Anthony Ongaro

Amy and I decided to make this month’s Attention Collective theme slow living and stillness, and that choice might seem a bit odd at first. “Anthony,” I hear you say. “Haven’t we just gone through the longest involuntary slow down in recent history?” You’d be making a valid point.

The last year has been vastly different for everyone, but it undoubtedly has impacted us all. For many; it brought a lot of isolation and boredom. Parents with school-aged kids I’ve spoken with actually got busier too, managing homeschooling, daycare, and more on top of everything else.

For me and Amy, the year has been one of intense introspection and personal therapy work. It’s been the first time I’ve done therapy since a stint during my initial ADHD diagnosis at eleven years old. While it was a choice to dive into that, it made for a pretty rough year. Toss in the isolation of the pandemic and that we had just moved to a new state toward the end of 2019, and more often than not, I felt like a mess trying to keep it all together.

Here’s the thing, the only reason we’ve been able to dive into this incredibly life-changing-but-painful work is because we slowed down. After deciding to take a break from video production work early in 2020 and then the pandemic sealing the deal, it was inevitable. Between that work and speaking gigs, we’d been on 17 round-trip flights that year, and it wasn’t going well.  Even then, I knew we were running ourselves into the ground and something had to change.

If anyone can understand having resistance to slowing things down, I can assure you, it’s me. My brain works at 300 miles per hour, and sometimes goes that fast in seven different directions simultaneously.

When you add a constant (yet unconscious) feeling of needing to prove myself, do things the hard way, and a healthy dose of crippling perfectionism, things get… not slow.

So if you’re skeptical, I understand. I hope you’ll consider the following lessons and observations from my own journey into slowing down. Doing so is difficult work in itself, taking small changes over time, but the benefits do begin to outweigh the challenges as you go.

Slowing down increases awareness

The deeper I look, the more I find that the seemingly spontaneous actions in my life have an underlying motivator. Our attention speaks to us. A river of emotion carries us through life, and slowing down allows us to feel where we’re headed. Sitting with difficult emotions in the moment gives us the bandwidth to navigate them in mindful ways.

The faster I move, the less attention I pay to the nuances of what I’m feeling in a given moment. Without that awareness, my needs go unseen and tend to escalate, often with results that look a lot like the Twitch.

Slow living doesn’t necessarily mean doing less

An essential part of the ongoing effort to break my own twitches is to be more present in any given moment. The less present I am, the more frequently I get to a place where I need to cope with those built-up, ignored emotions. The Twitch provides a quick numbing and temporary escape from those feelings when it becomes an emergency.

It’s a desperate act from my attention to get the relief it needs once I’ve passed the “manage this in a healthy way” threshold.

For me, presence simply means feeling what I’m feeling, checking in with myself, and addressing what I need in a given moment without dismissing it. As you might imagine, the slower I move, the easier it is to do.

This presents a challenge, as there are only 24 hours in a given day. When our obligations demand more time and attention than we have available to fulfill them, going slow really isn’t an option.

I visualize this predicament as juggling balls being thrown into the air. With just one, you can toss it up and catch it consistently. You can even hold the ball for a while and take a break between throws. Add another, and the difficulty increases, but it’s still doable. At three, we’ve reached the reasonable, “most people can learn to do this” level where it still feels pretty natural. After that, things get tricky.

The more balls you add into the mix, the higher and harder you need to throw each ball to give yourself time to catch the others. The higher the throw, the higher the propensity for a small error to become a big one, making the ball harder to catch on its way back down. This follows the concept of Essentialism and its philosophy of creating margin in your life.

Slowing down doesn’t always require doing less, but it’s hard to imagine that doing so wouldn’t naturally lead to it. If slowing down allows fewer mistakes and more time to adjust to them when they do happen, why wouldn’t that be the most appealing option? Especially after trying the alternative for 20-some years, it really starts making sense.

Stillness isn’t all-or-nothing

We humans have a knack for taking things to extremes, don’t we? With our 30-day detoxes and meditation challenges, we live win or lose, pass or fail lives. Much of it is brought on by cultural norms of success, but we participate in it, too. I’m guilty of these types of initiatives myself; they’re not necessarily a bad thing.

I deeply understand the appeal; these types of lifestyle experiments can help guide us towards more intentional lives. They give us a chance to try out new things and see what works by making a commitment to sticking with it for a while. The problem arrives when this all-or-nothing mentality gets in the way of implementing important changes long term.

