Sunday Mālama: Do you have a Stop Doing List?

Life is full isn't it.

Living a life is full of all sorts of stuff, and we human beings are great collectors of that stuff, carrying so many inconsequential quirks, habits, and to-do listings around with us. We collect, and we create busyness with such predictable repetition. How much of what is on our lists do we really need to attend to? How much information gluttony do we truly need to plump our security blankets of just-in-case with?

Probably way less than we are accustomed to dealing with.

However checking things off our lists feels terrific, doesn't it, even when those things we check off are minor and don't really count for much. Those little check marks make us feel good, smart, diligent, and worthy, and they color our efforts as valuable work. We sure love our rose-colored glasses.

Balance is on my mind for this, our final Sunday Mālama for January, the month we have dedicated to the value of Pono, rightness and balance. When I think of balance these days, self-inflicted busyness is what I hunt for most within my own habits: What am I patting myself on the back for finishing, when I really should have been giving my attention to something else in the first place?

When I think back on all I have learned recently, most of which has been faithfully chronicled in our Rapid Fire Learning feature each month on Joyful Jubilant Learning, there is one simple learning that I am most grateful for. I also feel a bit foolish that I didn't learn to do it years and years ago, however I dismiss those feelings quickly because I am so thankful that I know it now. My simple learning was to start a Stop Doing List, first giving it to myself on my birthday last year.

I will give myself the congratulatory check mark when I finish something that really didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. No harm done. However now it will also go on my Stop Doing List too.

When I began my list last April I had 7 items on my list. Now there are 62! What a reality check of inconsequential busyness.

Ironically I don't feel bad about wasting any effort on those 62 things though; they have come to have a "been there, done that" quality to them, sort of like closing a book on chapters you have already read. My entries have gotten pretty short too: I just write down what I am stopping and don't bother writing down why. When I look back over the list I will usually remember why, or just trust that I had a good reason at the time, and shouldn't second-guess myself now. It's a kind of Pono contentment.

There is one entry that sums up all 62 in a way, and it's this one:

I will stop telling people I am busy: Busyness is a self-inflicted situation I can learn to control better. Instead, I will tell them life is good, for it is.

I have heard the productivity advice with stopping that which isn't really important before; way back to Stephen Covey, those What Matters Most quadrants, and his Put First Things First coaching in the early 1990s:

"Good scheduling creates high-leverage activities - activities that create maximum value for our effort."

However it was always about making the right choices versus the physical discarding of the wrong ones: Writing down my discards seems to be where the magic has been. The simple logging of what I will no longer do is a triumphant decision with making a good choice too. Funny how it works, and I'm loving that it does.

Becoming a "Good Stopper" has been a great goal for me.

Try it: Liberate yourself from the busyness which may be dragging you down, and take a few minutes with Sunday Mālama to write down a few things you will simply stop doing. I can't remember where I read this, but it made me smile then, and now as I recall it:

"I decided I would stop making my bed every single morning, and only do it when I needed to use my bed as that temporary tabletop that can come in handy sometimes... when you really think about it, making the bed you sleep in every night is sort of like tying your shoes after you take them off..."

Flickr photo by shwe

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Mahalo for reading.

If you are new to MWAC, Sunday Mālama is when we mix it up here. I may offer a tangent to our current value of the month (for January: Pono and the Why of Right), or write about something completely different.

My very first Sunday Mālama was this one: A Beginning.