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Borrowing from What We Love for What We Don’t
Do you avoid challenges like "life admin?" Use ideas from activities you enjoy.
Posted July 25, 2019
My friend Susan taught me something this week.
She taught me that we can borrow techniques from something we love—for her, music—and apply them to something we find more challenging—for her, writing. This idea, it strikes me, holds promise for dealing with our life admin.
First, a little more about Susan and her idea.
Susan plays the piano beautifully. I heard her play recently, and it was even more magical than I’d remembered. She has a very ambitious goal this year: learning to play all of Bach’s Goldberg Variations by December. To me, this sounds like learning to speak Italian fluently by December. But for her, this is possible.
And more than possible, for her this goal is energizing. Her face shines, joyfully, when she talks about it.
This week, Susan had the idea to use the structures and energy she brings to piano to help animate her work in an arena she finds more challenging right now. To learn the 30 Goldberg Variations, Susan is setting goals for herself and tackling the hard parts in digestible chunks. Now, for her writing, she’s going to do the same. And by building on the processes she associates with her music, she is bringing some of that energy, that excitement she feels at the piano, to the written word.
Hearing Susan’s plan, I realized we could apply this strategy to life admin—especially to any big, daunting admin project.
Right now, top of that list for me is the admin of preparing for a big family trip. There are just so many things to remember and organize and decide whether and how to pack. And figuring out the packing is just item #1.
You don't need to hear the other 47 items on my list; you know what it’s like to have a major admin project you’re avoiding. (Or you might, depending on your admin personality.)
What Susan showed me this week is that I can take an activity I love and apply it to this Big Trip Admin. For me, that’s yoga.
Adopting this Yoga-of-Admin mindset, I’ve uncovered several lessons so far. Before I get to those lessons, I should note that, if you think that Big Trip Admin is a first-world problem, for people privileged enough to have money and time for a big trip, you are right—and I agree. The inequalities of life admin, along many dimensions including wealth, are one focus of my work, which I’ll post about in the future. (There’s a preview of some of my thinking here.)
Following Susan’s strategy, I’ve drawn these tips from my yoga practice for dealing with the Big Trip Admin:
1. Just do it. I often don’t want to do yoga. Showing up and starting can be hard, but when I do, I usually end up enjoying it. (So that might happen with the Big Trip Admin too if I’m open to it—or at least I’ll get the wave of done-it satisfaction.)
2. Trust the process. When I’m resisting, it can help to remind myself that I’ve been here before, I have my methods, and I’ll get to the other side. (Developing processes we trust for admin is something I’ve written about elsewhere.)
3. Calendar it. To show up and begin to trust, I have to make the time, carve it out. The stuff of admin is real work and, even after studying it for years, I can still fail to see it. I can mistakenly think I’ll just take care of it all in the interstices of everything else. (To make it real, I’ve just calendared several hours to deal with Big Trip Admin.)
4. Picture it. Lastly, just thinking of the Big Trip Admin as a kind of yoga is beginning to help me relate to it differently. (For starters, I can imagine different parts of the admin as different poses.)
These lessons might resonate for you. They might not. The point here is not for you to adopt my Yoga-of-Admin lessons.
The point is to pick a thing you love or have ease doing, and try applying it to your most vexing admin. And see what you learn.
I’d love to hear what you discover.
