O'Keeffe Woodworks – Lat: 40.1 / Long: -105.0 / Elev: 2168 m

2017: The Gift of Clarity

31 December, 2017 by Geoff O'Keeffe Leave a Comment

I have begun to see year-end essays lamenting 2017 as our worst year ever, a “just add water” dystopian prequel, the heart-breaking denouement in the last episode of “America The Tragedy” on Netflix. I would like to offer an alternative view. Not to inspire hope, mind you. Hope is not a strategy and hope usually … [read more]

Meditation On Not Being, At All

9 December, 2017 by Geoff O'Keeffe Leave a Comment

I just received my card in the mail. It’s official. I am now old. Bona fide, as Ulysses Everett McGill would say. In another year, I will receive a second card further confirming the inevitable. I am at peace with this other than that, relative to my earned benefits, it feels like I have been … [read more]

How Do We Go Back?

4 December, 2017 by Geoff O'Keeffe Leave a Comment

Since the Greek philosophers and then, reiterated over the millennia since, the concept of “the common good” has been a prevailing notion in civilised societies. Despite variants and contradictions, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Rousseau and Madison, among many others, all spoke or wrote of this concept as being the highest order within the polity, … [read more]

Halloween

31 October, 2017 by Geoff O'Keeffe Leave a Comment

On Halloween, I came as an anachronism. I passed myself in the hallway and felt wistful, trying to remember. The leaves were red and they crunched under foot.

Distress Signal

26 October, 2017 by Geoff O'Keeffe 1 Comment

Open letter to the Democratic Party Attention: Tom Perez, Keith Ellison, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and other potential candidates in 2018 and 2020. From Geoff O’Keeffe, Citizen, Colorado Congressional 2nd District. 26 October, 2017 Tom Perez and Democratic Party leaders, In full disclosure, I have been registered … [read more]

In the Eye of the Beholder

16 September, 2017 by Geoff O'Keeffe 3 Comments

I am reminded of that financial planning tv commercial with Dennis Hopper, admonishing boomers, “You gotta have a plan, man!” Indeed. Plans are a good idea. Just so I don’t hitch my emotional wagon to them. They are liable to change. Thursday morning I had ambitious plans, but they were not to be. On a … [read more]

O'Keeffe Woodworks

4 weeks ago

Doing Just This One Thing

I don’t think anyone twisted my arm in the business environment and forced me to adopt the misguided notion of “multi-tasking”, which first showed up on the business landscape in 1965, referring to the capabilities of an IBM System/365 computer.

Someone thought it wise that we emulate machines. We can’t count on the corporate world to safeguard our health or sanity. Health and sanity are not metrics on a P&L.

I count myself guilty of including a line on many a job description such as “Must be good at multi-tasking”. I have included such a line on my own CV.

While it was a popular aspect of being an efficient executive time manager (picture the staff of Sorkin’s The West Wing, bustling about, juggling air strikes and whip counts while flirting and mugging as they walked) the practice and its promised benefits have been debunked by all manner of scientists and psychologists, and some studies show corporate America losing two-thirds of a trillion dollars annually due to multi-tasking (Matt Richtel, NYT, 2008).

But the expectation persists, and, in my view, no, it is not “caused” by e-mail any more than workplace misbehavior is “caused” by workplaces being co-educational.

But nobody made me do it. My penchant to please superiors, an over-active brain and insufficient awareness did that for me.

I have trained myself out of some of it, and have become selective and sequential doing tasks, but there is another aspect to this affliction that I need more attention to and practice with. I avoid, as much as is practical, choosing to do more than one thing at a time. I am comfortable asking others to wait until I can attend to their need or question.

But I remain a fully addicted planner and commentator. I often am doing while thinking about the doing or the next doing. I just now rolled the trash cans out to the street through wet, brilliant white snow and sorted out where I will publish and post this piece, all in my head. Surely I missed something about the snow.

As a writer, there is an added aspect to this addiction. All too often, as I am doing something, in my head, I am writing about it. It reminds me of a quote I cannot find the exact words to, from Nathaniel West, (either the graphic artist or the author) that goes, roughly, “Tracing the shadow of the hand that traces.”

While I am not actually doing the next thing, I am mentally and physically preparing for it. Unloading the dishes, I know I will sort my laundry next. I have broken a few dishes this way. Driving home, I feel the pull of exactly how I will enter the house, where I will put things away I acquired in town, the email reply I need to do, (but first I’ll grab a chunk of that good brie) and the sequence of responsibilities needing my attention before I can watch Rachel with a glass of wine. I only have twenty minutes. Go!

While planning and project management are fully worthwhile standalone activities, if done consciously, done in conjunction with other tasks, the combination leaves me unfulfilled and separated from my life. Like I ate the menu.

The cure is easily said, difficult to realize. Doing just this one thing, even if it is planning or reviewing, right now, all by itself, is that cure. Lists and calendars help as well.

For me, fear drives this. I think that fear is deeply held, that I will drop the ball, forget to do something I promised, let someone down, or worse, be embarrassed. Be ashamed. Not be seen as the image of Geoff I created for myself. That guy who gets stuff done.

This cure involves trust. In reality, there is little chance I am going to forget to pick up milk in town, or call my brother.

I need to practice this trust, all day, as well as remembering that the expansive intimacy with my own life that is available by doing just this one thing shines so much more brightly than the unlikely possibility of forgetting to put my pants on before leaving the house.

That intimacy is at once deeply tactile and textural while feeling like free fall.

What’s the worst that can happen?

Go! ...

View on Facebook

O'Keeffe Woodworks

2 months ago

(Just posted on www.okeeffewoodworks.com from guest contributor, Bob Woodward. The photo shows Woody in front of Sierra Designs' second HQ at Fourth and Addison in Berkeley, early '70's.)

TSWB

Almost everyone in my old Berkeley neighborhood had a nickname.

There was “Walking Wally” who dressed daily in a safari outfit (complete with pith helmet) and walked a huge Old English Sheep dog all over town for hours on end.

His housemate, Eddie, also known as “Spaceman”, was conversant with aliens. “Did you hear the Venusians in the yard last night? I think they landed their ship up on the high school football field and came down to check us out.”

Then there was “Mr. Chips”, the retired potato chip company deliveryman and the “Mean Old Man” with his chain link fence topped with concertina wire fenced in yard and two large German Shepherds on patrol.

A bit down the street “The Artist” painted in elaborate script just above each wheel well on his more-than-abused Mercury Cougar, “Coug d’ville.” And when whitewall tires proved too pricey, “The Artist” simply took some white house paint and masterfully created his own.

Then there was the octogenarian “Mr. Blue” whose everyday dress was a sharp three-piece suit, dress shirt and tie, a pair of well-shined black wingtip shoes and a black fedora. Thus clad, he’d stand out on the street corner tipping that fedora and chatting up people as they walked by. My daily interaction with Blue was always, “Hey Blue what’s going on?” “Just holding up the corner like I always do.”

So what was my nickname? I knew I must have one but didn’t find it out until a friend tried to find my house and got lost. He ended up in front of the corner liquor store asking if anybody knew where “Bob” lived. Blank stares all around and then one of the store regulars smiled and said: “Oh, you mean the tall skinny white boy? “

Nickname established. ...

View on Facebook