Stillness doesn’t need to happen on a meditation cushion, on a beach, or in a hammock. It doesn’t need weeks of planning nor a plane ticket, either. A moment of stillness can be a deep breath in and out while sitting in your car after pulling into your driveway. It can be a hug held ever-so-slightly longer than usual. Stillness can last for a single moment if it means waiting just one second longer before acting on an impulse you feel.

If you allow yourself to let go of the expectation of what slow living and stillness needs to be, you give yourself freedom to practice it in creative and helpful ways.

Moving quickly can be a way to avoid discomfort

If it has been difficult to let yourself rest, I understand. Much of my own drive to do, do, do has derived from a feeling of never being enough unless I was doing something. Even if that something wasn’t productive at all, I’d do anything to distract myself from bathing in the scalding waters of my own perceived shortcomings.

In this way, making efforts to slow down must be paired with self-compassion; it is essential to foster a non-judgmental attitude to cope with the discomfort that comes along with it. This isn’t personal development as much as it’s healing emotional trauma. It’s a long road with lots of bumps along the way, but small acts of self-compassion make these feelings more manageable as you go.

Stillness is never completely still

Another note for the “impossible expectations” category: there is no perfect level of stillness. We’re always breathing, ebbing, and flowing along with the currents of life. Our cells are constantly dying while new ones are created, with our bodies and minds in perpetual chaos at the atomic level. We are in constant motion.

Stillness can simply be something that looks like mindfulness. Focus on our breath while walking, doing chores, or choosing to do an activity in a way that decreases the pace of our lives. Stillness can be a simple decision to leave space in between meetings and activities when scheduling our day.  Give your future-self some compassion and room to breathe.

Make slow living your own

No matter what, there’s no one “right” way to slow down and practice stillness in your life. Everyone is different, and how I do it might look a lot different from you. Do what you can to ask yourself, “Is this working for me?” And “How would I do this if I could work in a way that is best for me?” When life presents an option A and option B, look for your own option C.

In an upcoming article, I’ll share more ideas on how I’ve been practicing this and include some thoughts for implementing them in your own life if you’d like to explore this further. Make sure to sign up for email updates below if you haven’t already.

As you walk out the front door, you do a mental check to make sure you’re not forgetting anything. “Keys, wallet, phone. Check.”

The classic three-tap check hasn’t failed you. The smell of fresh pinewood brushes your nose as you step down the stairs of your wooden porch. On the second step, it happens — again.

Your foot breaks through the wooden stair, sending you tumbling. It’s not like you stomped on it with all your strength; you expected more from the high-quality lumber you installed recently. It was more like stepping through a soggy saltine cracker, the board crumbling to pieces.

“What the hell!” You proclaim, frustrated. “I just replaced that step a few weeks ago. How can this be happening again?”

On your way back from work that day, you swing by the hardware store to pick up yet another board, this time even stronger wood than the last one. After dusting away the splinters, the new board and a couple of nails secure the step back in place. At least you’re getting better at replacing steps now, you figure. Good as new — but you’re frustrated. You’re tired of bruising your shin, twisting your ankle, and taking a spill every time this stupid thing breaks.

It’s not just the physical injuries, either.

There are all kinds of consequences when this happens. You end up late to wherever you were headed, you feel flustered and disheveled. You assume that your poor craftsmanship is to blame for why the step keeps breaking. Not only that, but you must be a pretty terrible carpenter for something so simple to break this many times. This shouldn’t be that hard.

[Read more…] about Seeing The Problem Beneath The Problems

There are a million different productivity gadgets out there, and unfortunately, none of them do the work for us. One day, I’m sure our artificially intelligent overlords will figure it all out. For now, no gadget out there will magically improve your productivity or reduce your anxiety overnight. I’m willing to be wrong though; if you know of one, I’d sure love to know about it.

At the same time, there are things that can be very helpful in the pursuit of a focused life. Cultivating a focus practice will always take effort, but there’s an opportunity to meet ourselves halfway by adapting our environment, too. Over the years, I’ve found helpful tools for a focused workspace that create an inviting and peaceful environment to get my best work done.

[Read more…] about Helpful Tools For A Focused Workspace

While Amy and I have been working at home together for a few years now, we found we needed to adjust our practices when the pandemic started. Pre-pandemic, working at home with your partner already came with its challenges. In a pandemic situation, all bets were off.

