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  • picopause [xxviii]

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    Shaney Crawford

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    A “picopause” is a little loving nudge towards simplicity and serenity.

    Is this a blip or a glitch?

    When I am trying to get things done, any little thing might derail me, especially if the task is tiring, complex, or not something I want to be doing. When something stops me from making progress, I need to get out of my own head for a minute and try to figure out if I am dealing with a blip or a glitch.

    A blip is something that could potentially be ignored so that I can keep moving forward.

    A glitch is something that is actually preventing me from moving forward.

    Which one is it?

    I think I tend to mix these up and let blips stop me when I should just be ignoring them.

    *It has been so long since I have posted a picopause article, I forgot how to do it.

  • picopause [xxvii]

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    Shaney Crawford

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    A “picopause” is a little loving nudge towards simplicity and serenity.

    Yesterday, I suggested a way to make decisions easier when two (or more) people disagree. Today’s picopause is about making decisions easier for ourselves.

    Looking for the “still calm voice” means taking some quiet time to give your mind a chance to wander. By making a practice of sitting — literally just sitting and doing nothing else — for several minutes at least once a day, you can start to develop the ability to hear the “still calm voice”, and that voice will give you the strength/direction/insight that you need.

    In other words, people usually already know the right answer. They just need to be quiet for long enough to hear it.

    *This might sound pretty “woo-woo”. Okay, it definitely sounds woo-woo. I’ll give you that. But it actually does work. If you are at all skeptical, I urge you not to fall into the easy trap of “contempt prior to investigation”.

  • picopause [xxvi]

    Written by

    Shaney Crawford

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    A “picopause” is a little loving nudge towards simplicity and serenity.

    I'm a seven on chicken.

    You know how it can be really tiring when you have to spend more time/energy than necessary on relatively unimportant decisions like where to go for dinner tonight?

    I am listening to all of the This American Life podcast episodes from when it started back in 1995 and I found a neat idea for helping to navigate “difficult” decisions like that. It’s from Episode 289: Go Ask Your Father from May 2005. The relevant part of the story starts at around 43:04.

    The idea is that one person will give their opinion on what to do, and then the other person will give their opinion, and if there is a disagreement, they will both rate their opinion as to how strongly they feel about it. So, if one person says they want steak and the other says chicken, but the steak person says they are a five on the steak and the other says they are a seven on the chicken, they go with the chicken.

    I really like this idea because it allows a different element to show up in the conversation. Rather than having two equal people with two equally valid opinions, you get two equal people with two equally valid opinions, but maybe one of them cares more about the outcome than the other, so why not let them be the decider this time?

    I want to try this out sometime this week…

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