At some point in my house’s 112-year history, someone installed thick, white, nine-inch high baseboards that mostly act as highly visible shelves for dirt.
Whenever I try to clean these baseboards, I quickly get annoyed and discouraged. There are seemingly miles of them, running in and out of closets, behind furniture, and underneath power cords and dangling spider plants.
Unlike sweeping, vacuuming, or dishwashing, there’s no stable posture from which to clean baseboards. It’s always an act of ongoing contortion. Each obstacle interrupts the flow of what is already an awkward task.
The other day, however, I cleaned my office, including its baseboards, with none of the usual struggle. The difference was that this time I cleaned them without the entering the psychological state of trying to clean them. I skipped the whole idea of trying.
This mental shift happened because, as I had determined earlier that day, I must have a clean home office again in order to get anything done in the work-from-home era. Things were bad. A fortress of books had accreted on my desk, and nothing had been wiped or dusted since spring. I didn’t even go in there anymore. Productivity had reached trough levels, and my semi-permanent outpost at the kitchen table was an obvious factor in keeping things dysfunctional.
The necessity of getting the office back to spotless meant baseboard-cleaning could not be avoided, and so I brought a different verb to the task. Rather than try to clean them, I intended to, and that made all the difference.
When your labor is guided by intention, obstacles do not annoy or dissuade. The cloth will simply go beneath or around, as it must. The potted plant will be moved and wiped behind. The body will assume whatever positions need assuming. The intention ensures this.
In any apparent attempt to do a thing, there may or may not be a real intention to do that thing. If you intend to do a task, it will be done unless it can’t be. Trying to do a task means almost the opposite: if there’s a way it can remain undone, it probably will.
The tryer fixates on the difficulty of the task, and hopes for relief in the form of success. The intender fixates on success and navigates any difficulty arising on the way.
Why try when you can intend? Well, tries are much cheaper than intentions, and they do accomplish things — just not usually the task itself.
We learn by the end of toddlerhood that the verb try doesn’t mean, “Wholeheartedly attempt,” but rather, “Show you are not entirely avoiding the task.”
“You didn’t even try it!” they say. So you try the green beans and spit them out and the adults are satisfied.
In such instances, the task of eating your vegetables or cleaning your room was neither accomplished nor seriously attempted. However, a performative facsimile of intention is usually enough to silence any nagging, demonstrate that the task is too difficult, or even assuage your own guilt about not bothering.
Here’s my uneducated hypothesis: the childhood politics of trying can leave adults with the habit of sometimes engaging in tasks without a real intention to complete them.
That might explain my complex relationship to baseboard upkeep, and why you often get out your textbooks but don’t actually study — and why neither of us are necessarily lazy for it.
If you happen to be a superachiever, this distinction between trying and intending might sound absurd, since you are always intending. That is why you’re a superachiever.
However, if doing and achieving seems more complex for you – if, like I do, you struggle to get certain ordinary tasks done, you might benefit from periodically asking yourself, “Do I actually intend to do this right now?”
If the answer is yes, then get to it. If the answer is no, you’ve gained two things: clarity about why you’re struggling, and a chance to form a real intention, and finally move towards the prize.
***
Photo by Pan Xiaozhen
Beautifully written, helpful and true. Perfect timing, too. Will be giving this more thought. One of your best. Thank you.
Thanks Judy
In England we call them skirting boards. Presumably because (as you mention your old house, ours was built in 1880) – ladies skirts wafted over them and kept them dust free. Perhaps?!
*takes notes*
Well I guess I’m off to the thrift store
David, what happened to Maria Kondo????
Entropy
A good change in perspective. Thanks for sharing.
There’s an article at https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/mistaking-intention-for-behavior/ which finds that sometimes we remember an intention as a completed task. I think this plays along with your article in that when we ‘try’ and do something we already expect to fail, and when we ‘intend’ to do something we put in the mental effort to ‘justify’ it to ourselves and sometimes the ‘justification’ alone is enough – and we remember the task as ‘completed’.
I, for one, have built up a stack of interesting books to read, but now I have bought them the urge to ‘try’ read them has weakened to inaction. I suspect that ‘intention’ needs to reflect the purpose of doing (clean and tidy my room so I can get back to writing again’) rather than achieving a modest state (clean baseboards, unrelated to my aims in life).
Hmm that is an interesting article… I don’t think I have these false memories of having done things, perhaps because I’m so used to not getting things done that I would never assume I actually did the thing in question.
