How to Be Brilliantly Unfocused: A Guide to Pottering About
The Joy of Getting Nothing in Particular Done (While Actually Getting Everything Done)
Pottering about is the un-acknowledged heroine of getting things done - peacefully, delightfully.
In pottering about mode you do things , but only as a response to the things around you, only as the jobs call out to you. A potterer will do something for as long as it still seems like a good idea to do it, and drop it when interest drops away.
With no agenda, no checklist, nothing is ‘ruined’ when you switch tasks without finishing. There can be no failure in pottering mode.
Well, when pottering you can break or ruin something, but it’s not as if you have failed at crossing things off your list and falling short of all the things you thought you ought to have done.
Gardening is the great teacher of the skill of pottering about. As you are deadheading the roses, you spot a patch of weeds, then you see the lemon tree needs a bit of a prune, so you flit about the garden happily a bit like a bumble bee, getting the nectar from one little job then moving on when the nectar is gone.
The work you are doing automatically adjusts itself to the energy you have and the pleasure you are feeling.
Every task that actually gets finished is a bonus, not a necessity. Or even a possibility, really - in a garden there will always be more things to do and that isn’t a problem, it’s just in the nature of a garden.
The top-down, linear processes of the mind are not engaged in pottering about. It is a bottom-up, visually responsive part of your mind that decides what is important to do. And spending time in this visual, bodily-engaged mode makes life better, less anxious.
The Shed and the Studio as well as the Garden are places where pottering holds power. I think a key to good pottering about is having interesting projects scattered around the space, projects you can see and visually respond to. In the shed or the studio, you can tinker away at one contraption until the next one calls out to you. And learning to hear when the objects you make are calling out to you is very much the work of art making.
Those spaces are defined and enclosed - you can only see things related to that particular world. Other things don’t intrude. With the boundaries built into these spaces, your brain doesn’t need to work hard, doesn’t use up scarce willpower, to keep you in the zone.
In Pottering Mode, the mind has time to slowly integrate and process knowledge, slowly connect your thoughts and the environment together.
New ideas are happy to jump into your lap on a pottering day.
I’m thinking about all this as I re-organise my studio. I have an extra room to work in now. It’s a warm indoors room so I can do writing, journalling and business things inside and messy, splashy painting and ink making in the outside studio. I’m so happy! But as I sort things around between the two work rooms, I am trying to make sure they both support pottering about as much as my garden does.
And I’ve created a kind of defined pottering space in my computer, with Notion. These pages all show the zones I do computer-based work in and I can pretty much just open Notion and potter about in these sections, just as I feel like it and end up with plenty of work done. and importantly, not feel exhausted and frustrated at the end of it.
And it seems possible that just enjoying what you are doing makes you productive.
I think for years when I was younger I did nothing but pottering. There was a kind of dark side - I never finished anything. Ever. I would flit from unfinished degree to an unfinished novel, random job to the next random job. It has been a long journey for me to find out how to enter Finishing Mode, how to actually make the push to hit the publish button. How to not wriggle away and just potter around for longer and a bit longer. To meet the fear and pain that come up when I try to put work out there.
So I seem to need to push into Finishing Mode on some kind of regular basis, with some level of determination. But once I am there, it seems too easy to become obsessive, self-critical and harsh. That’s when I need to go back out to the garden. And remind myself to just potter about.
Agree, I love a good potter myself!
👍Terriffic. That’s owning it.