ACTIVITY: Choose What You Keep Up With
ACTIVITY: Choose What You Keep Up With
“Keeping up” is impossible, so stop trying to.
This is a final post in what turned into an unintentional series of three, first on Election Anxiety, and then how Attention Has a Cost.
When I was writing books like Side Hustle and The $100 Startup, I often held meetups around the world where people would share their business ideas and questions. One of the questions that came up over and over was:
“How do you keep up?”
Meaning: how do you keep up with all the things you could do, all the latest trends and tactics, all the ways that other people are doing things, and whatever else is on your mind?
I understand the anxiety behind this question! We fear that we must keep up (somehow), and if we fail to keep up, then we’ll be left behind (somehow).
The precise definitions of both keeping up and being left behind are always somewhat nebulous in this context—but anxiety-provoking nonetheless.
The first answer, of course, is: you don’t keep up, because you can’t. Keeping up is impossible.
You do not have 5 hours a day to be on social media, or if for some reason you do, then you certainly don’t have those hours available to do something else.
Then, when it comes to political news, it would also take another 5 hours, and ultimately be even less productive for all the reasons I mentioned earlier.
There’s a 24-hour news cycle, another cycle about the cycle itself, and endless loops that play off the ongoing cycles. Meanwhile you have incoming messages in different mediums from all over the place.
This is part of what makes you anxious.
Choose Wisely
The first answer to “How do you keep up with everything?” is “You don’t.” The second answer is, “You deliberately limit what to keep up with.”
If you’re wondering how to limit, there’s an easy starting point. Begin with reducing, cutting, stripping away. Unsubscribe, unfollow. Condense and clear your to-do list. Close those tabs you’ve been keeping open for three weeks. If you still need them later, you can always get them back.
Make deliberate choices about which news sources, inbound messages, and general information flows you’ll pay attention to—then opt-out of, close down, and ignore the others.
