No new year’s resolutions this year. No “one word to capture what I want this year to be about.” I’m committing myself to one thing: s-l-o-w-i-n-g.

S-l-o-w-i-n-g. I think I first learned the term about ten years ago in a chapter by the same name in one of John Ortberg’s books. I’ve always liked the concept and every once in a while I remember it, but these days something magnetic about the idea pulls me into it’s orbit. Maybe that idea of “orbit” and “gravity” is the real issue. The world I so regularly create and commit myself to has such gravitational pull that it holds me in a very close orbit. The closer the orbit, the faster we must move to get around it. Consider this:

Time it takes pluto to orbit the sun: 248 years
Time it takes the earth to orbit the sun: 365 days
Time it takes the moon to orbit the earth: 28 days
Time it takes the International Space Station to orbit the earth: 91 minutes

The closer the orbit the faster we must move. The faster we move the less we see. The less we see the more limited our perspective. The more limited our perspective the shallower our wisdom. The shallower our wisdom the more anemic our life.

I’m slowing. Practically speaking it means I will drive at least 5 miles under the speed limit, especially around town. I will work in focused segments of time, at least 20 minutes in length, doing only one thing. This necessitates not checking email, facebooking, twittering, texting, or answering my phone out of turn. Whenever I have the chance to walk somewhere I will walk. I will “behold” other people when together. I will read one poem a day. I will gaze at artwork every time I am near it. I will put away my iPhone between the hours of 6pm and 6am. I will take my time when I wash dishes or fold clothes or brush my youngest’s teeth. I will keep Sabbath weekly. I’m s-l-o-w-i-n-g.

In his book, The Contemplative Patstor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction, Gene Peterson writes, “It is far more biblical to learn quietness and attentiveness before God than to be overtaken by what John Oman named the twin perils of ministry, ‘flurry and worry.’ For flurry dissipates energy, and worry constipates it.”

If this strikes a chord in you, please join me. I’d love to see your every day practical ideas as to how “slowing” can happen. Jot down your ideas in a comment below.

I’m searching for a new word, one that captures a growingly frustrating everyday phenomenon. Here’s the dilemma:

I’m sitting at my desk, positioned in front of my “screen.” As I move through my email I come across a reminder from a co-worker  to send them a link to that article from the Wall Street Journal by Stephen Johnson.

So I shuffle over a few screens to my internet browser to find the article again. As I arrive at my browser, several pages are already open. I note someone new has joined the new project I am working on. This someone new happens to be a friend I’ve lost touch with from years before.

Before you know it, I’m back at my email sending this long lost friend a quick note to reconnect. Then I remember. I shuffle back over to the prior task in the internet browser. As I arrive there again, I can’t for the life of me recall the task that took me there in the first place. Remember the WSJ article I was to send to a coworker? For some reason, I don’t have the foggiest memory of it. I sit there dazed and confused at what to do next. Then a blogpost catches my eye and before you know it, I’m clicking on an embedded link in the blogpost.

Then I hear the “ding” on my iPhone and I reach down to see who’s texting me. And after that, I see the notification that “toocoolforhomeshool” has played a word on Words with Friends. And on it goes. . . . . .

So I’m looking for a word to describe that phenomenon– when you begin to fulfill a task or do a piece of work and by the time you get to the place where the work can begin you’ve become so distracted and disoriented you can’t remember what it was you were going to do in the first place.

I’ll come up with a prize for the best idea.

I’m stunned to find people who think they have to read every post that comes through their Google Feed Reader. As a result, they keep their feed count down to only what they can read.

I probably follow 250 blogs via my Google Reader. Of course I don’t keep up with all of them. Here’s my approach.

1. I consider my Google Feed Reader as my Blog Library. If I am even remotely interested in a particular blog site I will subscribe.

2.  I arrange my Library according to collections. I have a “Friends” collection, a “Thinkers” collection, a “Poets” collection, a “Social Media” collection, an “Apple” collection to name a few. There are collections for Worship, News, Productivity, Comics and I could go on.