For much of the world, the pandemic quickly uprooted major facets of day-to-day life. There will be lasting shifts in our cultural landscape from what’s happened in the past year. Many companies are likely to continue going fully remote. More meetings will be done virtually than face-to-face compared to before. There’s a greater need for the home to be multi-faceted in its functionality and use.

Over the years, we’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t when you’re working at home with your partner. It really has been an evolution of sorts. We started out sitting side by side in a small “office” bedroom in our old Minneapolis home, to having separate work areas in the house now in Phoenix.

We decided to talk through our experience working from home together—what we’ve learned, and what we’d recommend to others in a similar situation. If you’re still adjusting to making work-from-home work-for-you, read on (or check out the video below).

Tips For Working From Home With Your Partner

1 / Intentionally create some separation

Especially if working from home is a relatively new arrangement, you’re likely not used to spending all day, every weekday, with your partner. It can be easy to fall into the habit of not giving each other enough space—especially when it used to be there by default.

Back in 2018 when we began working from home together, it seemed like a good idea to have all the equipment and desks in the same place. However, it didn’t work out so well in other areas as we’ll discuss more below. We have separate working spaces now, which has made it easier to focus and to do our best work.

As annoying as commutes can be, driving or biking to work and back each day is actually built-in decompression time. This transition time tends to go away completely when working from home. You can find other ways to transition from “work” to “home” mode so there’s more of a separation.

2 / Allow focus blocks throughout the day

As we all know here at Break the Twitch, uninterrupted focus is worth its weight in gold. It’s nearly impossible to focus effectively if you’re asking each other questions or sharing things every few minutes.

While it’s tempting to share with your partner the second you think of something, it’s better to establish boundaries and guidelines for focus blocks during the day.

60 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted work time is my recommendation. It usually takes around 15 minutes to even get into this type of focused flow, so do your best to not interrupt when your partner is in the zone.

It can help to create some simple, visible guidelines that make it easier for your partner to see that you’re doing focused work. Indicators like “having headphones on” or having a small colored light you can turn on when you’re focusing can help. Having a Time Timer can be a wonderful visual indicator with the benefit of showing when you’re expecting to be done.

Test and establish the rules that work best so you each can do your best work. While we can’t control everything, even the smallest distractions can pull us out from a deeply focused state. So work together to create specific guidelines that work well for each of you.

3 / Same team!

There will be times when things are more frustrating, and communication wires get crossed. It’s bound to happen. When exchanges become more casual and interspersed, communication tends to be less clear and concise.

During these situations, Amy and I like to use the callout, “Same team!” It’s a lighthearted, humorous reminder when we have temporarily forgotten that we’re both working towards the same thing.

Imagine two soccer players on the same team, running after the ball and elbowing each other—each preventing the other one from getting the ball. Then imagine a coach screaming, “SAME TEAM!!” from the sidelines at the top of her lungs.

During these times, it’s good to remember you’re both working toward the same goals (hopefully—at least, that’s the assumption here). Take time to step back and make sure you’re communicating fully and effectively. Misunderstandings about issues you’re actually aligned on are a huge waste of energy better used for almost anything else.

4 / Schedule meetings like you would in an office

Schedule specific times to sit down and discuss priorities, household tasks, or whatever else needs to be done. Try to keep the meetings as light as possible and slow the pace down. It helps a lot when you do what you can to make the meetings more fun and positive.

It feels overly formal, yes—but that’s actually the point. Especially if you’re working on the same projects or business together, work-life balance becomes a thing of the past. At times, we’ll inadvertently discuss deadlines while washing the dishes, or make decisions while eating dinner. It’s almost too easy for everything to all mesh together. The stress from never being fully “off” of work can build up over time and lead to burnout or exhaustion.

5 / Learn each other’s working styles and adapt

Each one of us has a different working style and energy flow during the day. One of the fun parts about being in a relationship is that opposites tend to attract, which means that working styles may likely differ. If you’re working at home with your partner, any differences between the two of you will need to be accommodated.

Some people need more of a 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, Pomodoro-type situation, while others work best in three-hour chunks. Psychologically, it may be difficult to work when you don’t see the other person working at the same time. Perhaps the other person is taking a mental break by playing a game or checking social media while you’re working. Do what you can to trust that the other person is doing what’s best for them.

