90 Days of ILP

I am continually amazed at the paucity of time management skills offered by esoteric traditionalists: it as if mystics of yore had all the time in the world, a life-long task list consisting of three things, and little incentive to be efficient. Well, fellow email swimmers, we do not. This is why Integral Valley's Integral Living project is so compelling: a web-based tool for managing and tracking practice. But while we wait for that, what can we do now, right now, to save time and devote more waking energy to things that truly matter?

Traditional meditation techniqued like Vipassana teach one to cultivate a "mindfulness" in every moment, which constantly seeks to notice -- and break free of -- those moments when we are acting or speaking out of delusion, attachment, fear, or myriad other normal human habits. But what if we are acting out of inefficiency? What if we are "mindfully" spending two more hours a week on laundry than we need to be?

Enter time yoga, my gimmicky name for a very simple thing: training oneself in each every moment to ask: "What am I doing right now? Is this the best use of my time?"

Theoretically, whatever you're doing at any given moment falls into 3 categories: Fundamental Tasks, Significant Tasks, and Neither.

Fundamental Tasks: those necessary tasks you need to sustain yourself and survive. These will insure your perpetuity, but fail to inspire or catalyze your evolution beyond the status quo's center-of-lame-gravity. Laundry, hygiene, food, relaxation, sleep: these are "fixed" costs you can't ignore for long. The idea here is to maximize the efficiency with which you perform these, reduce the number of things you have to do, group tasks together, and find others to do them for you.

Significant Tasks: this is the good stuff, those important projects, relationships, opportunities, and experiences you believe will catalyze your growth along multiple developmental tracks, whether financial, romantic, artistic, theoretical, etc. The lynchpin of this category is discerning your "20% spike", that activity for which you've been genetically blueprinted to perform. This is your high-leverage facility, that thing you do with more passion and skill than anyone else in the world. The idea is to become more efficient at doing it, doing it more, and hooking it in to your "economic engine", so as to have primary source of life-energy actively generating your future.

Neither: obvious wastes of time you'd do best to avoid. Excess masturbation, too-long walks, boring hikes, coffee with dumb people -- this is where you confront your own nihilism head-on. In the nihilist viewpoint, non of the aforementioned are to be avoided, they simply form another stratum in the "it's all good" meaningless flatland malaise. Here, being "nice" and staying mediocre are the ruling norm. In the "neither" category, you must dare to judge, to make decisions, cut through, and throw shit away. And learn to say no, even going so far as to practicing it in front of the mirror 5-10 times a day.

So again, each and every moment, ask yourself "what am I doing right now?" Then, run it through the filter: is it Fundamental? Significant? Neither? And act accordingly.