This week is all about practicing the art of doing (almost) nothing, and I’m putting myself and all of you on a Busy Life Diet. I’m writing my blog & newsletter at 9:00am on the balcony of our rented beach house at the Jersey Shore with a pushed-back deadline, no to-do list staring back at me, and The Real Housewives of New Jersey playing in the background. This is in stark contrast to my regular 5:30am wakeup call down to my home office while everyone else in the house stays snuggled in their beds.
Now I realize that this is what vacation is all about – relaxing, putting work aside, indulging in pleasurable experiences. But how many of us really do that? How many of us even know how to put aside our lists and just go with the flow? I know I’m pretty terrible at it. I’m a women with a regular meditation practice, a job she loves, and a house in the middle of a wooded oasis, and I still have to travel miles away from home to truly enjoy myself.
Why do we have to go away to get away?
Staycations are a fun way to stay home and do nothing, but they’re not so practical for everyday. What we must do is practice a sustainable way to give ourselves time to do nothing, because doing nothing is the best way to get everything done. Doing nothing is the key to being productive, effective, and HAPPY in our busy everyday lives.
So let’s all practice doing nothing together –
which requires just a little bit of doing something.
I know a lot of you already assume this is about meditation. Meditation is NOT about doing nothing. Meditation is something that you do for greater awareness of self, of environment, and of the moment. If you make meditation part of your practice of doing nothing, you may be a little disappointed. I want you to set aside time every day for meditation, but that practice is not part of your Busy Life Diet.
The Busy Life Diet is about the anti-practice, the absence of lists, the randomness that happens when you put aside your “musts” and just see what happens. This diet is one that you follow for life – with lots and lots of individualized steps – but I’m going easy on you with just one step today. More on that in just one moment…
I had the incredible privilege of meeting the one and only Lorna Jane Clarkson, founder of Lorna Jane, at a breakfast event in New York City last week. There were fitness, style, and beauty editors in attendance, along with a few lifestyle bloggers and personalities that I recognized from social media. And then there was Lorna Jane, herself, front and center talking about the amazing brand she has built and her new book, MORE.
The only thing more dazzling than her inspiring words and fit body were her incredible sparkly pants that I just had to instagram. I’ve named these the Lorna Jane “Money Pants” and I have big plans to wear them out everywhere when they hit the market in Spring 2014.
It’s a rare moment that I get to speak to women as successful in business as Lorna Jane Clarkson, so I was the first to raise my hand when the moderator opened the conversation for questions. I wanted to know what was the one defining moment or decision she had made that changed everything for her in regard to the success of her business, and this is what she said:
But that wasn’t all of it. She went on to tell us how she calculated that we have roughly 30,000 days on this earth and how realizing that changed so much for her and the way she organizes her time. She didn’t want to waste a moment doing anything she didn’t love. She wants to spend each day connecting with people in a real way, exercising, inspiring women, doing yoga, traveling, spending time with her husband – she wants to do what she loves.
This is a women with an empire to run. She has 150 stores and a business that is growing more rapidly every day, and she’s telling us about the importance of walking on the beach and doing yoga. Putting together my firm belief that no success comes by accident with my faith that she truly does want to inspire women to do and be better, I took her words to heart and starting thinking about how NOT wasting even one of my 30,000 days must be my mission, too.
I thought about it on the cab ride uptown to the parking garage. I thought about on my drive home. I thought about it in the gym the next morning, during the work week that followed, and all the way down to Wildwood, NJ, where I’m spending my vacation with my family and some dear friends. I thought about all the ways that I wouldn’t waste another day, and what I ultimately came up with was nothing. Yup, the secret is doing nothing.
This past year has been so amazing. I got my own TV show, my business and income has grown by leaps and bounds, and everyone in my family is enjoying their own individual successes in school and work. We couldn’t be happier. We also couldn’t be busier.
I wake up every morning with a huge list of must-dos that hardly every include anything fun. I meditate daily – that’s awesome, but it’s still a task. I work out. I have dinner with my family. I spend time with my husband. I actually have all of this time charted in my planner. The days fly by so fast that I hardly remember them. What I realized while thinking about my 30,000 days was that forgetting equals wasting. I feel like I’m wasting my days instead of creating joyful moments and memories.
Enter nothing and my Busy Life Diet. As much as I don’t like deprivation diets, I decided to deprive myself of just one thing – my to-do list. I have committed myself – and this is what I want you to do, too – to not allowing myself to look at my list of musts until 9:00am each day (or about 3.5 hours after I wake up). During that time, I’m planning nothing but aimless wandering, maybe some random journaling, and possibly some staring at clouds.
I am positively certain that some amazingness is going to crop up during those early hours of meandering. What comes up will be the magic that fuels the rest of our days and will probably displace some not-so-important stuff on our to-do lists. For instance, this morning I went for a run on the beach. It wasn’t on my list, and it’s completely out of the ordinary for me. During that run, I decided that seashells and smelling the ocean are more important to me than I understood them to be. I also decided that I like running in a sports bra, that writing my book is what I should be focusing on more, and that nothing on my very pressing to-do list is actually so important today – maybe I’ll put it off looking at it until tomorrow.
None of these decisions would have happened
with my planner opened next to me
or during my daily meditation.
A lot of you give yourself time to think. What I want you to do is break away from everything you regularly do and and instead practice not-doing. If you run, take a walk in the opposite direction or in a new place or maybe just sit still. If you meditate, read a gossip magazine instead. I’m a hyper-organizer, so I’m letting this beach house get as messy as possible with no plans to clean up until the very last minute.
Whatever time you were spending doing stuff that you thought was productive, take just a little bit of that time to be unproductive. I’d be willing to bet you a dollar that you’ll come up with some wacky and amazing plans and insights during that do nothing time.
Step one: put aside your to-do list for the first couple hours of your day. Just don’t look at it. You can still go to work and take care of your chores or your families. Just try doing it by instinct. Take a few minutes or more to be aimless – in thought or in action.
Steps two through infinity are up to you. Leave some suggestions in the comments below or use the hashtag #30ThousandDays on instagram or twitter to show me how you’re replacing your must dos with want tos.
ON MY BODY: Lorna Jane sports bra
shorts my American Apparel
ON MY FEET: Saucony running shoes
Stay blissed in! xx
