Chasing squirrels: The quest for personal productivity

I find it harder and harder to focus these days.  Most of the time I think it's me. I blame myself for having some sort of deficiency. I think to myself, "If only I had more discipline... If only I could prioritize..." 

This morning I got up early to, well... do something. I don't have a routine, but I think that I need one. I tell myself that I have limited time to do important developmental things for myself because I have a 3.5 year-old, I work a typical 40-45 hour week, I have a 45-60 min commute both ways, and I do many of the things associated with that lifestyle. 

I believe that before the rest of the house wakes up and gets going, 1-1.5 hours is my time to do something personally productive. Personally productive for me does not typically include anything that anyone else is directly tied to or expecting (e.g. email follow-ups to colleagues or clients.) It does include enriching reading, meditative questioning, contemplation, study, and writing. 

Yet when I wake up and walk into our office/meditation space, I'm greeted by a litter of squirrels. Ok, not real squirrels, but I feel like a dog that's distracted by a bunch of options disguised as squirrels that I could chase.  I could read. I could write. I could study. I could review something I've written. I could listen to a recording. I could meditate. I could plan. I could just sit. That's not to mention all the books I have that I could read, or the topics I could write about. 

I'm sure some of you are saying that I just need a good plan or routine, or that I just need to trust myself, or learn to listen to my intuition, and you're probably right. I also know that I didn't used to feel this way and I'm not sure why I do now. Was I always easily distracted and not know it? Have I been ADD all my life and just in denial about it? Have I lost focus over the years since becoming a parent? Did I have the illusion that I was more focused when I was younger because someone else was setting most of my agenda? Do I live in a society of exponentially increasing distractions that have us in a perpetual state of squirrel chasing?

Mind you, I have nothing major against squirrels or chasing them, literally or metaphorically speaking. It's just that the dog rarely, if ever, catches the squirrel and if there are several or more, good luck Fido.

If you're like me, you have endless to-do lists (maybe more than one), overflowing email, and decreasing memory space on your iPhone and in your head. I think, one day I will clear it all out and create more space to focus. I tell myself that I'll have more time, mental space, and energetic space to operate. I think, if I just had a full day, or a full week to clear out, I could relax.

I think now, that cleaning out would be good to do since I've realized that I am a hoarder of thoughts, ideas, and to-dos. Yep, just like those people on reality TV with all the stuff in their house. I've got a cluttered internal house between my ears. Maybe you do too. So sure, clean out.  And I suspect I will need to develop a strong internal gatekeeper to regulate all the societal squirrels that will want to rush into the cleared out space. I need that fictional bifrost gatekeeper guy Heimdall from the Marvel movie Thor. ...Ok, nerd moment - I had to look up his name. He's the guardian of Asgard (Thor's home), who stands on the bifrost bridge and denies access to the city of Asguard to any "unauthorized beings" (or squirrels in my case). [Spoiler alert - R.I.P. Heimdall. He died since the original writing of this post.]

Anyhow, so I chased down this squirrel this morning and it feels good. I walked into our meditation-office with a list of things I could do, and decided to chase this one squirrel - write this blog article. Have I caught it? Seems like I did, this time.  It was the biggest one in the room, that is, in my head. 

Which squirrel are you going to chase down today?? My advice... Take a deep breath and go for the one that feels biggest. Oh... and if you decide to clean out, get yourself an Asguardian gatekeeper.