‘Reframe the Day,’ Four Years Later
‘Reframe the Day,’ Four Years Later
Some things I’ve learned, changed, stopped, and started over 1,461 days of reframing.
On April 28, 2020—four years ago today—I published my first book. (Hopefully it will not be my last.)
In Reframe the Day: Embracing the Craft of Life, One Day at a Time, I wrote about ten practices that had helped me build more fulfilling days. Among them: meditating, treating work as a craft, and thinking about death. Fun!
Actually, though, it was fun, or at least fulfilling and satisfying, to think about these ideas, to write and revise them into some sort of coherence, and to see what happened when I put them out into the world. It also was a lot of work and generated a lot of stress and anxiety and overwhelm, particularly when it came to promoting and selling the book. (There’s a reason I haven’t been back on Instagram in almost four years, except to delete a bunch of my old posts hyping the book.)
Ultimately, I think, Reframe the Day proved successful. Not necessarily in terms of sales, although the book has sold more than 1,000 copies, which exceeded my realistic expectations, if not my wildly unrealistic ones.1 (Good news, reader: It is still available to purchase wherever you get your books online.2)
But what’s made the book successful to me, in addition to its usefulness for readers, is that it got me started doing what I’m still doing today.
Writing Reframe the Day helped me organize my thoughts and articulate some of my values. It forced me to recognize the power of writing as a craft, and to understand this craft not as a burdensome slog but as a glorious, if extremely challenging and frustrating, tool for communicating and making some sense of the world (chapter 3: “make work a craft”). And it set me on the path of trying to turn writing, and now investigative journalism, into a full-time career.
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When I have the opportunity to speak with an author, one of my favorite questions to ask is how their thinking has evolved since they made the final tweaks to their manuscript. After all, they aren’t frantically reworking the text until the moment of publication. Most are forced to put down the metaphorical pen months and months before the book hits shelves.
I made my final edits to Reframe the Day, some of which are captured in the photo at the top of this newsletter, sometime toward the end of 2019. (It’s eerie to remember that time and consider how much the world was about to change, and we had no idea what was coming.) Yet I read about and experimented with and started jotting down most of the ideas in the book even earlier—mainly in late 2017 and throughout 2018. That’s a pretty long time ago.
So, in the spirit of the question I like to ask, here are a handful of reflections about how my thinking has changed since Reframe the Day hit electronic bookshelves right in the middle of one of the first Covid lockdowns. (Last year, I explored this evolution from a different perspective—essentially, why I regret citing so many billionaires and venture capitalists in the book.)3
Sorry in advance—this is a long newsletter. And it’s mostly about me. Sorry about that too! I hope I can explore many of the topics below, in a less self-centered way, with guests on my “Sunday Conversations” series.
Until then, here are some things I’ve been learning and working on and changing over the 1,461 days since Reframe the Day was published.
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I don’t really meditate anymore.
Or, at least, I’m not particularly strict about it. This might be surprising since one of the early chapters of Reframe the Day (chapter 2: “build awareness”) was all about how creating a meditation practice changed my life.4 In fact, meditation did change my life. I wrote in the book that “spending a few minutes each day practicing meditation has flicked an internal switch of awareness that’s transformed how I experience my life.” This remains true.
A couple years ago, however, I realized that meditating with the Headspace app had become more about keeping a daily streak going and less about developing and honing a transformative awareness practice. Plus, I was getting really irritable and anxious about making sure I preserved the streak and not being interrupted while I did—pretty much the opposite of what I had begun meditating for.
So, I stopped. Now, most days, I try to have what I consider “thinking time,” usually over coffee in the morning or while I’m running. Thinking time regularly gets interrupted or doesn’t happen for whatever reason, and that’s ok. Sometimes it trends toward a regular mindfulness practice: I pay attention to my breath while I’m sitting or to the pattern of my feet hitting the ground as I run, and try to return to this focus when my attention inevitably wanders.
Other times, though, “thinking” time turns into “plan the day” time or “write the first few paragraphs of an article in my head” time or “let the mind wander while I see how long it takes before the dog decides it’s playtime” time. That’s not mindfulness meditation, but it is interesting to follow these thoughts and see where they lead. Most importantly, it’s a practice that I can realistically expect to do most days, without creating additional self-imposed stress about making time for it or failing to achieve it every day.5
I started journaling.
And, miraculously, I’ve kept at it. What began as an attempt at the popular writers’ exercise of “morning pages” has morphed into 10-15 minutes, most mornings, of handwritten self-reflections about…stuff.
Sometimes I write part of an article. Other times I reflect on how yesterday’s long run went, or why American capitalism makes it so challenging to earn a living critiquing American capitalism, or whether my current time management-slash-productivity system needs tweaking, or why I was so anxious or irritable or on edge the other day. (The explanation for that last dilemma is almost always that I needed to read a few pages of a book, take a nap, or stop procrastinating on a story—or maybe just give myself a break.) I always feel better for having done a bit of journaling.
Also, the most important part of this practice: I always, always journal by hand. For me, at least, the practice must be analog.