3. I rarely actually go into the library. I pull out collections and feed them into a Feed Reader on my iPad. I use Pulse and Flipboard. Both of these apps allow you to import particular folders or collections from your Google Reader. Flipboard amazes me. It also gives you the ability to find and import feeds from many other sites across the web. And with Flipboard, the iPad rolls like a Ferarri through the blogdom.  You can cover hundreds of posts in half an hour.

4. The great feature of an app like Flipboard is the ability it gives you to share the particular posts you want to share with others. When Google+ integrates with Flipboard it will enable sharing with particular circles based on subject matter.

5.  Miss a day, a week, a month, or don’t read half the blogs for a year— not a problem. they are in the library.

So for what it’s worth– there it is. How I follow hundreds of blogs and thousands of posts in half an hour. . . . but not really.

A page without punctuation is like a life without spaces.

It happens to me constantly. I bet it happens to you too. Just this morning I scrambled around to get ready. Someone was picking me up for work around 8. I somehow managed to be ready a full 5 minutes before 8. I walked out onto the front porch and felt the cool morning air. Birdsong rang out from the trees. The garden still dripped dew. In response to that I sat down on the front porch swing, promptly pulled out my iPhone 4 and began to check email. That’s when it hit me.

A page without punctuation is like a life without spaces.

Everywhere we turn we see it happening people riveting their attention on a little rectangular device in the palm of their hand these devices for all the good they do can literally consume every square inch of space in our lives wherever there is a pause instead of a inserting a comma I pull out my phone and see if it’s my turn on Words with Friends on the short walk from my car to my office instead of inserting the (ellipses) my mind so desperately needs before launching into a full day of work I pull out my phone and fire off a text or two about who knows what on the short one mile commute from work to home instead of inserting a (question mark) and preparing my heart for home I pull out my phone and squeeze in a quick callback and most unfortunately after I arrive at home instead of the joyful interjecting exclamation marks of joy I pull out my phone and scan my twitter stream or update my facebook

A page without punctuation is like a life without spaces.

See what I mean? So much meaning is missed without proper punctuation. So it is with life. So much meaning is missed without those gifted spaces and brief interludes. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not giving up my iPhone. It’s not Steve Jobs fault. I’m taking back those little spaces. I’m learning to restore attention to the little mysteries offered by an ordinary day. So the next time I’m in an in between moment, instead of pulling out my phone, I’m going to put in a punctuation mark.

It’s really that simple.

Email apnea – a temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email

From Linda Stone, the woman who brought us the captivating phrase, “continuous partial attention,” comes another zinger of a nomer (opposite of misnomer). The term is “Email Apnea.” Most of us are familiar with the condition known as sleep apnea. It’s when  you pay a team of doctors thousands of dollars to watch you sleep and confirm what everyone has been telling  you for years, “You snore!” In all seriousness, people who suffer from sleep apnea don’t really sleep because they cease breathing hundreds of times during the night. Sleep doctors harness such persons up with a fighter pilot looking mask that makes you sound like Darth Vader. It’s a breathing machine that helps you sleep. (no I don’t have one, but it is fun to try on friends masks).

Linda Stone observes that when people are doing email, be it on their desktops, laptops, phones, iPads, they stop breathing. I’ve begun observing myself at this task and find it true. The problem comes with all the problems that not breathing regularly causes. Allow me to state the obvious: Not breathing kills you. Right? If one stops breathing long enough they are dead. It makes sense that the ongoing practice of not breathing is the pathway to death. Linda doesn’t put it so bluntly because she is a lot smarter than me. She actually spells out what happens in great detail, ranging from obesity to hypertension. Check it out. Maybe that’s why I’ve gained 30 lbs in the last couple of years. Maybe it wasn’t the late night Snickers after all. Giving up email will be a lot easier! ;0)

And watch yourself today as you are changing the world one email at a time. Try sustained breathing. It turns out that breathing and typing at the same time aren’t that easy after all.

