What can make a big difference? I found an unexpected answer

Once again, a simple question posed by Leo Babauta of the Zen Habits blog inspired me. He writes, “What tiny change could make a huge difference in your life? Taking a daily walk, eating fruits, cutting back on email, etc?”

Well, I started taking a Vitamin D supplement last week at my doctor’s recommendation, but so far I haven’t seen the vitamin make any difference in my life. And for the answer that leaped to mind, I felt a little bit bemused. Because I know it’s not what anyone who writes a blog called Zen Habits has in mind. It’s nothing so pure and organic as a daily walk, eating fruit or banishing electronic communication. It’s the fact that my friends Nicole and Tony unexpectedly provided me with use of a small, lightweight laptop they did not need.

Lots of people have laptops, you might be thinking. They’re convenient, sure, but life-changing? How’s that possible? Or if it is, just how materialistic are you?

But what the laptop did was enable me to change my habits for the better. As a self-employed freelancer, I have a home office. And like most self-employed freelancers, it’s really hard for me to close up shop for the day at any particular time. It wasn’t long ago that I worked in a corporate environment in which I snapped my computer off at the end of the day and went home. But recently, I realized how drastically that habit had changed. Not only self-employed and home-based but also enjoying an increasingly robust workload, I seemed in recent months to gravitate back to my desk consistently throughout the hours that I considered my non-work day: while the kids were having an afterschool snack, while I was getting dinner ready, when I was headed in to say goodnight to my daughter, while my son was bathing. And then once the kids were both in bed, I inevitably settled back down at my desk for an hour or so, doing more work.

Now, it’s different. Knowing that I can now do quick easy little things like send an email or check my Google calendar without having my desktop computer on, I fostered a new habit. Now I shut down my desktop computer at 5:00 every day, just the way I used to when I worked in an office.

Reading this, you might suspect that I simply do all the same computer functions as before but in a different room, so how’s that really any different? But it hasn’t been like that. Not having a computer running all evening removed the temptation of peeking at my email or doing a quick re-edit of a document file. It simply broke up that pattern of gravitating repeatedly back to my desk. Now the computer goes off at five and I focus on other things, family things, until nine o’clock.

And as for the later part of the evening, the laptop has reintroduced me to the joy of reading in bed, just like I used to when I was a kid but somehow lost the ability to do in recent years, because I was always at my desk instead. Of course, usually it’s not exactly reading in the purest sense of the word. It’s still emailing, or web-surfing, or drafting essays. But sometimes it’s real reading. Sometimes in the late evening hours I go on line to read magazine or newspaper articles, and a couple of times I’ve even downloaded e-books from the library website to try “reading” in bed that way.

So although I’d love to have a more holistic answer to the question of what has made a huge change in my life, an answer centering on daily meditation or spiritual engagement, it’s the three-pound laptop that has changed my daily life lately. The change it made was to liberate me from my desk and make me feel nurtured again by the treasured act of reading in bed. Doesn’t exactly have a Zen ring to it, I realize. But it’s made a world of difference to me.

Had enough of the To Do list? How about a "Done!" list?

The Zen Habits blog posted an article recently suggesting a novel approach to To Do lists: list just one item. Accordingly enough, it’s called the One Thing System.

I like the way author Leo Babauta explains his process, but the problem with that approach, for me, is that I actually like To Do lists. I feel far more anxious when I don’t have an active To Do list going than when I do, no matter how long it is. Frequently, I sit down at my desk in the morning feeling like I can’t possibly get through all the tasks I have for the day. But then I open my Google calendar and take a look at the Tasks list and it looks much more manageable than I expected. In a way, it relates to what I always say when I talk about journaling: writing down your feelings is important because thoughts move in circles but words move in lines: if you keep it in your head it swirls around endlessly, but if you write it down you progress from point A to point B. The tasks in my head swirl endlessly, but written on a To Do list, they extend straightforwardly from number one to number five, or number ten, or wherever they end. And then it’s just a simple matter of checking them off.

Or not so simple, sometimes. When my To Do list feels daunting even once I see it written down, I have a different trick I employ. Once in a while, I break from writing a To Do list in the morning and instead, at the end of the day, I write a “Done!” list. I itemize everything I did get to, everything I finished, every small goal I reached in the course of the day. Productive? Well, it may not seem so: after all, seeing what I’ve already done won’t overtly help me make progress to those things I still need to do. And yet somehow it helps. It reminds me that even on those days when it seems like I did very little, something, however finite, got done.

I did that yesterday, and as often happens, it was reassuring. First I wrote down the work obligations I’d fulfilled. I interviewed an expert on Margaret Fuller and finished drafting an article about an upcoming Margaret Fuller celebration. I submitted a photographer assignment form to get a photo to go with the story about Margaret. (Yes, it’s hard to take a photo to run with a story about someone who has been dead for 160 years. We decided to go with a picture of an actress who will be playing Margaret Fuller in an upcoming dramatic production.) I reached my daily editing quota.

Then I moved past work to list other Done! items. I noted that I fed the dog and the guinea pig. I ran two miles. I folded a basket of laundry. I made dinner for my family. I delivered a check I owed to a neighbor. I stopped at the bagel shop for some pumpernickels and some sesames. I filled a two-liter bottle with water and brought it up to the attic. (For vague post-9/11 reasons we try to always keep a few full two-liter bottles of water around, and during last week’s water main break affecting communities around Boston, I’d given away our supply to our student minister.) I called a friend to find out what happened at Wednesday night’s School Committee meeting.

It’s all somewhat satisfying until I take yet another step back and acknowledge how many things are on neither list: not my To Do nor my Done. I didn’t read the New York Times, not one single article. I didn’t serve any meals at a soup kitchen. I didn’t send any checks to charity. I didn’t compost. I didn’t write a letter of comfort to a prisoner.

But the Didn’t Do list can be turned on its head to serve other purposes as well. Because it’s only fair, if I list things I didn’t do and didn’t plan to do, that I include a few items on that list that it’s good I didn’t do. I didn’t kill off any pets. I didn’t make any frivolous clothing purchases. I didn’t poison anyone. I didn’t commit slander. And so on.

There are myriad ways that task lists can work for us or against us. Sometimes they’re overwhelming; other times they’re a comfort. If I tried the Zen Habits method and put just one item on my list each day, what would it be? Well, I could always resort to the Hippocratic oath: First do no harm. Suppose day after day, that was the only item on my list. Could I live up to it? Probably not. My children may well end up in psychotherapy claiming that the essays, blog entries and in Tim’s case full-length memoir that I wrote about them did plenty of harm. My not-very-impressive environmental habits probably generate more harm than I realize every day. I kill mosquitoes. I forget to water plants.

Still, at the end of the day I can look at all these different lists and reassure myself that overall, I did okay. Not stellar, maybe. But not awful. And tomorrow’s a new day, full of new lists to be made.