I do think that the verb “try” flirts with an intention to fail, or at least an intention other than doing the thing (such as appeasing someone who’s trying to get you to do the thing).
Books are a good example of trying vs intending. Yes I want to have read The Brothers Karamazov, and expect to *try* to read it. But do I intend to read it?
Read The Brothers Karamazov. You will never regret it.
“Do… or do not. There is no try.”
This is really the most useful idea in the whole saga
I was just going to post that – Yoda’s famous words! Thanks.
I’ve noticed for awhile that when I begin thinking about a project, large or small, I seem to start by putting up obstacles between myself and actually doing the work. I usually work out these kinks pretty quickly and get on with the task at hand but this habit of overthinking even small tasks is annoying. Perhaps a stronger focus on intention as you suggest will help me to “Just Do It”….. Thanks David!
I am the same, except with the working out the kinks part. I mostly just do the obstacle-making and overthinking part.
Great piece. But what inner dialog or position converts a try into an intention? Aren’t they both just thoughts?
Good question. Just asking, “Do I intend to do this?” challenges you to either form an intention now, or come to terms with your lack of intention to actually do the thing. In my experience, it shifts your view of the task from a problem to a possibility, illuminating whatever incentives are there to take intentional action. If it’s not there, it’s not there, but if it is there, you’ll probably see it.
breaking my comment silence to say that I fully expected the conclusion here to be that you intend to remove the baseboards from your office.
Hahahah that’s much more work than cleaning them
I’m working on a full post about a similar idea that helped me get out of being a person with a perpetually unkempt house.
I realized I was uninformed about how to clean, so I decided to stop “cleaning my house” and just clean one room and use it as my “practice room” for cleaning.
To my surprise, once this mental shift took place that I wasn’t “cleaning the house” but just practicing, and limiting to one room, it made the task so much easier, psychologically. All resistance dropped away.
I suspect it was a sneak attack on the Ego, which no longer perceived the identity shift as an attack on its sovereignty, because it was framed as “practice”.
The Ego’s story of “I’m a slob” could be maintained alongside the new cleaning behaviors that contradicted it. Cognitive dissonance: averted.
In particular, my inner narrative was that I wasn’t “cleaning THIS house”, rather I was practicing for when I owned my own house. Being a renter probably helped that story.
Eventually, with enough “practice”, the Ego (as it always does) began to identify with this new set of behaviors, and then of course incorporated them into its identification storyline.
Now, the mental momentum has shifted and the cognitive dissolve works in my favor, with any behavior that contradicts the new “keep things tidy” mantra being seen as an invasive threat by the Ego.
Thanks for this George. Identity does complicate everything we do, and in cases where an action is “out of character” for us, it adds a whole additional layer of challenge. We’re not just inexperienced at Task X, but we might feel like we’re not cut out for Task X or will never be someone that has a handle on Task X. That alone can be such a hindrance that we don’t even get to the challenge of the task itself. Well done for reframing the cleaning to circumvent the ego issue.
this resonates for me! please sent a link to that post when it is done!
This creates the next step for a practice I’ve developed for myself:
When I think or say that I’m “trying” to do something, I ask myself, “Am I really trying or just wishing?” That is, am I actually trying to do the thing, or am I merely wishing it were done? Am I *trying* to create a change, or am I only wishing the situation were different?
I’ve found that making this distinction often gives me the ability to either make a genuine effort to accomplish something or accept that I don’t need to and stop fixating on it. I look forward to taking this next step to reframe my effort as intention the next time I decide I’m actually “trying” to do something. Thanks, as always, for your insight!
I definitely resonate with this, having experienced a lot of toxic wishing in my life. I think wishing is a sign of lack of intention, a lack of a sense of agency.
Ethan, I think this is true not only of tasks we “should” complete, but also of interests and hobbies. When my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer one of the first things he said was “i should have bought a bigger boat”. He’d had a little boat for years and only took it out once or twice a year at most. He liked the idea of being a boating person a whole lot more than the reality of it. There’s so much inner conflict here. Am I really a person who likes X, or do I just wish that I was??
at the first paragraph I thought, ignore the dust, dust the baseboards (get on with it) or remove the baseboards and bevel the top edges so the accumulation is less to non-existent.
a bit further on I recalled Master Yoda, as did Valerio.
i need to re-examine the definitions of try, intend and do
Thank you David for more mind fodder.
