Frequently, at the end of my YouTube morning yoga session, the instructor will suggest setting an intention for the day —a word or phrase that you can remind yourself of when you start to get off track. This morning I chose the word “productive”. It is September, after all; the kids are back in school, the air is feeling crisp, and the first yellow leaves are beginning to appear in the trees. I think for most of us, September is a time when we feel reinvigorated. We slough off the lethargy of the dog days of summer. We metaphorically shed our skins. Each fall, I can’t help but remember the excitement of going with my mom to purchase new clothes for school. I was a kid in the ’70s, so for me, that meant corduroy pants in jewel tones, flared blue jeans, embroidered peasant shirts, and brightly patterned knitted ponchos. It wasn’t so much the end product – the clothes, or the purpose – being presentable at school that I enjoyed, but rather the process of picking and choosing each item. I could reinvent myself each fall by making different choices. Was I going to reflect a hippie vibe? Mod? Rocker?

This morning, after choosing the word “productive” to guide my day, I started to wonder if it is the product of what I am hoping to accomplish today that is important, or if it is the process itself, or the feeling I get from being productive. As someone who is recently retired, I am getting used to being wealthy in time rather than money. To use that wealth, my time, wisely certainly makes sense, but if I take that too far, do I negate the enjoyable benefits of free time? Then, there is the fact that time is elastic. The wait in line at the grocery store is interminable. The time spent on holiday is turbocharged. Someone recently asked me how long it took me to write Plain Jane Brown. That’s a difficult question to answer because I haven’t been in the habit of tracking the time I spend on particular activities. All art forms, whether visual art, writing, cooking, or gardening, to name just a few, have multiple benefits. Certainly, the end product is one, perhaps there is financial compensation, but for me, the process may be the most valuable of them all.

Sometimes, when I am struggling to get started on a task, I will trick myself by saying (to myself, I talk to myself a lot!) that I only need to do the thing (whatever it may be) for 10 minutes. Ten minutes of cleaning or writing, or weeding often turns into 30 minutes or an hour, or three hours! That’s because I have begun to enjoy the process itself; I am in a flow state. Time ceases to be noticeable to me. When I was writing Plain Jane Brown, I created a habit of sitting down with my notebook each morning before work. I would tell myself that I had only to write for 10 or 15 minutes. When things were going well, if I reached that flow state, the 10 minutes often stretched to fill the amount of time I had available. So I can say that writing Plain Jane Brown took place over a year or so, but not how many hours I put into it. At that time, I hadn’t realized how many hours go into editing and preparing a book for publication. This phase is a lot more like work and less like flow, but it is a necessary step to get to the product – a physical copy of a book that allows me to share the meanderings of my mind with others. So perhaps, it’s not process vs product at all, but rather intention-> process-> product.