The Empty Journal and the Architecture of Avoidance

Show Notes

Brian opens this episode with a confession: he owns half a dozen beautiful, completely blank journals. Each one was acquired with a clear intention. None of them were ever filled, because the planning of what to put in them, the perfect structure, the right page layout, the ideal starting point, became an indefinite substitute for actually using them. This is what Brian calls being productively unproductive, and it is one of the more insidious forms of self-sabotage because it carries the texture and feeling of real work. The 24-inch gauge is being applied to time, but the time is being spent on an elaborate delay mechanism dressed up as preparation.

This episode connects directly to the pile from earlier in the week. A plan that never converts to action is functionally the same as a pile you keep walking past. It watches you from a distance, accumulates weight, and stays exactly where it is. The misapplication here is not laziness. It is the mind convincing itself that the architecture of a plan is the same as executing it, and that perfecting the setup will eventually cause the work to happen on its own. It will not.

The practical response Brian offers is identical to the one he gave for the pile: find the smallest possible doing you can execute right now, something reversible, something that does not require the perfect conditions you have been waiting for. Make one decision. Choose a date. Write the first wrong sentence. The work begins in the doing, and the doing begins smaller than you think it needs to.

• Productive unproductivity as a disguised form of procrastination
• How elaborate planning becomes a delay mechanism with the feeling of progress
• The journal collection as a concrete metaphor for preparation that never converts to action
• The 24-inch gauge misapplied when planning time displaces doing time
• The parallel between the physical pile and the perpetual plan
• Starting with the smallest reversible action to break the planning loop

The blank journal is not a failure of discipline. It is a symptom of a specific misapplication of time, one that responds to the same micro-action remedy Brian has been building toward all week.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Brian Mattocks

Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D

What is A Mason's Work?

In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.

[00:00] As my fellow workman on the temple, I have to tell you something.
[00:05] I have no less than half a dozen elaborately beautiful and ornate journal books laying around my office.
[00:21] They are wonderful.
[00:24] They look terrific.
[00:27] They're artistic.
[00:28] They really represent this beautiful idea.
[00:36] None of the pages have anything in them.
[00:39] I've been planning what to put in my book or in one of these journals as a place where I'm going to store like this project information where this one day I'm going to go and I'm going to, you know, use page one and it's going to outline the project.
[00:55] And then on page two, it's going to have a breakdown structure and page three.
[00:59] And in the process of thinking about how I'm going to fill this journal, nothing ever actually is good enough to put in it.
[01:10] I don't fill out any of the pages of the journal or I fill out page one, feel like I made a mistake and then don't proceed.
[01:19] I have an elaborate collection of journals.
[01:27] I refuse to fill.
[01:29] To fill.
[01:30] And I, it's weird.
[01:32] I get it.
[01:34] I wish it was different in some ways, but it points to an issue that I think a lot of us might have.
[01:44] Uh, it's that we oftentimes in a misapplication of the 24 inch gauge against the level of time, we spend a lot of our time planning.
[01:59] And the planning is not the same as the doing.
[02:07] And when we have this come up, we think, well, we should think our way out of these problems.
[02:16] We should plan our way through these things as if we're going to one day eventually execute any step of those plans.
[02:28] And you in that process, me in that process is doing something that I'm inclined to do, which is be productively unproductive.
[02:39] Where I have, uh, mistaken or conflated some bit of work as essentially a really elaborate delay mechanism to avoid doing the work.
[02:53] But it feels like progress.
[02:58] I have convinced myself that this perpetual planning or this elaborate setup that I'm trying to create will eventually
[03:07] make the work magically happen.
[03:13] This is probably one of the more insidious forms of self-sabotage there is because it feels good.
[03:22] It feels like you're doing stuff.
[03:25] So how do we deal with it?
[03:27] How do we like wrestle this sort of preference for planning or this architectural analysis?
[03:35] Uh-huh.
[03:37] P-P-A-A-C.
[03:38] Get it?
[03:38] When we do this, how can we kind of overcome this kind of stuff?
[03:45] Well, step one is to take the smallest possible thing you can do right now.
[03:59] We talked about this when we talked about the pile on the desk.
[04:04] How do we deal with the pile that's slowly but truly driving us crazy?
[04:10] The same thing's true with the plan.
[04:13] The plan is kind of like the pile in a lot of ways.
[04:18] The pile that, you know, stuff you need to sort out in the junk drawer or on the desk or, you know, in wherever it is.
[04:24] It's keeping you, you know, kind of an eye on you from a distance.
[04:29] That little pile is the same as the plan.
[04:32] And so we solve the problem in the same way.
[04:35] We move out of the planning stage into the doing stage.
[04:39] Can I make a decision?
[04:41] I mean, sometimes it's as easy as, can I decide what day of the event we're going to do X or Y or Z?
[04:48] Or can I make a small decision that you can have permission to change later?
[04:56] Can I move past planning and into doing?
[05:02] And what's the smallest doing you can do that you can white out later if you need to?
[05:09] Oh man, I'm old.
[05:09] I just said white out.
[05:12] Oh well, you get the idea.