Leaving one shoe untied

I admit that leaving one shoe untied isn’t a pretty idea. It’s annoying, uncomfortable and outright capital D-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s (replace hyphens with clap emoji to use this as a LinkedIn post…ffs LinkedIn).

However, I do enjoy leaving one shoe untied. Preferably on rainy days when you can drag your laces through mud and filthy puddles.

Let them absorb the streets you wander.

For some this looks careless. Am I being a bad role model? What roles do we want to embody anyway? And, honestly, is it socially acceptable to embody more than one role? I digress.

Some of the most productive writers recommend, if you want to be super productive, then at the end of the day, don’t finish your

Sentences aren’t shoe laces. Ask any child on the street and they’ll tell you they aren’t the same thing. Depending on age and language proficiency, said child may be able to explain to you how to tie your shoes. In most cases, however, said child will shrug their shoulders, take a puff on their bejewelled vape stick, and leisurely point to their velcros, while giving you the middle finger (the 90s are truly back), while livestreaming your exhausted facial expression to their gullible audience on TukTuk, while selling a screenshot of your facial expression printed on a t-shirt to said audience. Buy now.

“Help! I’m stuck in a metaphor.”

Sentences, however, can be squiggly, just like shoe laces. But sentences can be objectively worse. Oftentimes sentences can become convoluted, bloated, moving from line to line to line, while being tastelessly decorated with unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, thoughts moved into brackets (ugh) — when you could’ve used parentheses —, and finally embellished with dependent clauses, which our dear reader doesn’t need anyways.

Have you ever seen, or “saw” how the lazy ones would write these days, flicking their irregular verbs like a cigarette butt into an overflowing bin on the side of the street, setting it on fire and calling out the fire brigade for no good reason.

Let me start again. Have you ever seen a shoe lace like that sentence two paragraphs above?

And while we’re here.

What’s the double knot equivalent of a sentence? A sentence with a double negative. Now you want an example but I won’t not give you one. If you knew the answer, you might be onto something. If it’s of commercial value, I don’t know. Value, and beauty, lie in the eye of the beholder. Behold your shoe laces, as when they’re becoming untied, you might trip and fall.

You need to ask the obvious question, of which so many people are afraid: Whose shoe is it anyway? Yours, clearly. So take responsibility.

Long story short, TLDR, one of my favourite productivity tips is to leave one shoe untied. Like highly productive and overly famous writers who leave their last sentence unfinished at the end of their day of thinking they’re smarter than a commoner (given every writer’s highly unique take on the world-as-is), I believe, leaving one shoe untied shows you exactly what to do next. Tie that shoe. There’s no question about it.

But never tie up loose ends before the end of the day, as most people prefer to do. That’ll kill your productivity.

And tomorrow I’ll get up again, tie my left shoe, and then leave the right one untied.

I’ll try to tie that very right shoe. I’ll be too exhausted to finish, untie the left shoe, kick both off my feet and put on my velcro-adorned trainers.