Archives for the month of: April, 2012

How did you spend the last hour?

April 12, 2012 //
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I want to talk about time, and how it’s spent. Almost every time I read about or listen to anyone talk about time management and personal development, they eventually get to TV. They say things like “Want to spend an hour a day learning a new skill? Just drop an hour of television.” or “Watch less television to improve your ability to pay attention.” While I wholeheartedly agree with this advice, I’m unable to apply it because I don’t watch TV.

Tonight, though, while mindlessly surfing the internet, I came across a wonderfully-titled article by Corbett Barr on Expert Enough: The Lost Art of Becoming Good at Things. I wholeheartedly agreed with the content of this article as well, but one sentence jumped out and stabbed me in the self-identity. In discussing how people make excuses for not learning and achieving things by saying they’re too busy, Corbett makes the typical comment “Really? How many hours of TV did you watch this week?” but then he asks:

How much time did you spend mindlessly surfing the Internet?

“Oh.” I said.

I believe that I’ve been excusing myself from learning and achieving things by saying, “Not only am I busy, but I already don’t watch TV!” …and yet… I definitely spend more time wandering the dregs of the internet than I would like.

Because good advice is a waste of your time if it doesn’t change your behaviour, I decided I would change my behaviour. I started using StayFocusd for Chrome several months ago, and it drastically cut the time I spend on sites like Facebook and YouTube. There are, however, more than 360 million sites on the internet, so I can’t block all of the time-wasting sites. Also, exploring is a good thing, so I don’t just want to have a whitelist (besides, I can waste plenty of time on very otherwise-productive sites).

My solution, instead, is just to be more mindful of my time. I’ve set up a script on my computer using Windows’ Scheduled Tasks feature that will bring up the following image fullscreen every hour:

How did you spend the last hour? Do you want to spend the next hour the same way? Yes? Wonderful. No? Stop doing it. Now. Right now.

Categories Habits, Mindfulness, Technology

I want to have reflection time.

April 10, 2012 //
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I want to have reflection time. How am I going to do that?

I’ve been intending a while bunch, lately, to “take some time and reflect,” referring to a whole host of topics I’d like to reflect on, from romance to school to my blog to my habits to my goals (individually and as a whole) to setting up a system to easily track failures and improve on them. I have done brief goal reflections, but otherwise that’s pretty much it.

Ultimately I’d like to reflect on a very regular basis. If I could find a way to do it, twice daily would be optimal. It wouldn’t have to be for long. The morning could just consist of looking at my agenda for the day, planning the main things I want to accomplish, and reading an inspirational quotation or something. The night would consist of (ideally) an assessment of my day, reviewing how it met, exceeded, and fell short of my expectations, and then noting if there are any patterns of failure that I notice. Then, I’ll figure out what’s causing the failure and come up with potential ways to address it.

In a multilayered cake of irony, it was the lack of reflection that was causing itself. My not reflecting led me to not address my failure to reflect. (rinse, repeat). I have recognized for over a week (I distinctly recall wanting to reflect last sunday) that I wanted to do something about this, but haven’t done anything because it’s never felt like the right time to do anything about it. The idea with the reflections is that they’d give me regular chances to tune into those thoughts that have been hopping around anxiously on my back-burner, before they get burnt.

One fortunate thing is that this particular revelation comes to me at a moment when I have got myself into a reasonably regular (and early) sleep-waking situation. This is not habitual, but merely a necessity given 9am exams every other day. Even still, I think I’m going to start this with an MEA (term courtesy of Nir Eyal, though ZenHabits has written about the principle extensively as well). MEA = Minimum Enjoyable Action, and is basically the smallest form of the habit possible. It must be so small that: a) you can’t fail & b) you can’t complain.

For my reflection habit, that will be writing a sentence, morning & night.

I can’t possibly get up late enough that I don’t have time to write a sentence, and I can’t possibly be so tired that I can’t write a sentence. Long term, I’d potentially like to have a form I fill out with fields expressing certain things about my day, but I’ll get there eventually. This is a start.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll scale back the MEA to “pick up a pencil”. That I can definitely do every day.

~~~

(While selecting a category for this post, it occurs to me that despite years of reading ZenHabits, I still had not really been focusing my personal development around habits. That changes today.)

Categories Habits, Personal Development, Reflections

“I Don’t Watch” – The challenge to mean what I say.

April 1, 2012 //
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“I don’t watch.”

This is a phrase I’ve said to people on many occasions, usually when they admonish me for not having seen something—typically a movie or TV show. I was blessed to grow up without a TV in my house and have (not surprisingly) never particularly been interested in following shows. It just takes so long! Years ago I watched all of Dead Like Me, because there are only two seasons and it’s hilarious. I was briefly caught up with The Big Bang Theory but not past season 2. I like watching movies but don’t do so often.

Modified YouTube logo reading "No-Tube" instead.

NoTube for me for a month!

So, when my friends cry out in horror and disbelief, “But you must have seen The Dark Knight!” or “You’ve never seen Doctor Who?” or “How could you not watch all of the episodes of Firefly?” I tend to answer “I don’t watch.” Recently, though, I’ve found myself clarifying that “well actually, I do watch a fair amount of YouTube videos”. I was talking with a friend about choosing my next 30-day challenge, and we ended up with:

For all 30 days of April 2012, I will not watch online video.

“Online” is defined broadly as anything that got to me via the internet. This means anything streamed or downloaded. This includes something that was downloaded by someone else, even if it was transferred to me by digital cable or by a physical disk. Essentially, this will limit me to the following, none of which I expect to be substantial (I was last in a theatre about 5 months ago).

  • Movies in theatres.
  • DVDs rented.
  • Videos I take myself, on my phone or camera.
  • Videos others have taken, watched locally on their devices.

I have decided to make a singular exception: I may watch lectures online, provided it is part of actively studying for one of the 5 courses for which I’m writing an exam on in the next 2½ weeks. Actively studying will probably mean taking notes. If the video has no important visuals, I will just listen to the lecture, but this is unlikely since most off these subjects involve working through math.

Also, notably, since YouTube is a popular source of music online, I may use it for such purposes, but may not view the tab containing the video, even once it has stopped. That is, if I want to listen to a song on YouTube, I have to search for it on Google, Ctrl+click on the link to open it in a new tab, then close the tab with the X when it’s over. This is largely to avoid distraction by browsing through related videos etc.

This is a particularly suitable challenge for this month for several reasons:

  1. I have a lot of exams to deal with, so this will free up extra time with which to study.
  2. Also, unlike a challenge of the form “do ______ every day”, this challenge won’t add any responsibilities to my day.
  3. I am going to be going home to see friends and family at the end of the month, so I have a lessened need to interact with them online.

(Although this was not designed to be within the scope of the challenge, it occurred to me just now that I won’t be able to Skype (video-call) friends or family this month either. Oh well, as mentioned, I have exams and I’ll be seeing most of them soon enough anyway.)

I’m not sure about GIFs and flash videos, but I’ll generally try to avoid them as well. My general rule for things like this is “if it feels like cheating, it is”. I’ve found this to be an easy and effective way to eliminate all loopholes.

I’ll write another post shortly wrapping up the 40 days unsweetened challenge. Since the challenges overlap by a day, I’m launching this one before the previous one actually ends.

Categories 30 Day Challenges