Detachment = Productivity
January 9th, 2009
Reading some articles over on lifehack about productivity and organization got me reflecting about these topics myself.
Yesterday morning, after being awoken by my conscious brain from a dream about working hard and being productive, I was all charged up and ready to turn dream into reality.
I work with computers pretty much all the time. Unless I’m out seeing some friends or going for a skate, or doing some climbing, I’m usually sat right where I am now, about a meter away from my screen. My computer is my tool, I use it to do pretty much everything I need to do in order to feel like I’ve had a productive day. I use it to blog with, to contact the world, to research, to paint and 3d model with, and I use it to organise myself with.
When I sat down in my usual spot to get to work, I was hit with the scary realization that… my tool was broken! OH NO! Now instead of getting all that work done that I’d wanted, I had to spend most of the day trying to turn my PC into the optimum tool that it could be again. Alas my day was destined to be completely unproductive. After hours of wrestling with the machine I decided to walk away from the problem, soak my bloody fists in disinfectant and go and play the skate 2 demo at a friends house.
Later that evening I returned to spend another few hours fist fighting with my PC. This time though I had taken some losses (lost a bunch of data) I won the main battle, a working windows installation that didn’t BSOD me every time I tried to copy data around.
Day finished and productivity = 0. Mucho frustration.
It’s probably really obvious to most people, but there was no real reason that my day had to be so wasted. The problem was really just my mindset. When you just use one tool all the time, its easy to become dependant on that tool, but really, there’s often many other ways to achieve the same tasks. I could have wiped the dust of my sketch book and worked with an old-school pencil instead of idling my time waiting for the chance to open up photoshop on my PC. Writing by hand might be slower than typing but if I don’t have something to type on that its actually a lot faster. Both these things I could have been doing while fixing my pc. There’s a lot of idle time when formatting drives and installing operating systems.
So the moral I learned from all of this was to do with detachment. Detachment doesn’t mean I don’t care about something. I still appreciate having my PC after all and I’m thankful for it. Detachment just means I’m not depending on it to empower me to do the things I need and want to do. If I had been more detached then I might have been able to see that I could still get things done.
This whole fiasco reminds me of this quotation from Abdu’l-Baha;
The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness. Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him. Look back to the times past and you will find that the greatest men have suffered most.
(Abdu’l-Baha, Paris Talks, p. 178)