The top edges are routered, but there is still a flat area and dust still clings. Even with fully beveled top edges the dust would still settle and cling, as it does on other angled surfaces. So I think there is no avoiding the necessity of upkeep, but that’s probably a good thing.
Once again, David, you nailed another great concept and have given me clarity. Thank you! “Trying” appeases the other person and yourself but unless you have intention we are on the wheel of unkept promises that is replayed day after day.
Appeasing yourself is definitely one of the many hidden motives in “trying.” Neglecting something outright feels bad. But if you know you’ve tried to deal with it, you feel less bad, regardless of whether there was any real intention to deal with it.
This reminds me of the difference between amateurs and professionals. Amateurs practice til they get it right. Professionals practice til they can’t get it wrong. It seems that professionals intend while amateurs try. I suspect that focusing on intending repeatedly would cause long term increases in effectiveness with an accompanying decrease in efficiency, which seems like a fair trade.
I like this framing. Stephen Pressfield talks a lot about the amateur vs professional mentality in The War of Art, which always makes me realize I am not a professional anything really
Great article. But let me tell you about how I clean my baseboards. Made by Swiffer it’s a 30” long tool and you slide on a machine-washable duster on the end. You barely have to bend over and you can walk along dusting baseboards. As an engineer, sometimes you need the right approach, whether an actual tool or a mental one.
Ah! I will check this out
I noticed the lack of results when my partner would say he would “try “ to do something I’d asked him to do (and which he clearly did not want to do!)—now I frequently say “Trying is lying” to both him AND myself, as we are both clearly guilty of this runaround. I always come back to the thought that only ACTION is what creates results, so I just focus on taking the first small step (get out that duster!) which naturally propels further action. (An object in motion stays in motion.). I also make sure to mentally congratulate myself for completing something that seemed difficult or boring. I do this for projects that may take days or something as easy as emptying the dishwasher. Approval is a nice reward, even, and maybe especially, if it’s just my own! P.S. Do I regret installing fancy wainscot and baseboards with multiple grooves and shelves that act as dust-catchers? YES! I envy you your simple baseboards. (Wink.)
I’m still often surprise myself with how much of a psychological difference is made in that first action. I often have immense resistance to writing. There are days when I feel like I’ve been struggling to write for hours, and then I realize that I haven’t even opened the word processor yet — the resistance is all mental, and has nothing to do with the task. When I do open Word, a major part of the resistance disappears. This pattern is so predictable and yet it constantly fools me.
BTW wainscotting is awesome but I am glad I don’t own any
Once upon a time, my friend Joanne held out a box of kleenex and said “try to take a kleenex”. As I reached for it and touched one, she said, “NO! TRY to take it”. I ‘tried’ a couple more times, touching the kleenex. Then I got it. This was before Yoda…Ever since then, when people say “I’ll try” to come over, or “try” to do such and such, I realize there is no intention. The words “uncommitted speaking” come to mind. At least now with Covid, certain folks who have been known to say “we should get together for….” whatever it is, doesn’t happen ;-) I’m going to start with a small space (as someone mentioned, above) as I’ve been beating myself up about what seems like messes and incompletions in every room including the garden.
“Should” and “try” seem to be cousins… they both imply that it’s appropriate to do a particular thing, but also hedge against any responsibility to do the thing
What works for me in dealing with routine, annoying tasks like dusting and other cleaning tasks is to set a timer. Rather than trying, (or intending) to get a job “done”, I set a timer for 15 minutes (for dusting) and then just carry out the task until the timer rings. I do this on a weekly schedule – each week I start from where I left off last time. No pressure to accomplish any specific amount of work; I just focus my attention on it (sometimes even meditatively) during that time. Works like magic for me.
I am starting to use this method on a daily basis now, and it does really work for me. One source of resistance towards tasks is their open-endedness — you don’t know how big the task is or what it entails. But if the task is timed, it’s finite and foreseeable to some extent. Then of course once you’re in it you want to keep going.
I set timers as well. It’s so helpful. Another thing I do that really helps is to time myself doing a specific task. Because the cleaning always seems so daunting and time consuming and I feel it will impede my enjoyment of my day off. But it takes less than 5 minutes to swish the toilet, scour the sink, and do the mirror in the bathroom. And I timed myself sweeping and then mopping my kitchen floor…only 15 minutes!
Once I realized that specific tasks were actually pretty quick to knock out, I realized that I could do them on my workdays either before or after work and maintain my days off as no housework days!
