Mind like Puppy

David Allen of GTD fame talks about cultivating a mindset that makes you ready for anything. He calls it “mind like water.” It’s an idea from martial arts. It goes like this: if your mind is like water, you’re constantly in a relaxed state. When some disturbance comes along, you absorb and respond to it with ease. As David put it when I heard him talk about this concept last summer, water doesn’t tense up when it sees the stone coming. For getting things done fans, having a mind like water is nirvana; it’s the holy grail. Instead of getting tense over work, the mind-like-water GTDer simply absorbs and responds to the demands on his or her time. I don’t have a mind like water. I have a mind like puppy.

I realized my “mind like puppy” state the other day when I was watching our new fur-kid playing. If the puppy has two or more toys, he plays with each one in succession for about two seconds a piece. He finds each toy with great joy and pleasure, as if he’s never seen it before. He pounces on the toy with immense enthusiasm and just as he’s really getting into playing with it, he spies another. Wow, a new toy! And so he drops the one he’s got and rushes over to get the next one. The secret to my having a calm puppy, one completely absorbed and contented in his play is to give him only one toy. One toy means there’s nothing to draw his attention away and, lo, he plays contentedly for quite a long time without interruption.

My brain works just like my puppy’s except that I’m rushing from one idea or task to another. Just as I get really involved in one thing, something else vies for my attention. Look! Something else that needs to be done! And I’m off, pouncing on that new activity with the same enthusiasm my puppy has for his slobbery toys. And I’m no sooner into my newfound pursuit than something else shows up and I’m after it like a puppy on a tennis ball.

My puppy sometimes tries to multitask. He grabs his gigantic toy bone and then tries to stuff a tennis ball into his mouth as well. It doesn’t work so good; his mouth is too small to get around them both at the same time. Same here, too. Too many things in front of me at once leave me feeling frustrated. Why can’t I play with all my toys at once? Because there’s just no room for me to carry them all in my mind at the same time.

Puppy training, I’ve learned, is all about patience. I take it easy with correction and choose to use praise and treats instead. I reward our dogs when they do what I want them to and carefully fail to reinforce the behaviors I don’t want. I wish my mind would get the picture and fall into line as quickly as my dogs do. Still, I think there’s something to the one toy at a time rule. One toy, one task, one goal in front of me with no other stuff to distract me away from whatever it is I choose to work on. And of course, treats to reward me when I sit and stay and get something done.

Now, if you’ll excuse me—I have a slobbery tennis ball in my lap and a puppy at my elbow asking me for a game of fetch. In this case, multitasking would mean puppy slobber on my keyboard taking distraction to a whole new level. Besides, the advantage of having a mind like puppy means saying always being ready to play, right?