What would happen if I instituted an auto-reply to every email that came into my inbox saying the following:

“I respond to Email on Friday. If you need more immediate attention please call or text my cell.”

The big question:  should I list my number??? I’m thinking not since those I want to have my immediate attention would already likely know my number or could easily acquire it.

The beauty of email is the wonderful way it enables you to keep projects moving forward, track conversations and keep clear communication trails.  The horror of email is the way it makes virtually everything urgent and creates the unreasonable expectation of immediate response.

Email creates the perennial scenario wherein we over promise and under deliver. I think my idea creates just the opposite reality.

So what do you think . . . . . . will it work?

I like David Allen and I appreciate his approach to “Getting Things Done” aka GTD.  He’s made a fortune by developing a very simple, systematic approach to creating a productive order for complex situations.  What I appreciate most about David Allen’s GTD approach is it’s bigger picture. His basic premise:

Finding order and structure for the universe of tasks, ideas, projects, responsibilities in order to free up mental bandwidth to do the creative work that really matters.

In other words, as long as there are 1001 things floating around in your mind, darting in and out of memory and keeping you in the constant state of anxiety that you just missed a meeting with your boss, you are doomed to spend your best creative capacities on the stress it takes to remember everything and know what to do next .

Ever feel like you could use a RAM upgrade in your brain; that your mind is one of those little colorful spinning frisbees, overloaded with so many things, constantly constipated and not properly processing? I do. GTD is not another application to add to your life, it is a change in Operating System.  (MS Office vs. OS X Snow Leopard).

GTD = Collecting (getting it out of your head and into a reliable container) + Processing (What to do– When to do it) + Organizing (Forming Projects with Next Steps) + Reviewing (Evaluating the whole system weekly)

If you are looking for a helpful mac application that runs GTD try Omnifocus. They also have a brilliant iPad app which is expensive but worth it.

Whatever it is that you have to get done today. . . . .

Just don’t do it!

It will be your biggest act of faith this week.

Keep Sabbath.

You will become more of who you really are.

It often seems I am serving a life sentence in the hell known as email jail. No matter what I try to keep on top of it, I fail. Yes, I know about filters and I have a ton of them to  make sure I respond to emails from you. I can’t seem to get my inbox below about 500. . . . . . . ever. And I’m assured, that’s neither a sign of my “importance” or “incompetence.” I’ve decided I will not let email rule me, and at the same time it requires living in a type of “denial” that so many people/messages are simultaneously screaming at me.

Remember Steven Covey’s 7 Habits book and the 4 quadrants?

SOME OBSERVATIONS FROM MY INBOX TO YOURS:

• EMAIL has a strong tendency to keep me in Quadrant 1. That’s where all my “must respond to immediately” filters lead to.
• The problem is that a lot of those emails filtering into the  ”must respond to immediately” folder should probably fall into Quadrant 3– urgent but not really that important.  In other words, Quad 1 people often send Quad 3 emails, making it all but impossible to filter out.
• At least 50% of my email probably falls in Quadrant 4– neither urgent nor important.
• That leaves Quadrant 2, the most important Quadrant and where I would like to spend most of my time. The trouble is most people don’t send too much email when it comes to Quadrant 2. Why? Because when they are doing email they are also wrapped up in Quadrant 1, 3 and 4. This too keeps them out of the important work of Quadrant 2.

A FEW WORKING HYPOTHESISIS

1. Email largely exacerbates the malady known as the “tyranny of the urgent.”
2. Email keeps us in the almost constant state of “quadrant-jumping.” This destroys concentration, blurs focus, frustrates progress and keeps us generally disoriented for most of the day.
3. Email, when engaged on our smart-phones, actually leads us to choose low priority issues over the most important priority in life– the people we are with.
4. Email, engaged uncritically, effectively prevents us from doing the work we most need and long to do– the work of Quadrant 2; the important work that calls for our deepest creativity which requires a non 9-1-1- environment to engage.

SOLUTIONS. . . . . . .  you first. mine are coming soon. ;0)