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Your One Precious Life
A radical approach to productivity & time management
One of the most transformative things I’ve ever done is to replace consuming self-help content and listening to productivity gurus with deeply reading poetry and listening to poets.
The place this has made the greatest difference is in the way I see productivity and time management. Instead of making to-do lists or building the perfect system that will somehow unlock my potential and allow me to get more work done, I approach each day with a single question borrowed and adapted from a Mary Oliver poem.
What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?
Life is about more than what you make or what tasks you complete. Life is meant to be lived, and we only get one shot at each day. Instead of meticulously planning out my day, blocking time for this or that, creating lists, or picking the most important task, I lay in bed each morning and ask, What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?
I know how I spend each day is how I spend my life. What should my life be spent doing?
The poem that I took this question from is Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day. The last several lines of the poem read:
I don’t know exactly what prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll the fields,
which is what I’ve been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Oliver’s poem is not a call to do more. It is a call to do less. It is a call to be mindful of how you spend your days — your life.
I’m a self-employed creative. To pay my bills, I write and illustrate my thoughts in ways that sometimes resonate with others. This is my work and my greatest source of peace and comfort.
I used to make lists of the steps for the projects I “needed” to get done each day. This never worked. Like almost all humans, I overestimate what I can get done in a day and underestimate what I can get done in a year — or a lifetime — with…
