattern is new. My actual son and my inner child, both, bring me fully into the richly palpable world, reawakening me in the most mysterious but unmistakable way.

Suddenly I find myself absorbed more deeply in the unprecedented present, and if I have the innocence to be a little awe-struck, it’s a good thing. It turns out I don’t mind being a beginner at all.

You might also enjoy:

“The Risk of Happiness”

“A Moment of Fulfillment”

“Art Awakens Us“

These days, slowness bears a number of negative connotations. Our modern world’s industrialism, globalization, and high-tech, high-speed information systems have made the word “slow” virtually interchangeable with “unproductive,” “costly,” “out-of-date,” “useless,” “lazy,” “stupid,” “ineffectual,” or just plain “broken.”

But in recent years, the go-go-go modern lifestyle of fast food, fast connections, fast talk, fast cars, and fast money has inspired a swing of the cultural pendulum back toward the cultivation of more mindful habits in people’s personal lives. It seems we’re beginning to realize the costs of so much fastness — the damage it can do to our bodies, our minds, our spirits.

Wait a minute, we’re saying to ourselves. We’re human beings. Our work is important and so is our time, certainly, but what is that time really worth if we spend it at a blurring pace in hopes of packing every minute with profit or accomplishment? Is that any way to live? — letting time drain away so that you hardly notice it? No, we all require balance, rest, and peace of mind if we’re going to continue to be healthy, happy, and yes, productive citizens.

So we find certain cultural initiatives such as the Slow Food Movement emerging to new prominence. We see people stepping back to say, “The Internet is terrific and all, but we need to learn to unplug and take walk in the park, or sit down to talk face-to-face with a friend!”

Slowness, it turns out, is not so much a detriment as it is a fundamental aspect of leading a meaningful human life. Doesn’t the age-old impulse toward religion show us what an essential human impulse slowness is? We modern mortals, just like the generations before us, need to be re-set on a regular basis, reconditioned to the natural, non-mechanical pace of things. By practicing meditation or attending Mass or praying in the mosque or temple we gain perspective, we slow down, we breathe and return to the moment at hand. And it’s not just religion that does the trick. We walk in the woods, we ponder a work of art, we explore history, we write a poem or read one.

Speaking of poetry, here’s one on the subject of slowness which I particuarly like. Whenever I read “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke, I can practically feel the coils of my brain unwinding, the hammering of the clock growing fainter. Slowness sets in and everything around me seems to get a little bit clearer.

Do yourself a favor and read the following stanzas slowly. This isn’t the morning paper. Give each line your thought, rather than expecting the line’s thought to be given to you. If you’re able to, read the lines aloud. Each one deserves a breath — or two — of its own.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
(Theodore Roethke; 1953)

Carl Honore is the author of the book, In Praise of Slowness (2004). He’s got a lot of wonderful things to say about the value of slowing down and paying more attention. The video below captures a 20-minute talk he gave at the annual TED conference back in 2005. (TED, which stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” is a fascinating event geared around “inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers.” The TED website, which features many videos of these talks, is well worth exploring.)

I thought I’d let Mr. Honore conclude my Soul Shelter post this week. Give him a listen.

In the vocation of writing, poverty is a prerequisite for greatness. At least that’s what I told myself back when I was nineteen or twenty years old. I had only recently committed myself wholeheartedly to “becoming a writer.” I harbored a zealous admiration for literature’s impoverished, ill-fated greats: John Keats, Stephen Crane, Henry David Thoreau—all were paupers, and all died young.

As I saw it, those literary greats were able to remain intensely focused on the eternal verities because they weren’t after fame or fortune—just beauty, just truth. It was their raw existences, lives close to the bone and suffused with awareness of nature’s riches, that made possible their immortal works. I eventually came to realize I’d romanticized their poverty, but even today I believe my naivete served a powerful purpose, and laid a

foundation that has helped me for a decade now.

In my twentieth year I packed a large cardboard box with belongings and headed east by train to begin my artistic life in Massachusetts, 3,000 miles from California, where I’d been born and raised. I wanted to live near Walden Pond and commune daily, in nearby Concord, with the wise ghosts of Thoreau and Emerson. The closest I could get was the city of Lowell, birthplace of the American industrial revolution—a ramshackle town cluttered with eerie decommissioned factories and mills. But from Lowell I could get to Concord by train as often as I liked.

I set up my new life in a 300 square-foot studio apartment 14 miles from Walden Pond as the crow flies. My sole furnishings were an inflatable mattress, a plastic patio chair, a small lamp, a pile of books, and a radio/cassette player. In the cardboard box, I had packed the essential kitchen wares: a can opener, a spatula, two plates, two cups, two forks, two knives, two spoons, and a frying pan. More importantly, I had packed a word processor and a ream of paper.

I was determined to begin my writerly life in the spirit of Thoreau’s proclamation in Walden: “Give me that poverty that knows true wealth.” Thoreau, living for two years in his tiny cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in the mid-19th century, had proven conclusively to the industrialized world that simplicity and “mean living” were the highest spiritual ideals, for they refined one’s sense of beauty and truth. “Simplify, simplify,” said Thoreau, and I wanted to heed his advice. The fewer my possessions and the smaller my quarters, the loftier my hopes could be—and the freer I could remain to realize them.

My rent in Lowell was $400 dollars a month. With roughly $1,500 in bank savings, I could conceivably live and write—and do nothing else—for about three months. I set to work. I spent nearly every day clicking away on my word processor, and every evening reading. Intellectually, I’d never been wealthier. It was an education unlike anything provided by my years of schooling.

Practically everything in my life had been cleared away for the sake of writing. And only years later would the true nature of this apprenticeship period become clear to me: more than learning how to be a “starving artist,” I was learning how to be grateful for what little I possessed.

The residence in Massachusetts proved successful. I returned home that autumn unafraid of poverty, able to work for five to six hours at a stretch, and in possession of a 150-page personal manifesto. I’d become a writer.

Maybe it’s needless to say that my “manifesto” never saw the light of day. At the sentence-level it was truly awful, but however far I remained from producing publishable work, I’d committed myself to my craft, and knew that if I nurtured this commitment my words would find their way, sooner or later, into print. Four years later that’s what happened, when my first short story was published in a national literary magazine.

Since that idealistic Massachusetts adventure, I’ve never lost my grasp on the importance of simplicity (though living simply remains a day-to-day challenge). Simplicity frees one to make any range of choices and pursue any range of possibilities. And such freedom is hindered by complexities like financial demands, time constraints, and the baggage of material belongings. By consciously seeking simplicity in life, one places oneself in a condition of gratitude. And gratitude, by instilling an awareness of one’s blessings, clarifies one’s vision and helps one establish goals. (Chapter 5 of our book further explores gratitude, and can be read online).

I’m lucky that I had the opportunity, back at age twenty, to romanticize things and be naive. Through the years since, those early ideals have helped me recognize real happiness. I continue striving to be grateful, and to live up to Thoreau’s wise exhortation: “Simplify, simplify!”

See also: “The Barn of Fortune?” and “How Much is Enough?”