flashlight
You are alone and in a dark room. It’s completely black and you cannot see a single thing around you. In your right hand you have a pretty powerful flashlight/torch. You switch it on.
Standing there, you make sweeping movements to build up a quick view of what’s around you. The intense circle in the center of the beam shows up the most distinct detail. You can see what you’re pointing at and everything else around it fades into darkness in ever widening, blending circles.
You see the only door in the beam you’re casting across the room. It’s over to the right. Slightly ajar, it makes sense to head that way and leave the room you’re in. It’s your way out of here and the starting point of where you’ll go next.
This somewhat simplistic analogy has recently had a more profound meaning for me. Having cleared my life of all my habits around email, Facebook, Twitter, meetings and other interruptions; I started to move in a room with no light.
Start reading a book I’ve been meaning to. Hit a section early on that would be cool to try out on the iMac. So I stop reading and do that. Tinkering with code I remember that I wanted to send a payment out for a bill. I flip over to that. Knee deep in Bank of America’s website the nagging of did I/didn’t I leads me to the cupboard to check if I marked another bill as being paid. On a shelf there’s a snowball mic. I really wanted to record some audio for the book (long story, will explain/demo another time). So I do.
The result? Lots of little things. Lots of nothing really. No big result. No result.
It’s too easy to underestimate the importance and pure effectiveness of sitting down, uninterrupted, and concentrating for a solid period of time on doing just one thing. Like sleep, your brain takes a short while to warm up to what it’s absorbing right now. In the early stages of reading a book you will be distracted with other thoughts. If you let them.
From spending time with children to conversations to absorbing a book, experience or something else that’s going to add value to your life: be present, switch on your flashlight, point it at the door and walk toward that. Switch on a light and you’ll see everything, want to use everything and end up never moving. Or lots of moving around but with no progress forward.