I am shifting, slowly but surely, away from to-do lists and toward habit tracking.
Discussions of productivity, and specifically to-do lists, were a significant part of Reframe the Day (chapter 5: “resist the productivity obsession”), so let’s briefly get into the weeds here.
A few years ago, Erin printed a habit tracker for me. It was awesome, especially because it had a picture of our dog’s face on it. It looked like this:
Who could say no to that face? (According to the habit tracker, maybe I should have said no to that face, and yes to writing and reading books, a bit more.)6
Anyway, after a couple months, I migrated my tracker to a Google spreadsheet, where it still lives. A few of the habits I’m tracking in there right now: Sleep more than 7.5 hours a night. Read a book for at least a half hour. Spend quality time with the aforementioned pup. Don’t open Twitter. Wrap up work for the day by 5:30 pm.
Exciting, right? Well, sort of by definition habits are not supposed to be revolutionary, or even interesting, at least to anyone other than the person doing them. On a daily timescale, my own habits are usually not that interesting or impactful even to me. They’re just little things that add up over time—activities through which, by doing them or not doing them, depending on the activity, you can make some pretty exciting progress, as long as you trend toward accomplishing them more often than not.
This, I think, is the key attribute of reframing your daily aspirations as routine contributions to an ongoing, compounding practice, rather than discrete tasks to be executed without fail every single day: It’s ok if you don’t do all of them every day. It’s also ok if you don’t do any of them some days.
Here’s what this looks like for me. In my habit tracker spreadsheet, I put a “1” in a cell corresponding to a given habit on a given day if I succeeded in that habit that day. I put a “0” if I didn’t. On the left-hand side of the spreadsheet, I can see what percentage of days I’ve accomplished a habit since I started working on it. When that accomplishment ratio hits 80 percent, the cell turns green. As you might expect from someone who became obsessed with his Headspace meditation streak, I am very motivated to turn my habits green! And to turn them green, all I have to do is succeed, on average, four out of every five days. This threshold feels exponentially more manageable to start and sustain than trying to achieve perfection.
Also, it works. The point of creating a habit is to build or achieve or shape something over time, not overnight. (You might say it’s about embracing the craft of life, one day at a time.) So, I’ve figured out a system that rewards and celebrates progress that happens over time—and helps me visualize that progress—rather than one that reprimands me every day I don’t hit the productivity bullseye.
I stopped reading The Economist.
Despite its market-obsessed, capital-trumps-labor, pro-status-quo-and-corporate-power tendencies, I had, until last year, read The Economist pretty much every week since the summer of 2009. I wrote about this habit at some length in Reframe the Day.
But one of the painful realities of trying to “make time for what matters” (chapter 6) is that even if you succeed in eliminating all the stuff you don’t want to do and don’t have to do…you’re still not going to have enough time to do everything you do want to do. Eventually, you have to choose among many different activities that you truly, genuinely enjoy and treasure.
I’m not sure how long it was taking me to read The Economist each week, but it was probably at least four or five hours.7 I only have so much time to read every day, and I decided I wanted to spend that time reading more books and less news. So, about six months ago, I stopped reading The Economist.
But wait! Erin bought me an issue of The Economist at our local bookstore the other day. It turns out I’d really missed knowing at least a little bit of what was going on in a lot of parts of the world. (Also, for the topics I write about, it’s helpful to know how the neoliberal establishment—sort of joking with that phrase, sort of not—sees the world.)
I’m now reading The Economist again, even though it means I have slightly less time to read books. What I learned is that I value the understanding and perspective that I get from reading this weekly “newspaper” enough to make time for it.8
I probably read more novels than nonfiction these days.
In chapter 4 of Reframe the Day (“consume content intentionally”), I noted that “the content I consume is heavily biased toward nonfiction.” Toward the end of that section, I wondered whether I might want to introduce a bit more literature into my reading diet:
The idea that stories help us understand what it means to be human seems even more true for novels. … Is there space to expand my emotional and empathetic understanding through the fictional lives of others, whether novels, films, TV shows, or plays? There must be.9
Well, yeah. Pretty much as soon as I wasn’t able to edit my manuscript anymore I started reading a lot more novels, a practice I’ve continued to this day.
The best part of not having read a lot of fiction in my twenties and early thirties? I now have decades of great books to read for the first time. What a privilege! I hope I get to stick around long enough to read a lot of them, and then share them in our Little Free Library.
I discovered I’m a dog person.
Who would have thought that a creature—one who is outrageously expensive and time-intensive, and entirely dismissive of my yearning for stillness (chapter 1) and my protestations that I can’t hang out right now because I have an article due—would be exactly what I needed in this stage of my life? (If we’re being honest, probably quite a few people who read Reframe the Day and/or knew me well could have predicted this exact outcome.)
Anyway, our dog Camden, with all her unconditional love and her ruthless insistence on living wholly in the present moment and her total disregard for whatever silly thing I’m stressing about, has unlocked new levels of empathy and a new appreciation for right now. She requires so much work, and she is so frustrating sometimes, and yet…I think adopting our pup is one of the best decisions Erin and I have made over the past decade.10
I try to recognize and resist my compulsion to “clear the decks.”
