I had it all planned out. It was going to be so much fun.

It really was a great idea, if I do say so myself. My blog is about overcoming the kind of perfectionism that gets in our way by telling us that what we’re doing isn’t good enough. National Novel Writing Month (which I’ve written about before), is a month of hands-on practice in blasting straight through that mindset with wild writerly abandon.

So I was going to blog my entire NaNo novel publicly, right here, during the month of November.

Practice Makes Imperfect and NaNoWriMo—what a natural combination!

I got in touch with the organizers, and they were going to feature me in one of their daily Q&A spots. I would get to publicly practice what I preach in a very visible way, and maybe turn some people on to this annual event that I love so much in the process. We could cheer each other on, inspire each other, and keep that flow of raw, gloriously unedited words gushing.

Except then I heard an inner warning siren go off. It was followed by a voice:

“Wait, you’re the person who says she’s finally coming to grips with the fact that she can’t do it all, no matter how much she wants to. Who says she’s tired of trying to be superhuman. And who is already having enough trouble handling all the things on her plate now. And you’re thinking that you can manage to write 50,000 words next month on top of all that?”

Damn.

The disturbing truth is that once you embark on the path of self-awareness, it gets harder and harder to be in denial. Even when you really, really want to be.

So today I’m here to tell you that I will not be doing National Novel Writing Month this year.

And that makes me incredibly sad.

It would have been so joyous! Not to mention good for web traffic! I would have gotten exposure to many thousands of people around the world who do NaNoWriMo and visit its website, and who might have seen my Q&A feature and checked out my blog! I could have possibly been inspirational to people who were thinking about trying NaNo this year, or who were doing it but flagging in their enthusiasm, just by writing my novel publicly! And maybe some of them would have become regular readers or subscribers here at Practice Makes Imperfect! So many exclamation points that I will now miss out on!

Not to mention that I simply adore doing NaNo each November.

It is actually harder for me to not do it than to do it and drive myself into the ground. The latter has been (until recently) my modus operandi. I know very well how to pummel myself into submission over a goal that I’ve arbitrarily decided I have to achieve.

It’s much harder to admit that the world will keep on turning and that I will keep on breathing without my writing a novel next month. It’s so difficult to allow myself to just drop something that would prevent me from the self-care that I need to focus on right now.

Which is why I’m letting NaNo go this year. I need the practice in saying no to things I want so that I can say yes to things I want even more. Like health. And sanity.

BUT . . .

If you have ever wanted to write a novel, I cannot recommend NaNoWriMo highly enough. Here’s an excerpt from (again) my own previous blog post about it:

What makes the program so effective? It allows you to barrel right past your critical mind. You have to write so much so fast that quality concerns fly out the window—you just don’t have time for them. “I can edit later” becomes your mantra. And the amazing thing is that once you push past your initial resistance, get into the flow, and establish a daily writing routine, you realize it’s completely feasible to write 50,000 words or more in a month if you just keep writing and don’t overthink it.

It’s fun, it’s intense, and it’s probably the best training program for recovering perfectionists I’ve ever found.

If there is ANY part of you that is saying (perhaps very quietly) “yes!” right now, then I heartily endorse NaNoWriMo and suggest that you check out their website right away. Because this year’s novel-writing adventure begins at midnight this Saturday night.

If you decide to do it, I’d love to know so that I can holler and whoop and cheer you on!

Warning: The following article describes a brutal act of clutter-clearing in which a number of inanimate objects are heartlessly disposed of. It may not be suitable for sensitive readers. Proceed at your own risk.

I’ve never been a packrat. By most people’s standards, I live quite simply and don’t have a lot of “stuff.” I have learned, though, that a lot of the material I do accumulate is like sea wrack, washed up against the shores of my living space by the waves of projects I’ve started and not completed.

Oh, I’ve tried to complete them—most of them, anyway. Usually by organizing the heck out of them first. I’ve kept lists of projects. I’ve whittled those projects down to bite-sized tasks, devised methods to streamline and schedule those tasks, and created whole systems to track my progress so that I could have the joy of crossing things off my to-do list. I’ve spent hours, days and weeks blasting through those to-do lists like dynamite in an all-out effort to finish as many projects and tasks as quickly I could, so that I could have the simple, uncluttered life I crave.

It never, ever occurred to me that I could simplify my life by eliminating things without finishing them.

In late 2001 I fulfilled a long-held dream and began to learn to play the Indian tabla drums. I took lessons for five years from one of the world’s acknowledged best tabla players, Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri. I adored the classes, and Swapanji is a wonderful, patient and gently humorous teacher whom I miss deeply . . . because I haven’t taken lessons now for over two years.

It broke my heart, but I had to stop for my own benefit. I took the classes far too seriously, and I felt such a sense of obligation that the lessons became more of a chore than anything else. I was feeling enormous stress over the fact that I couldn’t practice as much as I wanted to, and I thought I wasn’t doing justice to either the money I was spending on the classes or, even more important to me, the beautiful musical tradition of the tablas.

At the end of it all (and I still choke up just writing that), I was left with five years’ worth of cassette tapes. Tapes? Yes, because we learned so much so quickly each week that Swapanji allowed us to record the classes. I would come home from class, play through the tape, write down the new composition we’d learned, and refer to it as I practiced throughout the week or refreshed my memory of it later.

These tapes held pure gold. They contained the teachings of a living legend, instructing very small groups of students in a tiny room. Swapanji played each new composition for us. He gave us individual attention and advice. He gave encouragement, sometimes talked about the history of the tablas, and often told funny stories.

