Making a list of things to do is not quite the same thing as getting things done. The thought at the front of my mind when finger touched keyboard a sentence ago. But I like the analogy of taking a single strand: a busy, complicated workload, a list of one item under the heading "What am I going to do now?" and the discipline of doing that one thing before either adding to the list or doing anything else. Maybe the psychology is: if you're committed to one thing, the mind throws up all the other things.
It gets you started. Or me, rather. And with that psychology in mind, if you - I - keep on doing the one thing, the ideas come for the next thing, the impatience kicks in bcause there's something that has to be done before the next thing, the desk clears gradually. Or something like that. Describing a process tends to impose an order that isn't there in the doing of the process. But I'm impatient to get to the day's work now, because I'm not allowed to start on it until I finish this.
I wonder if there's a false distinction between work and everything else. Or failing that, one false level of distinction in an otherwise true distinction. Work is the answer to "What do you do?" but if doing and being are close to each other ... and I wonder when "I'm going to work" began to be the catch-all for what we were doing when we left the house/hut/hovel/cave in the morning. "I'm going to work" might cover accountants, electricians and retailers, and I suppose writers, but is it what the farrier and the blacksmith would have said, or the hunter joining the pack to track down the mammoth?
Okay, maybe not mammoth. But if "What do you do?" typically gets an "I am" answer, as it seems to, why is that answer so limited?
"What do you do?"
"I am what I am paid to do during the hours of daylight."
Are you?
It gets you started. Or me, rather. And with that psychology in mind, if you - I - keep on doing the one thing, the ideas come for the next thing, the impatience kicks in bcause there's something that has to be done before the next thing, the desk clears gradually. Or something like that. Describing a process tends to impose an order that isn't there in the doing of the process. But I'm impatient to get to the day's work now, because I'm not allowed to start on it until I finish this.
I wonder if there's a false distinction between work and everything else. Or failing that, one false level of distinction in an otherwise true distinction. Work is the answer to "What do you do?" but if doing and being are close to each other ... and I wonder when "I'm going to work" began to be the catch-all for what we were doing when we left the house/hut/hovel/cave in the morning. "I'm going to work" might cover accountants, electricians and retailers, and I suppose writers, but is it what the farrier and the blacksmith would have said, or the hunter joining the pack to track down the mammoth?
Okay, maybe not mammoth. But if "What do you do?" typically gets an "I am" answer, as it seems to, why is that answer so limited?
"What do you do?"
"I am what I am paid to do during the hours of daylight."
Are you?
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