90 Days of ILP

They say "hell is other people", but what they really mean is "other people's task lists." I mean this in two senses: both the tasks they have for themselves, and the things they want you to do. That's why Ken Wilber's definition of karma makes so much sense to me: action that requires further action. If you let someone into your life, and you do something for them, they will expect you to do that same thing for them again and again and again. If not, the friendship is severed, and "bad" karma is the result. But pissing off a friend -- the act of telling someone "no" -- is not the problem: it's the initial "yes" that sucks.

And I mean that literally: every "yes" you say to the world is like a vacuum pump sucking you into a new obligation, a lamprey dragging you down to the ocean's bottom where the Menial Things reside, another vampire bat with an addiction to iCal. You have to learn to say "no". NO NO NO NO NO. They have a "project list" for you? You have a non-list for them. They want to foist their task management software on you? Tell them you have only one, ruthless meta-task: making your task list go away.

It's a question of plates. Menial Tasks, Mundane Things, the hauling of trash and chopping of wood and the cleaning of rooms and the cooking of food and the vacuuuuuuming: these are the plates you are taught to spin. Because we are nice, savvy, postmodern liberals, we're fine with this. We would never choose to put these tasks on someone else. Hire a maid? Hire a cook? Hire a gardener? Chase money so you can even afford to have servants? Feh. That's for conservatives, and, ick, CEOs.

But I argue that it's a fine aspiration to no longer want to Spin Plates and to instead seek to build a Plate-Spinning Machine. The question is how much of your daily time are you willing to devote to building the Plate-Spinning Machine? What's the proper ratio of Plate-Spinning and Machine-Building time you may spend per day? At what point do the Mundane Things start falling and toppling and shattering? When your bedroom is filled with mice? When your gas and electric back-bills enter the five-digit area? When your stomach bulges from a week's worth of starvation? Maybe so.

The point is: people will give you things to do, which in this age of scarce temporal resources, is akin to being robbed in the Capitalist era. In the Attention Economy, where you invest your precious daylights is a far more crucial decision than what you're spending on beer each month. People will beg and scream and plead, and it is a weak man who says YES YES YES to life, piling more plates on his already tip-spinning axis. But you are bigger than that: you've got an idea for a Plate-Spinning Machine, you know what Big Great Things you are capable of, and you know that your future lies in passing the Mundane Things on to someone else. Instead of saying YES to the mundane things of life, give this a whirl: say NO. Say NO to Life.