But 90% of the tapes were filled with us students, ineptly tapping and pounding away as we attempted to stuff each new kaida, rela, tukra and chakradhar into our short-term memories. This was nothing I would ever want to listen to again.

Once I’d finish transcribing each week’s tape into my permanent notes, I’d save it with the intention of extracting the 10% of the material with real value for future reference. So when I stopped taking classes, I had a gigantic box filled with five years’ worth of cassettes. I consoled myself with the thought that since I was (*sniffle*) no longer learning anything new, I would finally have time to deal with them all.

It was an Enormous Project. Just getting the (sometimes undated) tapes into chronological order took me a long time. The next step was to listen to roughly 200-250 hours of class tapes through an analog-to-digital converter, and sift through the dirt of the vast, useless majority of the recordings to find the tiny nuggets of gold where Swapanji was actually talking and teaching. I would then need to save those smaller files, date-label them, catalog their contents, and burn them to CD for safekeeping.

I really thought I could do it. In my spare time, outside of my full-time job and my many other projects and commitments. I expected myself to. This unfinished project weighed on my consciousness for two full years. All unfinished things have an oppressive weight to them, but this one was extra-heavy. After all, those tapes were priceless! They deserved to be saved, if not for me, then for posterity!

But slowly I realized that posterity didn’t much care. That other people took these classes, too. That I wasn’t personally responsible for being the caretaker of the material I’d learned. That Swapanji had been recorded—professionally—hundreds of times over the decades.

That I really, truly didn’t have to do this project at all. Ever.

So . . . I threw away the box.

Then I cried.

And then I was swept with the most profound feeling of relief I’d felt in years.

How odd that my biggest lesson came when I stopped taking classes.

I have a lot of wonderful friends who are dealing with a huge sense of overwhelm right now. Many of them are in business for themselves, which means they’re pretty much trying to do all the events of an Olympic decathlon simultaneously without dropping any balls…erm, batons. Others are just (“just”!!!) dealing with all the demands of an overly hectic life, both online and offline.

This post is for them, and others like them (you, maybe?). Because the technology we’ve developed over the past handful of decades has evolved so much faster than our nervous systems that we can’t keep up with our own devices and systems anymore. Yet we’re taught to think we should. And if we don’t, we’re to blame. Personally.

So let’s forget about the fact that most if not all of my friends have so many “to dos” on their lists that the weight of them would give a rhino’s knees arthritis. Let’s not even talk about how many of those tasks and projects are required by others, self-imposed, or some combination of the two.

Let’s look for a moment at the experience of overwhelm.

The time management and productivity experts like to talk about things like quadrants, mind maps, next tasks, lifehacks, and trusted systems. And I’m not knocking them—those concepts and tools are all important and very, very helpful. But I’d like to add one more concept to the list.

Closure.

The experts give us all kinds of ways to achieve closure on tasks and projects, but in my experience, few of them talk in depth about what that feels like. They (correctly) make the assumption that a sense of closure is what we want, and then mostly just dive right into showing us how to get it.

But closure is worth some solid discussion, because it’s really the big “why” lurking behind all those schedules, planners, checklists, and nifty filing methods. Because let’s face it, people—no matter how you do it and what tools you use, nothing feels quite so good as getting stuck into a task, finishing it, and crossing it off your list.

That’s worth saying again.

When you’re overwhelmed, nothing feels quite so good as finishing something. Or better yet, a few somethings.

Only you know how you work best. Some people (like me, for instance) hate the feeling of clutter, and would rather clear the decks of as much of the little stuff as possible before tackling the bigger tasks and projects. Other people crave the relief of knowing that their One Big Thing is out of the way so that they can focus on the smaller tasks.

Whichever way you operate, when things in your life are not done or not finished, it bothers you, either consciously or unconsciously. And this doesn’t just relate to your to-do lists. Often people are surprised when they do some purging of their physical possessions and experience a sense of relief that feels entirely out of proportion to the material they got rid of. This is usually because all that physical stuff represented unresolved mental and emotional stuff in one way or another.

This is not to say that we should all become Zen-like ascetics and eliminate all material possessions from our lives and all time commitments from our schedules. But maybe you can (gently, compassionately, and only if it truly feels okay) admit to yourself that you haven’t really looked at any of those dozens of your first love’s notes and letters in more than 25 years, and you won’t suffer if you don’t keep them anymore. Or that the chances of you actually reading all those books stacked on the corner table (or chair!) are minimal at best, and that you’d feel more relief from donating them somewhere and knowing you no longer “had” to read them than you’d feel guilt over not having read them.

When you eliminate enough things from your list(s) and space(s), the feeling of overwhelm starts to dissipate. Your headspace feels clearer. And that feels wonderful. There are two basic ways to get that deliciously liberating feeling:

1. Finish things.
2. Discard things.

It’s extremely important to be gentle with yourself in the process of doing both. That’s hard for perfectionistics, I know. I know. And we’ll talk about some ways to do that. But for today, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like you to try a little experiment.

First, finish just one thing that’s on your to-do list, no matter how small. Go and get that spare copy of the house key made. Return those library books. Answer that one e-mail that’s been nagging at your mind. Whatever.

Next, get rid of just one thing that you think you have to do, but probably don’t. Will your job really be in jeopardy if you don’t attend this week’s staff meeting? Will your house really flood if you don’t clean the leaves out of the gutters this year? Do you honestly need to read every issue of Widgets Monthly to keep up with the developments in your field? If you skip this month’s, will you be okay? Try it, just this once.

And revel in the tiny but very real feeling of relief it provides.

More later.