I do something similar! Committing to working on something for a short period of time helps me resist the thousand and one distractions I will gravitate to when I am “trying” to clean or write. I kind of have to fool my ADHD brain when I want to accomplish anything that feels big and intimidating!
This is a good trick. I know it as the Pomodoro Method. It does help keep you focused on completing the current task.
I’ve read many an Intention pieces and this by far is my favorite. And, all the comments were worthy of notes in the journal. Thank you, once again, for opening an avenue to new thought.
Thanks Allyson. Agreed on the excellent comments today
Wow! This literally came the morning I needed to be even more clear and impactful to me. I LOVE when Life works this way! Thank you. One of my many favorite articles of yours! Thank you for sharing with us! Wish you were my neighbor! :-)
Thanks Erika. Wishing you good intentions today
Great post! One of my favorite things about yoga is setting an intention at the beginning of class. I’ve tried to incorporate that into my personal daily routine as well. I always thought of the distinction as being focused on the intention rather than the outcome and learning to have equanimity with whatever the result is. But I never thought about the distinction between trying vs intending and how the ‘trying’ is what causes the sense of struggle. I will definitely keep this in mind next time I find myself struggling with something.. which will probably be later today :)
At one time I did that with my meditation sessions — creating an intention not to get frustrated with distraction, or to explore challenging emotions instead of resisting them. To the degree I can remember, it works!
Thanks, David. You put into words what I have just recently been doing out of instinct. In working to get into remission with a painful addiction, I realized when I said I was going to TRY not to engage in this behavior today, I was already admitting defeat. However, saying I WILL NOT engage in this behavior did not feel right either because if I did give into my impulse, I would see myself as a failure and begin a very negative cycle of self-defeating thoughts. Using the word intend is the solution I have been seeking!
Try is such a red flag, isn’t it? The problem is our thoughts aren’t always clearly verbal, so we might not realize we’re trying rather than intending.
Hello David,
Loved your blog today. When you spoke of intention I thought about shopping. Over the years I have purchased many things ‘to do sometime’. I have learned to change the question to one of intention: “Do you intend to use – wear – fix – this today?” Using intention when shopping has saved me a lot of money. I may just try this with housework! Thanks, Susan
That insight is a part of the depth year concept — it becomes clear at some point that we don’t have the capacity to intend to make use of everything we’ve bought. There isn’t enough time and energy, let alone intention. It would be great if we could question our intentions right there in the store.
I had more difficult with this post than others. I think it comes down to your relationship with the word “intend” and whether you are thinking in a mindset of
“Intentions dont matter, actions do”
Or “declare your goals to yourself so you know what you’re doing” i.e more in a “will a thought to manifest an action” mindset.
I suppose both words have a lot of connotations. In the way I’m using it here, intentions alone do matter. There’s a meaningful difference between intending to do something and not being able to, and trying to do it without really intending to.
It’s not so much declaring your goals to yourself so you know what you’re doing, it’s questioning your relationship to the task. Do you intend to make this particular thing happen, or are you engaging with the task without that intention, perhaps for other reasons?
Adding, I have a more tepid relationship with the word “intention” perhaps because sometimes I’m a dreamer and have intentions that dont manifest. So I see the word as more troubled for me, and this through me off throughout the whole post.
I used this tip just now, with great results. I had a huge pot of stock I made this morning that needed straining and ladling into containers for storage. It’s a hot, messy, tedious job and I don’t enjoy doing it. As you suggested, I set an intention to get it done rather than the struggling/trying I was doing, et voila! Several nice containers of stock that will get used in delicious dishes. Thank you for this essay — the timing was perfect.
It seems to work very well with tasks that are psychologically intimidating but are physical in nature. Once the body is doing the task the mind doesn’t have so much to say.
David, thank you. I’ve been reading Raptitude for a while now. I have a couple of comments and 1 suggestion.
Check out Fly Lady (http://www.flylady.net); her cleaning system, which I use, is a method of keeping the house clean via 1 zone a week. It works for busy people. I like her attitude, too.
I also have a home office; I call it my Study in memory of my late father. His Study was my favorite room as a child. I used to do my homework in there while he worked. I use a combination of Fly Lady’s system and my own to keep my Study organized and functioning. There’s a lot of Dad in there, and quite a bit now of me, too. My latest addition is a library table where I can read, vote, and go through mail. I call my Study the house’s engine room. Now go enjoy your home office again.
Ah this looks great. Thanks Alice. I remember the Fly Lady from her suggestion of shining the sink each night before bed. I will try the zones approach.
