2025-07-21

I have spent the last few days in Paris, mostly doing a lot of the same kind of thinking that the woman in the picture seemed to be doing.

It seems likely that a lot of my habits and systems need an overhaul, because there is currently a lot of friction in all aspects of my working life. The most useful mode I am ever in is when I am writing or creating something. Alongside that, there is an amount of necessary admin that makes life work. But there is also the news and social media, and sundry other irritations and anxieties which seem to be taking up an increasing amount of my brain space and that needs to stop.

In the past, I've been pretty good at curating my experience because doing work-for-hire and having to observe deadlines forces you to lock in. But I haven't been doing work-for-hire for a while now (not so much by choice as because the US industry has been spending less and less on fewer and fewer people), and so all deadlines are self-imposed and it is far easier to become distracted.

But now is the worst time to be distracted. If you're creating your own work and attempting to take it to market, you have to be working at a rate that is both intensive and sustainable. That's fun, when you can lock into it, but distraction can mean that days go by without anything useful getting done and, when output and income are so intrinsically linked, that can lead to spirals of anxiety.

And so to curation and focus and the need to observe the basics of Stoic philosophy, namely that we should only concern ourselves with that which we can control; all other considerations are irrelevant. I can control the rate and quality of my work. I cannot control its reception, just as I cannot control what a foreign government does, nor how slowly someone is walking in front of me, nor people honking their horns in the street outside. Allowing ourselves to be be irritated by what we can't control is a surefire way to lose focus and be miserable.

There are things we want to do because they are interesting, fun, challenging or rewarding. There are things we don't want to do but that we nonetheless have to do and those things need to be dealt with quickly and efficiently and not be allowed to occupy too much time or thinking space.

And then there are the things that we don't want to do but feel like we SHOULD do. And those are the things that need to be thrown out. I don't remember who suggested it, but a "To Don't" list seems like a liberating idea - a list of things that you are definitely NOT going to do, that you can immediately tick off because they are certainly NOT getting done. The advantage of this being a physical (or digital) list is that each one of these items has been considered and rejected and can therefore be banished from your mind.

We live inside our heads, and we need to create a world in there that is conducive to the life we want to live. We don't want to shut ourselves off from the world outside, because that is where new ideas come from. We need to open the windows, but we also need bug screens that can stop all the crap getting in alongside the light and air.

Anyway, that's where my head was at in Paris, and that is where my attention is going this week - I need to get back in the game.