Engaged Vs. Autopilot

You're listening to the Uppercase Life, where we work hard, play hard and chill hard. Also, I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

I'm going to give you two words, and I want you to think of what comes to your mind when you hear them. The first word is engaged, and the second word is autopilot. If these two words were in a fight to the death in a duel, which one of them would you see as the villain and which one would be the hero?
I mean, if you're thinking of these two states of being, which one seems intuitively the better option to you? And full disclosure, that was a trick question. But I bet if one seemed more like the hero in your mind, it was probably the word engaged, because we think of being engaged as being on an active and connected and alive.
And we think of autopilot as being repetitive, mundane, probably boring and mechanical. And surely a really meaningful life is an engaged life that's better and more desirable than being on autopilot. Right. But it's wait, Engagement, it is vital to a productive and fulfilling life. I mean, nobody wants to be the lifeless automation trudging to work every day and performing the same mindless tasks and just coming home to some bland way of life.
However, when we talk about living life full throttle, always on, totally engaged, sharp focus. Is that really what you want? I mean, actually, for me, no, I it exhausts me just to say that. And I think, well, that's OK sometimes, but I can't live like that. 24, seven. That's just not healthy. And it would probably drive my family crazy.
So a demanding life and a productive habit every day is going to require you to automate some things. I mean, seriously. Automation will save your time, save your energy. And if you don't have some automated behaviors that make sure things go well, even when you're really not able to fully engage, then you're going to be in for this rollercoaster ride of existence.
And it's not not in a fun way. What's going to happen is that you're going to engage, you're going to burn out, you're going to crash. And when you do, nothing will get done because you have to be all on all the time in order to do anything. So how can we differentiate between when we should be engaged and when we should be on autopilot?
Well, there's probably a lot of good answers for this, but I want to give you three scenarios in which I want to encourage you to think of being engaged in autopilot in different ways. So I want you to think about engaging experiences and automating your maintenance, because the world is full of incredible and really novel things. You're going to pass them every day and maybe you're missing them because your brain is so distracted by maintenance mode.
And I would define maintenance as being these tasks that are they are crucial, but they are also repetitive. And you can put systems in place to accomplish these tasks without giving them your full attention. They're going to happen over and over again, usually in a timely manner. So take the time to set up less hassle ways of doing repetitive type tasks so that later you can spend less time overseeing them.
Anything from haircuts, all changes to weekly lunch schedules. I mean, all of these things are recurring and set. So why not automate them? You know, here's one great example. It always humors me when it's coming holiday time in America and we're nearing Christmas and suddenly you have all these adults acting like, who would have thought it's Christmas already, you know, as if Christmas doesn't come every stinkin year.
But these people are so, you know, engaged in other things that they haven't even thought about Christmas. And then they feel, you know, behind on that task when you could you could really mostly plan for Christmas, like six months out. Come on, you know, it's coming. Just get it done. And then when the time comes, you'll be mostly prepared.
So engaging experience is automating maintenance tasks so you can have really novel and cool experiences on a daily basis. If you're perceptive and being present for them. So make sure that you're delegating, you're automating these things that you don't need to put a ton of attention into, but they still need to get done. So you can't not do them, but then participate.
Look around you today. What do you see? Be open to new experiences, sights and smells. I mean, these are vital to our creative thinking and our overall interest in just staying alive, which I'm sure you can relate to. That idea is that sometimes our life feels so stressful and overwhelming, trying to be engaged all the time that, you know, we just want to check out and stay in bed all day.
So the second thing is engage with people and automate the things. So look at it as the value, the really high value things that you're going to participate in life relate to people in some way. And there's going to be a person on the other side of it, even if that person is not standing in front of you and staring you in the face, but make sure that you are engaging with the humans in your life, the people that you say you love, and you're automating the things, the tasks.
Sometimes people even though we would say, you know, somebody ask us which are greater, we'd be like, well, people, of course people are. But sometimes we let the things crowd in on the people and then we find that we're spending our high value mental energy on tough thing tasks. And then we have to suffer through social times, like we end up with people with family.
Family gets the worst of it, right? Because you come home to them whether you want to or not every night and you're tired and you spend all your mental energy on maybe on a computer or on a spreadsheet and then you got these beautiful humans there and you don't have anything to give them. So engage with the people, automate the things, look into people's eyes.
Check in with them, make sure you're using the right tools in your daily work and life flow to automate things. There's usually an app for that. Can you get an app that will take some of that time away from what you spend on the thing and allow you to have a little more time with the people? And then here's the last.
I engage with dreams. And automate drudgery is we all have stuff we don't want to do. And that could range anywhere from, you know, doing your taxes, taking out the trash to paying off your student loans or whatever it is in your life, which is something you can't simply stop doing. But their drudgery is we have them. We got to do them.
But let's engage with the things that we're dreaming of we feel called to do. We have a vision for doing and make sure we automate those drudgery. Because let's face it, usually when a thing is a drudgery, usually there is someone else out there that is better at that task than we are anyways. Somewhere in the world, there's probably somebody that that really sparks them to do that thing.
They love it. And here you are trying to do it and you hate it, and it's taking you so long when you could just engage someone else to do it. And you might say, Yeah, but you know, I've got to spend money. I don't feel like I should, or I'm going to tell you, you know, wait, look at this stuff.
You spend money on every day. Wouldn't it be worth it to take some of these drudgery off your plate and engage in dreams? Your boss is not going to put that on your desk. Your clients are not going to call you and ask you to do your dreams. You got to do them yourself. What are the things that you're worst at you absolutely hate?
How can you offload those things and think of yourself as a steward of that task who needs to see to it that the task is done, but you don't have to be the one that directly does it. Can you steward those tasks while still stepping away from them? And then what would it take to pour some quality time into a vision project?
For yourself, something that is closely alig...