There’s an enormous skill that I call “unpluggability,” and it’s essentially making the effort to make no effort. That’s what it is…. The effort to make no efforts. We have to work really, really hard to shut down our minds and stop thinking about all the things we have to do.
In the modern age, one of the most difficult habits to develop is how to get our minds back… How to get our attention back. We are in such busy lives that they have become overly complex. We have so many things happening at one time that, in this full spectrum of attention, we shift from thing to thing so quickly, it’s no wonder that we don’t have the depth we desire. Efficiency, in many ways, is a defense against depth… A depth of understanding, a depth of grasping what we can see and what we can experience.
In a state of “busyness,” we lack deep attention and deep listening, and one of the driving reasons, of course, is the internal thoughts that corrupt, outlaw, ambush, and delude us away from a deeper part of ourselves.
So to reclaim depth and true attention, having time away, turning off our minds, and finding the space to listen become essential.
We often hear things like:
“If I could just get away…”
“I just want to get away from it all…”
“I want to get off this merry-go-round of life…”
“Stand still and then I can…”
There’s such a binary quality to that type of thinking. It’s like either or… I’ll leave one world and I’ll go into the next. These two extremes, the fast world and the slow world.
There’s this sense of, “If I could just get to the slow world I could make it all work, but I’m too busy being busy to do what could make me a lot less busy.”
So we push this off to a place of blue sky time, where we’re going to be able to outthink all of our problems like a good night’s sleep. If we just got to sleep, we’d be able to get up in the morning and solve it all.
One of the biggest problems that we can actually solve is to stop trying to solve all the problems! Because most of the problems in our lives are just unsolvable. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have any problems, it just means that there are ways to transcend them by focusing on bigger things.
One of the areas unplugging makes us really, really troubled is the status that we crave – and the intensity we have to bring forth in the pursuit of it. We set out with intensity in our pursuit, and it makes us wonder if what we’re actually pursuing is the most important thing…
If I think about what is truly indispensable to my happiness… If I made a list of five things that I would be unhappy without… Honestly, those things don’t cost a lot. So what am I working so hard to get?
If we know what really matters, and we know that they don’t cost much to get it, why are we so averse to unplugging?
There are very simple things that I do to connect with people. I could go to the park and just get lost in happiness with my family.
We often think that it costs money to have these experiences. Sure, if you want to put your kid in the best school… If you want to send them overseas on the most amazing trips… Yes, that costs money. That’s all good. Earnings are great, but how we get those earnings has everything to do with how we renew ourselves.
We underestimate renewal, downtime, quiet time, and silence because we don’t associate them with more worth. We don’t think they have an outlet for productivity. We attempt, with our ambitions, to put ourselves into working until we blow up so we can justify the time we need to rejuvenate and re-energize. We search for a reason to feel like we deserve it, to feel like we’ve earned it. We’ve worked hard for it, rather than making the time or seeing it as independently important – the base, the foundation, from which everything else comes.
Sunday is a free day. It’s the beginning of the week. So when someone says to me, “Oh, it’s Monday,” I say, “Well wait, the week already started. I was already in my week yesterday.”
Why don’t we carry that over into the current moment? That’s really the point… How do we blend our work time and our unplugged time? How do we go on vacation all the time?
I’m not saying that in terms of a fantasy where everything is bliss and we pretend like everything’s beautiful and okay. I’m not saying we live like every day is bliss. There are bad days and good days.
We’re not talking about having the rewards of that all the time. We’re talking about energy. We’re not talking about time. We’re talking about energy and the way we experience time… The way we use time, the way that we live in our time. To live in the present has to do with how we quiet ourselves down. Silence is the language of the future. Stillness is the language of the future.
Because when we stop, we listen. We gather. We make sense of things. Nature gives us back slow time. It moves us from fast to slow, it heals us, and it helps us reflect.
So, are we spending money that we shouldn’t on things we don’t really need trying to impress people that we don’t like? Are we running ourselves into poor health for the wrong reasons?
Because our stress is killing us, and that stress comes from striving – and the imbalances of striving for something that doesn’t necessarily quench our thirst. So if we start from what really matters… If I made an ideal day of what I would love to be doing, where I would be, and who I would be with, what if those things were indispensable?
And what if that’s really my own personal, private definition of what I want? More isn’t necessarily better, and less isn’t necessarily better either.
By getting gratification through creating – creating the way I want to experience life, what I want to invest my life spirit in, the way I want to experience my children… Seeking gratification through creating things (including earnings) doesn’t suggest that I’m unhappy with what I have.
Money itself isn’t going to make me happy, but I can buy some time with money, and how I spend that time can be indispensable. There are also time commitments that don’t require money to enjoy, and those certainly feed me too!
I suppose it comes down to what you really want and the “unpluggability” that you have to change your attention. If you come home tonight at six o’clock and choose to if say that you don’t have enough time for something important to you, that’s not true. What you’re really saying is that you haven’t made up your mind about what’s important to you. “Not enough” is a misstatement of reality. You have 24 hours a day, and so does everybody everybody else. You don’t get more…
But you can use time differently. You can shut it off because you choose to. You can stop being busy because you choose to. With this approach, you can be the predominant creative force in your life. If you choose to.
Therefore, you can make a life plan of where you want to be, who you want to be with, and what you want to do. Then it’s about composing or designing a set of vehicles to support that, and finances are one way to do it.
This works with your team as well. If you want to know how your team is doing, look at your ability to unplug. I think one of the most important performance objectives that should be part of your close management team is how you spend your free time… How much screen time do you spend?
A good way to know how your managers are doing is to ask how well they insulate you. Truly! If you say, “Hey guys, 30 days from now, these are four days that I want to spend this way. I’d like you guys to come up with structures that help me spend the time that way, and how I come back from that time will tell me how you guys did. That’ll be your KPI, your key performance indicator.”
What kind of boss do they want? Do they want the person that’s going to be tired, fatigued, frustrated, and easily annoyed – or someone who’s inspired, creative, full of energy, and loving their life? I want to work for someone in the latter category.
So, what kind of boss do you want to deliver to them? What value do you think you can bring if you enjoy your time away, and what kind of role model could you be for really living your life?
Monkey see, monkey do… If you’re afraid that other people are gonna go do it, then you’re afraid to go live your life because you’re trying to manage with self-deprecation, right?
“I can’t leave work today even if I get everything done by two o’clock.”
“I can’t leave work today because other people are going to mess around.”
Cat’s away, the mice will play…
Well that’s a direct reflection that you don’t have a vision. That’s a direct reflection that you don’t have the right people and you don’t have enough “give a shitism” at the business. People don’t give a shit. If they give a shit, then they’re focused on being there – not because you’re always there. That’s an excuse. What a silly reason to motivate people. You teach them commitment because you’re there when you don’t need to be. I think we have to be honest about that.
So, unpluggability is about your own life AND your team, getting them ready by helping them understand how you want to spend your time and how that affects their lives. It really is one of the most generous things you can do for yourself: give yourself more free time.
