Getting things started

For years I’ve been a fan of the first sug­gest­ed prac­tice in Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way pro­gram: morn­ing pages. The sug­ges­tion is to do three pages of auto­mat­ic writ­ing (writ­ing with­out stop­ping to think) the very first thing every morn­ing. I’ve gone through peri­ods where I’ve done the morn­ing pages faith­ful­ly, and months on end where I haven’t done them at all. Faced with the litany of things I usu­al­ly feel I have to do, it is a chal­lenge to keep this prac­tice. When I am focused and don’t let the pen lift from the paper I can fin­ish in twen­ty min­utes. When I am scat­tered or dis­tract­ed it can be more than forty.

One of the ques­tions I’ve had is how lit­er­al­ly to take the instruc­tion to make morn­ing pages the very first thing I do in the day. I have an idylic pic­ture in my head of sit­ting at the break­fast table writ­ing in the jour­nal with a cup of cof­fee, but some have sug­gest­ed that if one takes the time to make cof­fee that one has already blown it; that morn­ing pages must be absolute­ly first thing so that they can serve as a brain dump and set the tone for the day. I have there­fore usu­al­ly done my morn­ing pages writ­ing in bed.

That sort of rigid­i­ty does not serve me these days. In the morn­ings I have cats to feed, med­i­cines to take, and oth­er things that for a vari­ety of rea­sons ought be done pri­or to tak­ing pen to paper. So long as I don’t delay the start of writ­ing more than a few min­utes while I take care of some essen­tials, I see no prob­lem with doing morn­ing pages thusly.

Recent­ly, anoth­er con­flict has come up that seems a bit stick­i­er. Get­ting Things Done sug­gests writ­ing tasks down imme­di­ate­ly so as to avoid hold­ing on to unnec­es­sary task lists in our heads. Dur­ing morn­ing pages, usu­al­ly a num­ber of things to do in the upcom­ing day start jump­ing for my atten­tion. I write them in the morn­ing pages, but that’s not some­where I’ll see them again. It’s seemed to me for some time that it would be appro­pri­ate if unortho­dox to keep my to-do list, whether on paper or in soft­ware, close at hand while writ­ing my morn­ing pages so that I could pause and add these items to my agenda.

The purist recoils; morn­ing pages are sup­posed to be unin­ter­rupt­ed. Putting the note­book down or (hor­rors!) pick­ing up a com­put­er are anath­e­ma to the flow of morn­ing pages. This makes some sense; I con­sid­er morn­ing pages to be more a form of med­i­ta­tion and less a form of writ­ing, and I would nev­er inter­rupt zazen to attend to my to-do list.

This is per­haps a dif­fer­ence between med­i­ta­tion prac­tice and morn­ing pages: med­i­ta­tion does not have a pur­pose besides itself. Morn­ing pages, while med­i­ta­tive, is still a prag­mat­ic prac­tice. It serves a purpose.

My new exper­i­ment there­fore is to allow some over­lap between morn­ing pages and a GTD-style morn­ing mini-review. When the top­ic of my writ­ing in the morn­ing is a task that is not yet entered into Omni­fo­cus, I pick up the iPhone and add it in. I cap­ture the task or the project and then put the iPhone down and resume writ­ing imme­di­ate­ly. The point here is not to get tak­en off-track into the job of plan­ning my day (not that I ever plan my days, real­ly) but just to get the task where it belongs so that I can deal with it at a more appro­pri­ate time.

The ques­tion real­ly is not about how well or pure­ly I’m fol­low­ing the sug­ges­tions of Julia Cameron or David Allen. It’s about how well these prac­tices serve me in my dai­ly life. That of course, remains to be seen.