Category: XTH

Within My Reach, Diving

(Yes, I am listening to Slang as i clickety-clack. Gonna have to play that song next week on Better Off Dead).

Some random thoughts today that might end up as something different/bigger, but right now feel all weirdly connected:

1 / Time. I need more of it and/or the ability to use it. I waste it here in search of something, squander it there because i’m “tired”. Came across Mile 73 yesterday and today read about her quitting her job and this resonated heavily:

I told him I like my job, but I need more time.

2 / Thinking about quitting Facebook again. I’d have 3-4 more hours a week I think collectively (not that that’s how it really works, but…) if it was gone. I’m increasingly hard pressed to identify what i get out of it or my 3 email accounts.

3 / My phone. Ugh, i’ll admit I’m addicted. Checking, checking, checking. It’s reflexive to the point that when I don’t reach for it in the spare moments it feels odd. It may be time to destroy/unplug somehow.

4 / Vitamin D. Don’t know where I read it now (maybe Tammy’s blog) but another BAM! moment thinking about the lack of sunlight I have in my life. It felt acute in Boston when I worked in church basement, but somehow I brainfroze on the fact that I don’t see the sun for 4-5 hour stretches at a time at work in my little office building. Every day I yearn to leave for lunch (esp. now that it’s getting nicer out) and it sunk in today why. I might have to start bringing my laptop more, it may be actually affecting my mood, concentration, outlook.

5 / March is coming up, onto the next of 36 habits. I feel like I stalled out on getting rid of stuff and it might be time to push forward again. Could I really get away with cutting down to, say, 150 books? What about fitting them to my teak shelf from my 5×5 expedit? Keep the next 100 books i want to read and 50 I love?

6 / Came across Cabin Porn (via Huckleberry) and renewed the dream to build a little shack like Nikki’s mom has: Something out on a lake where we can go, read, swim, read, cook & eat, read, talk, walk, live low.

I sometime worry that we’re growing into a set life that might be hard to extract from when/if we want. Makes me more and more interested in selling 1716 sooner than later.

Feeling completely overwhelmed in my work life led me to think about time, balance, needs, priorities. Reading what others think about the intersection of these things helps clear the mental clutter — or at least gives the illusion of it.

I settled recently on that there are too many content streams and that it was completely overwhelming me. Instead of trying to do more, read more, understand more (breadth), I’m switching to try and focus on the few things that are most important (depth).

I quit Twitter, not that I was particularly active on it, but I would check it every so often and feel like I had read through everything — or at the very least scan to see if i missed anything.

So it’s with some personal interest that I read Adam Brault’s article “I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly everything.”

I used to believe that time was the most important thing I have, but I’ve come to believe differently. The single most valuable resource I have is uninterrupted thought.

That’s how everything I’ve ever felt was meaningful about my entire life came to be—either people I’ve come to know, things I’ve learned, or stuff I’ve created.

I’ve realized how Twitter has made me break up my thoughts into tiny, incomplete, pieces—lots of hanging ideas, lots of incomplete relationships, punctuated by all manner of hanging threads and half-forked paths. I am perfectly fine with unfinished work—in fact, I doubt I’ll ever be a better finisher than I am a starter. But I’ve found that my greatest joy, deepest peace, and most valuable contributions come from intentionally choosing where to let my focus rest.

I’ve felt more and more that either an exodus from Facebook — or a fantastically radical pruning of the folks I follow/friend — is in the offing too.

I was emailing a friend and was saying that our move to Tallahassee was good, but that it also felt different. Life has changed — at first not by choice, but by location and opportunity (being in a new city largely without close friends or commitments AND with a newborn baby). But with that shift, that change I think I allowed myself to consider the possibility of a fundamental shift in looking at life, about the future.

A big part of it is A coming along. And the rest of it is, as with everything, a work-in-progress and an exercise in balance and understanding. But this from zenhabits crystalizes some of the key shift:

It might seem smart and productive to not let a single minute go to waste (they’re precious, after all), but let’s take a step back to look at the big picture.

Is this what our lives are to be? A non-stop stream of productive tasks? A life-long work day? A computer program optimized for productivity and efficiency? A cog in a machine?

What about joy? What about the sensory pleasure of lying in the grass with the sun shining on our closed eyes? What about the beauty of a nap while on the train? How about reading a novel for the sheer exhilaration of it, not to better yourself? What about spending time with someone for the love of being with someone, of making a genuine human connection that is unencumbered by productive purpose, unburdened by goals.

What about freedom? Freedom from being tied to a job, from having to improve yourself every single minute, from the dreariness of neverending work?

These are things I’ve not come to terms with, but the thinking of them and the being present with the thoughts allows for a change of arc. A degree? 45? 180? The amount isn’t determined fully yet. But it is changed. That I know.

On vantage points

So today, on my first father’s day as a father, since I’m away from my family I decided to start work on my inaugural XTH Annual Review. I started by doing some reading on how other folks set goals, track them, review their work, etc.

I’m very good at selling myself short and/or underestimating what I can or have done. In that light, it’s interesting (odd even?) to see read some people’s goals/life bucket lists, etc., and realize they are things I’ve done and probably take for granted.

One of Sean’s goals is “Donate more than $1,000 to an important cause.” I currently give $1,000/yr to three different important causes (ACLP, national health care and women’s liberation). Maybe some would quibble on how important those are, but…

The point isn’t to look down on what anyone else sets out to accomplish, but to change how I look at the things I’ve done. I’m gonna try and incorporate that into this first XAR.

I almost stumbled today, told myself I only had 1 more day on the 30 day challenge and so if i had a Coke (they were out of sweet tea, which I know isn’t THAT much better) it would be close enough.