I love this. I’ve been trying to be more conscious of my mental state. And a lot of times I’ll sit down to work, nothing happens, and I don’t know why. Some part of me must have not intended to work in the first place and was just waiting until a text or email would come through to distract me. Thanks for this post. Good food for thought.
I hope it works for you. I’ve come to believe there are layers and layers of subconscious and semi-conscious influences on what we end up doing, and we can make many of them more conscious. Questioning whether there is a real intention present is one example.
I think your approach will work for me! Also I agree you Wd enjoy Brothers Karamazov. Thank you. Ps for some reason when I signed up I thought you were David Byrne!
Thanks for the boot to the head! (Apologies to the Frantics.)
I love the idea of having completed tasks, creative work, etc but often do not follow through. The ego is easily satisfied, it seems! For me, “trying” is often unconscious, as is a lack of “intention.” Two sides of the same anti-motivational coin?
I will give “I am doing this because I can” a shot as my new motto. Being motivated enough to care about completing things is a struggle these days. Just doing it because you can is perhaps a way of cutting out the need for motivation or for the task itself having sufficient value to warrant the effort.
Sadly, “nothing is any good” is a refrain that our culture seems to be pushing these days. The down side of a post-modern, “all is relative” skepticism, I suppose. Cheers.
Haha! Please continue to think I’m David Byrne
I like the distinction between “intention” and “attempt,” the latter including half-hearted efforts. (It reminds of how some project workers, in setting out their goals for the coming month, will include things like “to begin x” — a red flag for the manager who realizes that just opening a file can count as “to begin.”)
I was particularly reminded by a passage in “A Life of One’s Own,” by Marion Milner, a book that I think you in particular would enjoy. She writes on page 91:
/quote
I began to realize what a lot there was to be learnt about the unrecognized parts of oneself from observation of unhappy children. For instance, I once found myself making a quite unnecessary fuss over some difficulty, and managed to catch the idea that if I showed enough distress someone would come and help me. Actually the problem was, like most of the difficulties of adult life, one which no one else could solve for me, so this observation gave me a clue as to a possible cause of many of my ineptitudes and confessions of failure. As a child, if I cried and said, ‘This is too difficult, I can’t do it’, someone came and helped me. Now I found myself one day unwilling to admit I was happy because of a vague sense that I might thereby forgo some advantage, might give up my claim to that special attention which seemed to be the prerogative of the miserable.
/endquote
This quote, uh, hit home. I will seek a copy of Milner’s book.
Totally agree. Have had the same and or similar experience.
Great read.
Something related I’ve noticed:
When I’m describing something in the future tense, I often fail to actually do it at all. Saying “I’ll try to clean my bathroom tonight” isn’t worth much, because odds are I won’t even make it as far as trying. (At best I will probably try to try.) Even if I honestly intend to do it, I still might not, because intentions can change easily.
However, if I’m really actually going to do something, I use the present tense, even to refer to future actions. For example, if I’m summoned for jury duty on August 3rd, then I legally have no choice except to go when the date comes. I’m not going to say “I’ll try to go to jury duty on August 3rd,” because that’s far too weak of a commitment to upholding a legal obligation.
Instead, I’ll say something like “I have jury duty on August 3rd,” or “I’m going to jury duty on August 3rd,” or perhaps “I have to go to jury duty on August 3rd.”
In each of those sentences, I use a present tense verb to describe an action that I won’t actually do until the future. That’s because, when I’ve internalized that I really must do something and will do something, there’s no use in thinking of the future as a separate, hypothetical place, or “future me” as some separate person.
Sorry for the long and confusing comment. I wrote it because I think it might possibly be a useful trick for other readers who are so deeply in the grasp of procrastination that “intending” to do something isn’t powerful enough to work, and who use the future tense as a subconscious procrastination tool.
Thanks Pipsterate. This makes sense to me. The way we language things, even to ourselves, makes a huge difference in terms of our psychological relationship to a task.
This is kind of besides the point, but the hose extension on my vacuum plus a brush attachment cleans baseboards in a single pass — and I don’t even have to stoop!
I actually quite like this chore — it feels like tracing a giant drawing of my house, and the results are immediately visible.
Thanks for the tip. That would actually work great in my case.
Years ago in therapy I was complaining about really trying but not being able to put my plans forward. My therapist told me to try to get up from the couch where I sat. So I got up. And she said: “not, that’s getting up. I told you to TRY to get up”. Learned that lesson right then and there.
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