#personal mess

I can’t even focus on my breath (or any given thing) for relatively long periods of time, but one thing that did get through me while listening to guided mindfulness/meditation is to put the effort to bring my diverted attention back to the breath every.single.time it wanders. It’s not working progressively, but it did make me realize that one of the reasons my research/writing is taking so long and I’m having difficuty coherently forming and presenting arguments is that I’m trying to think a million different angles to a given problem at any given time. “Break it down to managable tasks”, people say, “Go step by step”. I’ve known this type of approach for years, and tried many times to implement it, but apparently it can take time to actually grasp what is meant by this and how it can apply to one’s own, personal work process. I somehow only just realized that the “focusing on one single thing at a time” aspect is common ground: I opened one of my narrative sources with the intent to just extract certain factual information, but within fifteen minutes found myself reading it line-by-line and taking notes on anything and everything instead. Bring your wandering attention back to the task at hand. Otherwise I’ll never get anything done.

Note 1 to self: tasks are what make you productive. I think, without realizing, I resisted to this approach thinking ‘how can you break down social sciences/humanities to tasks? By nature it requires the use of all one’s interpretative faculties - I’m not processing data in a statistical way; I’m invited to think on certain things, based on my research, in fresh ways. How can such a wholistic process be broken down to tasks?’. Then I realized that it’s not the mental process that needs to be broken down, it is the process of getting it out of my mind and onto the page. Now that can be done. I can only think that I wasn’t meant to realize such a seemingly obvious thing until now. I’m glad that I did.

So, note 2 to self: stop trying to tackle the entire problem in all its apparent aspects every time you sit down to write. It will help stop getting overwhelmed and springing from the chair in a panic and not wanting to go near it for a while. (I have exams-related traumas.)

best beans :0