But i waited, I drank some unsweet tea, then some sweet tea and felt really good that i’d not back slid.

Next month it won’t be as easy — especially during lunch if I can’t get lemon — but I was really good at not drinking Cokes this month, so I’m hoping to build on that progress.

 

36 months

So tonight as I ate my steak burrito, I came across this from Leo Babauta:

[tweet https://twitter.com/zen_habits/status/205762701941669889]

I thought it odd that he’d call his own post “amazing” so I followed the link. Now in the past I wouldn’t have gotten past the 3rd sentence probably, but for whatever reason lately (probably something to do with my mission statement over there) I’ve been engaging these types of articles more. This certainly resonated:

One day, I might decide to stop drinking coffee. I’d go two or three days without, then find an excuse to drink it again.

A few weeks later, I’d decide that I was going to start writing every day. Or running every day. Or reading or saving money or playing chess or keeping a clean workspace or following a schedule or walking my dogs more or checking email less.

I’d decide to change something (or usually, many things at once) and implement it immediately. I’d tell myself that from this point forward, things would be different. I would be different.

And invariably, I’d quit the next week, disheartened and frustrated. So I’d try harder next time, with more ambitious goals, more changes to make, only to fail again.

So my curiosity was piqued and I decided to read on about his Limitless allegory. As with most of the great advice I’ve read via zenhabits the point was so elegant in it’s simplicity and correctness:

The ingredient I was missing was patience… In my notes from [Leo’s talk at the first-ever World Domination Summit in Portland], I wrote these words:

One change at a time. Five minutes at first…

[Y]ou’d never try to run 10 miles on your first day back after a long layoff; you know that it takes time to regain your fitness, and that doing too much could lead to injury or burnout. Same with the gym — you don’t go in on Day 1 and try to bench twice your weight… And yet that’s exactly the way I had tried to change my habits… Every single time.

Again this resonated with a bit with my experiences with my first 30-day challenge and with the stuff I’d read on zen habits. I’ve gone 24 days without a Coke because I started small. I didn’t try and go from eating & drinking whatever I wanted to a vegan diet. I picked one thing that I really wanted to change and focussed in on it.

And then the kicker:

Change just one habit a month, and in three years you’ll have 36 new habits.

Wow. Bam! The pieces seemed to fit together so nicely. You can develop 36 new habits all-at-once. But one-at-a-time, building on your successes it seems so possible, so attainable.

And I’ve done this with other habits, just not with as much succession. I started budgetting and paying off debt (and in the process gave Dave Ramsey a try). This is the same core concept he talks about with the debt snowball, the same basic behavior modification. So I’ve done it before. Now I just am going to do it again and again. Once a month x 36 months.

So you like time away from computers. Do you do all of your sketching and writing on paper?

Paper, and not in the studio. I’ll go to a bar or a restaurant. When I did the book, I left the studio every morning and I went to the park and sat for an hour, hour and half. I brought an idea, and I wrote longhand in one of these big sketchbooks. Then I would come into the studio and work during the day. Afterwards, at 4 or 5 o’clock, I’d go to my bar, sit with a beer or two, and refine it. Or write on a new idea. So it became this really nice process of every day. And it became a habit. — James Victore

(source)

I started a 30 Day Challenge to not drink Coke today. I figured no time better than the present. It was brought on by our trip to Gainesville where I felt like a tub wearing my new shirts that J got me which accentuated my boobs n’ belly.

Not drinking Coke is a pretty minor change in the grand scheme of things, but I think this challenge is as much about will-power and determination, so here we go.

I was really dragging after a night of off-and-on baby sleep. At lunch I really wanted to get out of the office and get some coffee so I walked to All Saints (and stopped at Voodoo Dogs). Of course they had a Coke machine and it was nice and sweaty hot. I got lemonade instead — I suspect in the early days I might do some substitutions to stay on track.

We’re heading to Chicago this weekend and I’m hoping it’s not tough to stick with it.

On manifestos

Increasingly I feel overwhelmed by the streams of to-do’s and information. I stumbled across Focus Manifesto while looking for the omm writer (which I’d seen years ago and forgot to bookmark/save).

Now that I’m looking for ways to avoid distraction it seemed that it might be useful to find.

The Focus Manifesto is something I’m going to look into — it fits together with some of the other things I’ve seen, but I also appreciate the context it puts online-ness in: addiction; that’s how I’ve felt lately. It’s easier to articulate the problem at work — i.e. how do these platforms fit together into what we’re trying to do — but not as easily in my life.

But what is the value of them? How can I best work & live with the fewest number of apps, distractions, tools?

Balance.
Simplicity.
Efficiency.

I suppose to some extent this is about crafting a practicing manifesto.

Perhaps my newfound interest in efficiency/lifestyle websites is an early-onset midlife crisis? Maybe it’s my brain’s way of trying to sort out the myriad of changes I’ve gone through in the last 60 days (moved to a new city, for a new job, in a new house and — oh yeah — became a dad).

I’ll admit it feel troubling — like I’m becoming a neo-new age nimwit addicted to self-help guides — but I suspect it’s a mix of the sorting out theory and my interest in learning/doing new things. A few more of the bits I’ve come across recently:

30 Day Challenges — I noticed folks doing such things (and 365-projects), and heard that’s the rough time you need to form new habits, but Good Disruptive Change suggests is not just new habits (i.e. change) but can also be for restarting, renewing, getting unstuck. So, many directions to go in not just one.

Simple Desks — I think I’ll wait to make a great workspace until we move again (ugh).

Lifehacker — maybe becomes a daily read, some good stuff, but could also become a sinkhole b/c it’s not terribly focused. One post reminded me about about.me (where i found a couple friends)