Most importantly, understand that each person works differently, and trying to force your own working style upon someone else doesn’t really work. In the end, the other person works best if given the space to do so on his or her terms.

6 / Take it day by day.

There is a lot to consider and learn when adjusting to a new work-from-home situation, so remember to take it day by day. Do what you can to stay flexible and communicate in a kind and honest manner with the other person. It’s always best to approach any disagreements with curiosity, kindness, and creativity, rather than with annoyance or blame. No matter what happens, the situation will evolve over time, and you’ll adapt along with it!

If you know someone who could benefit from these tips on working at home with your partner, share this article!

On a crisp autumn day in the late ’80s, more than a hundred thousand people made their way towards the college football stadium about four blocks from my childhood home. Given that the town’s population practically doubled every home game, parking was a nightmare. Thousands of people always ended up walking past our house and apparently, I saw this as an opportunity.

I went out and collected fallen maple leaves from the front yard and tried to sell them to people walking by. It didn’t make a ton of sense, as there were thousands of them all over the ground—but that didn’t stop me. If I remember correctly, a very nice woman gave me five bucks for one. Which to this day is one of the reasons I always try to stop and buy something when kids are out selling lemonade or whatever. It’s never too early to encourage creative, opportunistic thinking.

Entrepreneurship really is for everyone—even if you never officially start a business or a company. It’s a great model for identifying problems and fostering optimism about creating solutions. And the value of entrepreneurship is so much greater than the pursuit of money.

Entrepreneurship… isn’t about money? Yeah, I said it.

At least for me, that has never been the most important part of it all. There’s so much joy and learning opportunity in taking a novel idea, trying to make it work, and seeing what the world had to say about it. I imagine I’ve fostered this mentality partly due to having ADHD and being a high sensitivity person. A lot of the things that were supposed to happen a certain way in school and my career didn’t really work for me, so I’ve had to find my own ways to bring it all together.

While hustling dried leaves to captive passers-by might have been my first venture, it certainly wasn’t my last. I’ve learned continuously from my entrepreneurial explorations since then, and have found a myriad of interesting ideas. One of those ideas, is an incredibly effective model in the startup world for developing new ideas that works flawlessly in developing new habits, too.

I’ve come to call it the Minimally Viable Action, a Break the Twitch concept adapted from something called Lean Startup methodology—the Minimally Viable Product.

The Minimally Viable Product, or MVP

Ideas are great, but they’re a dime a dozen; they don’t carry much value unless we do something with them. When an entrepreneur has an idea, she needs a way to see if that idea is actually viable—without immediately raising millions of dollars or investing years of life into building the idea when it, well… might not be that great.

An MVP is a simple and inexpensive version of the entrepreneur’s idea, created to test and get feedback that will be incorporated in the next prototype. The process is iterative and evolves with each version to make small improvements along the way. The team is able to change the idea more quickly, easily, and cost-effectively based on early audience feedback. It doesn’t make sense to spend months building a feature that no one ends up wanting, right? By the end of this process she, in theory, has something that works well, and that people actually want.

A few examples of this would be:
If you have a big idea for a new type of electric car, start by applying the idea to an electric skateboard. You’ll learn if your concept for propulsion is practical, and what challenges might arise at a larger scale.

Perhaps you want to start a business in the agricultural industry, creating a new hybrid fruit by combining an orange and an apple. Driven by the deep desire to finally put all the comparisons to rest, you start looking at farms to buy to create your vision. Instead, start with an inexpensive, fast-growing fruit like raspberries or strawberries in your backyard.

When you start any project like this, the biggest problem is not yet knowing what you don’t yet know. You can spend years theorizing about this, but it’s more effective to test the waters and learn by following the process.

New Habits Are Just Like Big Ideas

Habits tend to carry a lot of weight for people—they did for me at one point, too—but I’ve learned to put a lot less pressure on the word. To me, habits are just how we show up in our lives with regularity. They’re the little things we do consistently over long periods of time—and we’re doing them whether we intend to or not. As the years pass, they become the way we spend our lives.

If you do something for five minutes each day, you’ll look back on a lifetime of doing that thing; not any one day in particular, but a long streak of color in the blur of a life well-lived.

With life being how it is though, starting and maintaining any positive habit can feel like an incredible burden. There’s a lot of deep human psychology at work that causes this, and we all have different reasons. For me, a big part of the resistance I’ve felt is the perceived distance between where I am and where I want to be. If the initial resistance didn’t get me, the pressure I put on myself to consistently see improvement eventually would. To make it work, we need to think like an entrepreneur—both in the way we try and the way we fail. Here’s how to do that.

