It's so easy to lose the thread of getting things done. This is my reflection after eight months of pursuing this lifestyle seriously. This is the lifestyle:

* Taking responsibility for my own habits.
* Investing time and energy in constructing, willfully, my methodology of doing things.
* Deciding to make a positive choice with regard to effectiveness: not be mad at myself, or scold myself, but instead try to be more effective.
* Deciding that I was not alone in this situation, deciding that the best way to go forward was not to construct a system myself from the whole cloth, but instead find systems out there and adopt them.

Since then I've found many resources that have opened my mind to how to do this.

My initial research lead me to believe quite early on that Getting Things Done was a great place to start. The book. I did it: i cut a couple weeks out of my life and put everything into my inbox. Then I went through it. I implemented the system.

I found 43Folders. I found others going through this same process. Merlin's discussions of Buddhism Pure and Simple lead me to read that, and read more about buddhism. I listen to audio dharma and the zencast now. I'm learning a lot about the practicalities of living a conscious life. I've also recently found Steve Pavlina's podcasts and website (stevepavlina.com.) Also someone who, like me, like this movement, is thinking about practical ways of living that are more joyful, more effective, more good.

And yet--the draft of my paper for the job market this fall should be finished by the end of this week, and this weekend I went for a bike ride and hung out with some friends and even when I had time on Sunday, I read Fark.com and some political blogs instead of working. Did it make me feel 'rested?' was it something i 'needed to do?' No, I don't think so. I didn't need to take this weekend off entirely, which is what I did. I needed to work. I needed, at the very least, to do my weekly review...which I haven't done for about four weeks, now. How did that drop off my list? Oh, yeah, and that 30 days i committed to doing a set of things every day, and was keeping track of on an excel sheet (eating less, going to the gym daily)...it was interrupted by a short trip, and then another short trip, and I wasn't keeping track, and the end of those 30 Days passed I didn't even realize it. I guess that didn't work.

The draft, will I finish it? I'm not sure. It fills me with fear, thinking about it. I'm tempted to say "which makes it harder to start," but that's old thinking--that's reactive thinking. I have a feeling, I decide what to do with it. Fear. Interesting. Fear does not make me do things. I make me do things, I simply have feelings. They do not rule me.

And yet I am scared. And it does make it harder for me to start. And I do want to surf instead of face the music. None of these things are gone.

So am I better off? Yes, I am. I've been on a lot of cycles in my life, cycles of accomplishing a lot and being happy, accomplishing little and being depressed. These cycles have not gone away, but I am starting to see these patterns for what they are. What is done *to* me, what I do myself.

I've learned that my patterns are like centrifugal force. The natural tendency of my life is to veer out of control. The natural tendency of my stuff--physical and otherwise--is to scatter. I provide the centripetal force. I must do it, willfully, and constantly. That never "goes away." I'm not going to "solve" this tendency of life. That is the natural way of things. Things break down on their own. I will never solve organizational entropy. I must simply provide a constant and opposing force.

I have a friend who is an engineer in the Netherlands. He told me a lot about the physical structure of that country. I knew the Netherlands were below sea level and that they had all these canals and they had dikes and had to pump a lot of water. But what I didn't know is that most of the Netherlands is floating. Most of it is, in fact, a layer of peat moss floating on essentially swamp. The peat is so thick and old it looks like "solid ground." But it's really like a sponge floating on top of the water. So no one "fills the canals with water;" if you were to carve a slice into the surface of the sponge, there would be water there.

So what if you scooped a big part of the sponge out with a spoon, and you wanted to make that part dry to live on? Well, it wouldn't be enough just to "drain" it. No...you would have to pump constantly to keep it dry, at a rate at least as fast as the water seeping up. The Netherlands is not in the state of being dry. It's in the process of being dry.

So is it with the system. I am in the process of living an increasingly better life. I am in the process of solving my problems. But I will never solve them, in the sense of no longer having them. I will forever be riding that flow somewhere, in carving out my own Netherlands of dry land. It's a constant process. It's a path. And I walk on it. I'm not going to reach the end of it.

So these days when I work well, I think about them. These days I work poorly, I think about them. And these days I work neutrally, I think about them. I provide a force. That's all there is.