What you feed and nurture will take root and grow whereas what you do not give your time and energy will fade and suffocate. Learn how to be more productive and have more time and energy for the things you love.

Don’t feed your problems by giving them your time. Ignore them.

Spending time on problems can have the counterproductive effect: making them bigger and worse.

Focus on each wave as it comes. Photo by Manika Trevisan on Unsplash

There is a reason behind the saying, ‘you are what you repeatedly do’. What you give your time to, your focus, your energy, will naturally grow. What you feed and nurture will take root and expand. What I find is most powerful, however, is the converse of this statement:

What you do not give your time, focus and energy will not grow.

It will fade and suffocate like a flame without oxygen.

Often with problems in our life, we take the following approach: We must attack it, research every option and turn the obstacle on its head. We must be relentless and hard-working. We must persevere until the obstacle is no more.

After all, we want it so bad.

However, what if we did the opposite? What if instead of caring so much, investing so much of our time, thoughts and energy, we took a step back, we let ourselves daydream and relax?

I propose the following:

Many a problem can be solved simply by not giving them your attention and your time.

Many problems become more potent when we feed them with our energy and thoughts. If we give them no attention we realise that they are but a flutter, a passing cloud. If we realise this, we can save countless hours, days, and weeks on problems that would fade should we not grasp onto them.This has profound implications for our own lives, for habit-formation, reducing stress and anxiety, and, of course, achieving our goals.

So how can we be more productive, have more time and energy? Spend your time on what is important and ignore what is not. Feed the good habits and suffocate the bad.

Matthew McConaughey likens it to this: “Let’s admit it, we all got two wolves in us, a good one and a bad one, you know what I’m talking about — and they BOTH wanna eat… We just gotta feed that good wolf a little more than the other one.”

Imagine this

You are on your way to work and everything that could possibly go wrong is. You have no clean shirt; there was no milk to have your morning coffee, and to top it off, your 7-year-old was screaming about not wanting to go to school. Then, as you get into the peace and serenity of your car, traffic jams hit and traffic lights turn red. You’re already running late. Eventually, you get into work and you spend the rest of the day complaining to others and thinking about how terrible your morning has been. As a result, your work is sluggish and of poor quality, your friends feel drained from your company, and you have achieved nothing.

I constructed this scenario to demonstrate that focusing on problems is not always the best path to follow. As seen in the scenario above, it would have been better to accept that it was a terrible morning and to then shift the focus onto the work and tasks at hand. It would have been better to move on. What can we learn from this?

Let what is temporary pass instead of trying to hold onto it.

This is simple but not easy. Nevertheless, being aware of this is key to identifying which problems will pass without our efforts and which need our upmost attention and energy.

Give your time to what is important. Photo by Caroline Hernandez on Unsplash

How to implement this method in your own life

It is much easier to eliminate problems by not giving them our time, thoughts and energy than through brute force, attacking head-on with every ounce of our energy. Prevention is always easier than ‘treatment’ after all.

But with which types of problems can we use this approach?

Uncompleted tasks weigh more heavily on our minds than those we have finished. Due to the Zeigarnik effect, our minds connect all of our past, present, and potential future experiences to these tasks, desperate to discover solutions. Thus, when doing something mindless and habitual, like brushing our teeth or having a shower, we often get potential insights, your mind returning to the task, often against your will. The moment you get such insights is what I like to call the eureka moment.

Some of the greatest minds in history used this knowledge to their advantage:

1. Archimedes figured out how to calculate the volume of an irregular object when he noticed his bathwater overflowing.
2. Newton supposedly came up with his theory of gravity when he saw an apple fall from a tree.
3. Richard Feynman would sit at a topless bar, enjoying himself, and if inspiration struck, scribble equations on cocktail napkins.

But how can we use such an approach to solve problems in our own lives?

How to implement this in your life

• Creativity. When you’re stuck on a creative or complex problem. You don’t continue to sit and spend countless hours racking your brain and attempting to solve it through brute force. You get up for a walk or do something completely unrelated, letting your mind wander and daydream. All the while your subconscious mind connects present and past experiences, desperately attempting to solve the problem. This is called the Zeigarnik effect.
• Negative and draining people. The advice given when dealing with such people is always along the lines of: “Stay clear of them. Surround yourself with people who energise and support you.” The same is true with other problems: Don’t try and change them. Just stay clear by not giving them your time and energy.
• Sleep. When you can’t sleep and you’re tossing and turning in bed. What advice are we given? To get out of bed. We are told to do something calming or relaxing for 10–15 minutes, like reading a book, before coming back to bed. Why? Remaining in bed means we obsess over trying to get to sleep and find ourselves more awake than before. Don’t give the problem your time and energy and it will naturally suffocate and fade away.
• Exams. We are told not to spend too much time on one question. Why? So that when we come back to it, we see it with fresh eyes and more experiences that may connect to form a solution.
• Any work. Attacking a problem ferociously for so long. We spend half our time looking at the wall and the photos from last summer. What is needed? A break. Some relaxation. Not more painstaking work which would contribute to the feeling of burning out.

Take a break. Do something crazy.

How can we implement this approach in our own lives?

1. Figure out where you want to spend your time:

• Keep a daily planner. Then you can roughly plan your days, organise your time and understand where you’re spending your time.
• Define what is important to you. Use the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to help decipher what is important and what is not. Ask yourself what your goals are. What do you want to achieve? It’s okay if you don’t know. That’s what you’re here to find out. Get out and experiment.
• Say no. Once you have defined what is important, you must say no to things that deviate from that criteria. Spend time with what is important: your friends, family and goals, but learn to say no to things that don’t push you along your desired path. However, there must be a balance here as gaining experience in a wide range of fields and subjects often helps us develop new ideas and aids us in the pursuit of our passions. Therefore, spend most of your time doing what you have defined important but keep some flexibility so as to avoid tunnel vision.

2. Spend your time on:

• Those things that are truly important. Work on your hobbies and crafts.
• The people that energise and support you. The radiators in your life.
• The goals and dreams that wake you up in the morning.

Conclusion

Not all obstacles are movable, but all obstacles can be turned into an opportunity. We should know when brute force is necessary and when it is not. We should know when it is best to think about a problem and when it is best to eliminate it from our thoughts.

Save your energy for the tasks that you deem important but recognise that occasionally putting in not more time, effort, and hard work towards a problem but the opposite: letting ourselves relax, our minds wander, enjoying one’s time before coming back with new insights and a ferocity to implement them, can be more effective.

The three key takeaways:

1. You can solve many problems simply by not giving them your energy. What you give your time to will be classed as more important in your mind.
2. Ignoring problems can also have the opposite and adverse effect: actually helping you achieve your goals. See my article on Lessons from Fight Club to see this in action.
3. Spending time on problems can also have the counterproductive effect: making them bigger and worse.

Thanks for reading and if you are interested in the Zeigarnik effect and keen to learn more, read this article.

Day 4/30 article writing challenge.