For years—at least my whole adult life, certainly—I’ve felt a compulsion to tie up loose ends before moving forward to what I really want to do, or what really needs to be done. Some classic, quotidian examples: thinking I must start the laundry and water the plants and check off all sorts of little tasks on the list before I can start to write, or trying to empty the email inbox before I allow myself to sit down to read a book. Getting the little stuff out of the way now, so you can focus on the big stuff in the future, in other words.
The writer Oliver Burkeman refers to this as “clearing the decks.” In his email newsletter, which I was reading one day so I could archive it and then hopefully feel more peaceful reading a book later, Burkeman suggests:
If you treat sanity as something you have to get to, by doing a lot of preparatory things first, the main effect will be to reinforce the sense of its being out of reach. You might get plenty of useful things done along the way, but you won’t reach peace of mind—because you’ll effectively be telling yourself, on a daily basis, that peace of mind is off in the distance, and never available here.11
Writing Reframe the Day was one of my first concrete attempts to interrogate this compulsion—hence my urging in the book to do things like “create stillness” (chapter 1) and “make time for what matters” (chapter 6). But only recently have I begun to tackle the harder part of these instructions, which is recognizing and accepting that operating this way feels very, very uncomfortable to me.
I’m reliably happier and more fulfilled and certainly more productive (in the healthy sense of the word) when I have carried on with my most valued activities without having first attempted to clear the decks, but that doesn’t mean, in the moment, that feeling chaotic and disordered and not on top of everything isn’t supremely unsettling.
This has been one of my most radical and profound realizations: Making a change like this is not supposed to be comfortable. In fact, searching for comfort—order, stability, on-top-of-it-ness, the feeling of having successfully banished chaos from my swirling mind—is precisely what drives me to want to clear the decks in the first place. Burkeman again:
The paradoxical truth [is] that stepping into this orientation toward life doesn’t exactly feel good, so it’s helpful not to expect that. Frankly, it feels uncomfortable and awkward, especially at first, because it involves shifting away from a familiar way of being into an alien one.
Some people can operate just fine in the middle of what appears to me like paralysis-inducing levels of chaos and disorder. (I think many of the best journalists, or at least the most prolific ones, are among this crowd.) It’s tough, but I’m working on reframing, you might say, this feeling of discomfort so I interpret it not as an impulse to be followed but rather as an indicator that I am, in this moment, prioritizing something I care about.
I strive for good enough.
Especially in my writing. Of course, I want to obsess over everything I write and make it feel perfect to me before I distribute or publish it. Also, of course, I will never achieve perfection and will never run out of edits to make and, moreover, from the perspective of probably every reader, will reach the point of diminishing returns long before I feel like a piece is “finished.”
One of my writing goals this year—which I think is probably a healthy goal in general—is good enough. Work hard to make something good enough, and then send it. That doesn’t mean I can’t be meticulous and thorough and fair and careful. It just means I should do the best work I can, with the limited time and attention and abilities and resources I have, and move forward.
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Thanks to everyone who bought, read, shared, talked about, or otherwise contributed to Reframe the Day over the years. I appreciate each of you. Thank you for reading this newsletter, too. It was fun to write. (Hopefully this attempt at “good enough” turned out to be good enough.)
With these thoughts safely out of my head and into your inboxes, next time we’ll return to our regular programming about the wildly disproportionate influence of corporations and their executives on America’s economic and political systems, etc.
As I promised before the book came out, I continue to make contributions to the global nonprofit Direct Relief—first to its Covid-19 relief fund, and now, since Direct Relief closed its pandemic fund, to the organization’s general efforts—in a USD amount equivalent to my GBP royalties from book sales.
https://adaml.substack.com/p/ray-dalio-the-allure-of-billionaire-bs. Today’s newsletter is basically a postscript to an article that I published a few days before the book came out: “Reflections on Launching a Self-Help Book in the Middle of a Global Pandemic.” (A non-paywalled version is here.)
One of the book’s early working titles was Put Meditation on Your To-Do List. That title did not help me find an agent. (Nor, for that matter, did Reframe the Day.)
For instance, the idea for this newsletter first bubbled up during one of these thinking sessions.
Isn’t it wild that I found a picture of one of those old habit trackers, and it happened to be from exactly two years ago? I’m obsessed with the passage of time.
I don’t read quickly! I just spend a lot of time doing it.
Also, I do my absolute best to read The Economist—along with a couple other publications that align a little more closely with my values and worldview, like The American Prospect and In These Times—only in print, not on a screen. I wrote about this a few years ago here: “Analog Cravings in a Digital World.”
I’ve edited this excerpt slightly for clarity. The full passages are on pages 108-109.
Do you want puppy pictures? I have them, and I would like to share them with you. Also, it was Camden’s birthday a couple weeks ago. 🥹
https://ckarchive.com/b/e5uph7hpk2kv0. Burkeman uses “sanity” in a specific way here, which he explains in the newsletter.