Introducing Minimally Viable Action, or MVA

While modern culture has conditioned us to expect quick results and overnight success, that would be like trying to design a car without any experience. There are so many variables at play, so we need to start smaller and figure out what challenges might arise.

A minimally viable action is the smallest and easiest-to-do action of the habit you are trying to form.

With a Minimally Viable Action, we have the ability to test out a new habit just like it’s a simple lifestyle experiment. This allows us to see what issues come up, make adjustments, and continue on.

You don’t want mile two of a marathon to be the place where you discover that your new running shoes are rubbing in all the wrong places. That sounds terrible, and I doubt anyone would be encouraged to do another one after that experience.

To effectively use the Minimally Viable Action, you really need to boil down the new habit to its essence. Make it so incredibly simple that it becomes the easiest possible thing to do while still doing the thing you set out to do. A skateboard isn’t a car, sure—but it is a four-wheeled electric propulsion system designed to transport a human from A-to-B. If I had to design a full electric car from scratch, I would probably never bother starting because the thought is entirely overwhelming. A skateboard on the other hand? Complicated, but seems manageable, right?

By creating a minimally viable action, you’re increasing your chances of actually doing it—even when unexpected things come up during the day. It’s creating a goal with such little resistance that it’s hard not to do.

How To Build Habits That Last

1 / Create A Minimally Viable Action 

The first step is to consider the new habit you want to build and break it down into a small, easy action. The most common mistake with habits is going too big, too fast and burning out or running into unforeseen problems. If the MVA you’re choosing feels silly, you’re on the right track.

For example, if your new habit is to exercise more, but you’ve been almost completely inactive lately, the MVA would be to put on your sneakers and take two steps outside. That’s it. Maybe take some breaths of fresh air while you’re out there.

If you want to eat more vegetables, the MVA would be to have a few pieces of broccoli with your lunch. The goal isn’t to do as much as you can today; it’s to have enough in the tank to still do the action tomorrow, the next day, and so on. If you stuff yourself full of veggies on day one, especially if you haven’t developed a taste for them, the last thing you’re going to want to eat the next day is vegetables.

We’re not going for results today—we’re going for paradigm shift.

2 / Test, Improve, Repeat 

After you create the minimally viable action, the next phase would be to test, improve, and repeat. Just like an entrepreneur would test an MVP, you’re going to test the MVA you’ve created.

A week or two into it, you may choose to increase (or reduce) the difficulty, change some aspect of your habit, or try something else entirely! Continue to skew on the side of keeping it simple, even if you’re scaling up. This phase is all about testing and improving the MVA as you go along, so you stay consistent with the habit.

3 / Pivot!

Let’s say it’s really not working out, and something has to change. Back in entrepreneurship land, when a minimally viable product is presented to an audience and receives poor feedback, or a better opportunity appears, the entrepreneur doesn’t give up. She can always pivot and create a different solution for the same problem or use the MVP to solve a different problem entirely.

Wrigley Gum is an incredible story of pivoting: Did you know Wrigley’s Gum started as a business selling soap?

William Wrigley Jr. offered premiums as an incentive to buy his soap, such as baking powder. Later in his career, he switched to the baking powder business, in which he began offering two packages of chewing gum for each purchase of a can of baking powder. The popular premium, chewing gum, began to seem more promising, prompting another switch in product focus.

Wikipedia

Not only will you find the challenges by trying something out, but you’ll find the opportunities that come with it too!

If you realize that walks aren’t the right exercise for you because of a heel issue, perhaps riding a bike would be a better fit. If you find out that you hate steamed broccoli, try cooking it another way. Better yet, try literally any other vegetable—there are so many of them! It might just be a green protein smoothie in the morning that does the trick. Trying out different solutions will help you find something you enjoy, so the habit stays around for the long haul. When things get boring, switch it up and find something new that serves a similar purpose.

There’s really no need to be rigid in our approach to building habits that become the way we live.

When building a habit, remember everyone is different. What works for one person may not work for someone else. Remember there is always a way to stay curious and look for creative solutions along the way. Keep it up, and you’ll find what works for you, too. Even the best products and greatest ideas have a lifespan. When you get bored, get creative and find the next thing that helps you stay engaged.