Tag: Rituals

Shutdown Rituals

Shutdown Rituals

Posted on by jabittan
What do you do at the end of your work day? Do you just haphazardly save and close out of anything that you happen to be working on during the last 10 minutes of work? Do you glance back through your email one last time and shoot off a couple emails to make sure you got a response in before you left for the day? Do you even sign off for the day or do you just leave the office only to continue checking email and doing tidbits of work here and there for the rest of your evening?

 

One thing about work today is that it can creep into every moment of our lives. It is easy to continue checking your work email all weekend long, to continue to take calls from clients well into the evening, and to hop on for a few minutes here and there when you are off the clock to help take care of something. All of this can be extremely draining, and we can become overly consumed by our work. Living this way pushes our family out, adds a low level of stress to each moment of our day, limits our time for real leisure and disconnection from work, and as Cal Newport puts it in his book Deep Work, prevents our unconscious brain from working through those challenging issues when we are not thinking of them directly.

 

Newport’s solution? Shutdown rituals. For Newport, ending the day with a plan is incredibly important for having a life focused on meaningful things within and outside of work. Shutdown rituals are crucial for setting ourselves up to have a productive workday the following day. If you take some time to gather your thoughts, reflect on what you accomplished, how long it took, and what you wish you had been able to achieve, you will be able to better structure your work and your days. You can plan ahead for the next day to make sure you get the really important thing done and avoid getting stuck on the small unimportant details. Shutdown rituals allow you to evaluate what went well, and where improvements could be made. They also allow you to put your work down, knowing that you have a plan to address the crucial things tomorrow, when your brain is fresh.

 

Newport writes, “Shutdown rituals can become annoying, as they add an extra ten to fifteen minutes to the end of your workday (and sometimes even more), but they’re necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic idleness summarized previously.”

Embrace Your Life

Posted on by jabittan
 Yesterday I listened to Tyler Cowen’s latest episode of his podcast Conversations With Tyler in which he interviewed Karl Ove Knausgard. In typical Tyler Cowen fashion, the interview went all over the place, with in-depth questions about Knausgard’s writing, influences, and thoughts on a variety of topics. Early in the interview Cowen asked Knausgard about writing and having children and how his writing has changed with kids. Knausgard talked about the ways in which having children has taken away some of the mysticism and rituals surrounding his writing and forced him to learn to write at any time in any situation.

 

So often in our lives we have things that we like to do and want to make sure we do, and we end up building our own rituals around those things. In my own writing, I wake up much earlier than what is really necessary, make coffee, turn on just a single light, and write by myself in my quite house while I drink my coffee. When I go to the gym I have my phone and my headphones and I listen to specific music (Mid 2000’s/2010’s LA rap) and I wear certain shoes. I know people who prep for big sports events (that they are watching not that they are competing in) by purchasing certain foods, wearing certain clothes, and doing certain activities to set up the atmosphere for the game. All of these rituals create a world around us that we enjoy and are comfortable within, but these worlds are in a sense our own withdrawn fantasy worlds, and we likely cannot keep them together for ever.

 

Knausgard explains to Cowen that his writing was ritualized in this way before he had children, but that once he had kids, his writing could no longer occupy a fantasy space. He had to learn to adjust to the world and adapt his writing to fit into his new life with kids. His lesson is that writing cannot only take place in certain ritualized settings or it will never be done at all, and that adjusting out of our ritualized space is not a bad thing.

 

In a quote from the episode he says, “I think the best advice I ever got —  to accept everything that happens. So if you have many children, it’s a good thing. If you don’t have children, it’s a good thing. You have to embrace it because that’s your life. That’s where you are, and writing should be connected to that —  or painting or whatever it is.” I really enjoy this quote because it shows that we cannot judge life to be good or bad based on our rituals, our experiences, and our predetermined ideas of what makes a life good, bad, valuable, or meaningful. We must accept what happens in our life and find the best way to move forward with what we have. Life packs our suitcase for us, and we must make do with the items packed for our journey. In this spirit, Knausgard explained that writing went from something he only did in certain contexts to something he had to learn to do whenever he had a moment available. It took the magic and mysticism away from the process of writing, and it freed him to write more frequently and consistently, allowing him to actually be a more prolific writer after children than before children.