Do the Next Thing – TPW400

Planning is an important part of a productive life and a frequent topic of discussion on this podcast. This week, though, we’ll talk about another perspective on living a meaningfully productive life.

Planning matters, but sometimes you just have to do the next thing

It's hard for me to fathom that I’ve reached episode 400 of this podcast. That's 400 times I’ve sat down to plan, outline, record, and publish my thoughts about productivity and a meaningful life, or talked with other women who shared their experiences and insights with us. When I went into my closet on July 1, 2014, to record that first episode, I couldn’t have imagined I would still be doing this 400 times later.  

The truth is that although I talk about the importance of planning and living intentionally, I didn’t have a plan for this podcast’s future when I launched it nearly 8 years ago. 

Similarly, I haven’t had a long-term plan for my life. If I have a plan, it’s always just been this: Do the next thing. 

I like to plan. I like certainty and knowing what to expect. But as hard as I’ve tried, I can’t live my life that way. In the short term, sure. I can plan a to-do list or a day or a weekend or a week. But long term, I can’t. Maybe I lack the imagination it takes to envision the possibilities or the discipline to stick with the plan I’ve developed. 

“Do the next thing” works for a life. It also works on a very practical level when you have too many things to do and not enough time to do them, or when a crisis has thrown your life and heart into disarray. 

Do the next thing

For those of us who value certainty and predictability, who want to have a plan and know what it is, this can be a hard approach to accept.

Here is a quote from a post on The Marginalian, a blog and weekly digest written by Maria Popova (Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of “Do the Next Right Thing”) 

"We long to be given the next step and the route to the horizon, allaying our anxiety with the illusion of a destination somewhere beyond the vista of our present life.

But the hardest reality to bear is that death is the only horizon, with numberless ways to get there — none replicable, all uncertain in their route, all only certain to arrive. This is why there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. And this is why each and every one of them, even the most seemingly actualized, trembles with a staggering degree of doubt and confusion. Uncertainty is the price of beauty, and integrity the only compass for the territory of uncertainty that constitutes the landmass of any given life.

And so the best we can do is walk step by next intuitively right step until one day, pausing to catch our breath, we turn around and gasp at a path. If we have been lucky enough, if we have been willing enough to face the uncertainty, it is our own singular path, unplotted by our anxious younger selves, untrodden by anyone else.”

A song from the Frozen 2 movie talks about this same thing:

https://youtu.be/kFkClV2gM-s

~ Songwriters: Kristen Anderson-Lopez / Robert Lopez. The Next Right Thing lyrics © Walt Disney Music Company

Michael Sliwinski, developer of the excellent digital task manager Nozbe, has this to say about this song:

“Anna is right - our duty to ourselves and our community is always “to do the next right thing”

In the post on The Marginalian (<a href="https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/12/07/carl-jung-next-right-thing/" target="_blank" r...