What If You Replaced Self-Help with Poetry?
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One of the most transformative things I’ve ever done is to replace consuming self-help content and listening to productivity gurus with deeply reading poetry and listening to poets.
The place this has made the greatest difference is in how I see productivity and time management. Instead of making to-do lists or building the perfect system that will somehow unlock my potential and help me get more work done, I approach each day with a single question, borrowed and adapted from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.”
What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?
The last lines of this poem read:
I don’t know exactly what prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll the fields,
which is what I’ve been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Every so often this poem makes the rounds amongst the hustle-and-grind-until-you-die crowd and tech oligarchs, and they all miss the point.
Oliver’s poem is not a call to do more. It is a call to do less. It is a call to be mindful of how you spend your days because each day is your life.
Life is about more than what you make or what tasks you complete. Life is meant to be lived, and we only get one shot at each day. Instead of meticulously planning out my day, blocking time for this or that, creating lists, or picking the most important task, I lie in bed each morning and ask, “What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?”
When I’m feeling especially bold, I ask this question out loud.
I know how I spend each day is how I spend my life. When everything is over, when my children and friends gather around my grave, what do I want them to know about me? How do I want to have spent my days? Certainly not tracking every minute.
I’m a self-employed creative. To pay my bills, I write and illustrate my thoughts in ways that sometimes resonate with others. This is my work and my greatest source of peace and comfort.
I used to make lists of the steps for the projects I “needed” to get done each day. This never worked. Like almost all humans, I overestimate what I can get done in a day and underestimate what I can get done in a year — or a lifetime — with small, consistent effort.
I live with anxiety and ADHD. I must have internal buy-in to do my best work. I have to be excited about something to finish it in a way that satisfies me and makes sense to my readers. Seeing a task on a to-do list rarely motivated me to get it done. Instead, it often moved me to find something more exciting to do.
I’m also the primary caregiver for my children. A consistent daily work routine is out of reach. At any time, I might be taking kids to appointments, picking up sick kids from school, or dealing with a thousand other small emergencies.
The infamous Eisenhower matrix, a touchstone of nearly every productivity book from the past fifty years, has you rank tasks based on urgency and importance. The idea is if you do what is important regularly, you will almost never have to worry about anything being urgent.
This does not work with caregiving, where so many tasks deal with the inconvenient expulsion of bodily fluids. A child with a bloody nose or who is vomiting has created something you must deal with immediately. It is both important and urgent, your deadlines and decision matrix be damned.
Instead of fixed routines, I rely more on ritual. I try to make even mundane tasks moments of reflection and meditation. Instead of seeing the care and feeding of my now-not-so-small humans as a distraction from my “real work,” I see everything I do for them and our household as the real work of being a human.
There is no struggle over work-life balance if you accept that your work is to be human.
Starting my morning with the question, “What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?” allows me to find a handful of things that will make me feel alive. That might mean writing or painting to move a project forward. It might mean taking a long walk along the Willamette River, where I might encounter bald eagles or the perfect turn of phrase for a piece that I’ve been stuck on.
In recent years, what I have consistently planned to do with my wild and precious life is notice the rhythms of the natural world around me and capture those rhythms in poetry, comics, and essays.
I no longer worry about five-year plans, annual resolutions, or monthly metrics. Instead, my unit of focus is this moment. If I can live this moment noticing what makes me human and what nature is doing, everything else sorts itself out.
Not every project pans out. Not every idea makes for a good essay, poem, or comic. But by focusing on living my life as if I were truly wild and precious, work gets done, and each day is filled with more wonder and mystery than I could ever capture or articulate in a thousand lifetimes.
I’ve imperfectly used this radical approach to time management and productivity for several years. I still get distracted by the allure of social media rabbit holes and other quick dopamine fixes.
I now see each day as a fresh chance to remake my life. What I did or didn’t do yesterday doesn’t matter. This moment right now is all I can control.
Currently, the sun is coming up over the Cascades, and I’m here at my keyboard, hoping to help you understand that you are wonderful just as you are. I’m searching for the right words and images to convince you to give up trying to be perfect. Mostly, I want to persuade you to give up chasing optimized routines in hopes of finding quick riches and invite you to live life like it is wild and precious.
This radical approach to time management won’t make you a billionaire.
It will make you more human and lead you to the kind of wealth that will forever be out of reach of tech oligarchs who are only guided by cupidity.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
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This post was also published in Zenite on Medium, and on my Weirdo Poetry Substack.
