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Saturday, January 18, 2020

Solving a problem in one day

You can solve a problem in one day. I wouldn't recommend doing this every day. Change can be difficult, and you don't want to overwhelm yourself. But during the first month of the year when you are still thinking in terms of making changes, it is good to instantiate several changes, as I've done this year.  I'm not listing everything I've done, because there are some that are too personal to discuss here.

What you do is identify a problem that has a single solution, involving stopping or starting a habit. On a single day, you either begin or end a habit, by which action you solve a problem.

For example, I have decided not to have my email on in the background on my computer.  Now I will not read every email as it comes in.  I have solved that problem, of being distracted by email.

Other things you can do:

delete your facebook profile or your twitter account (I did this with twitter and haven't looked back)

deleting an app from your phone which is a waster of time (I've done that with some stupid games)

begin meditating (I've done this one, beginning in 2019)

quit smoking

join an organization (I've done this; joining the choir; not singing with them now, but I put in a few years with good results)

sign up for a class

cutting off a toxic friendship

Now you want to make sure they are things you can really do, that you won't backslide on.  Things like quitting smoking can be hard, because it may be you really like to smoke. Maybe binging on Netflix is a good release for you, and you don't really want to quit it.  That's fine too.  I thought about giving up my crossword puzzles, but I don't think they are a bad addiction to have, as addictions go.





2 comments:

Clarissa said...

What I really want to give up is the idiotic habit of thinking I need to get all the minor distractions (answering emails, updating the CV, checking my academia profile, entering grades, etc) out of the way before I start writing. The minor tasks never completely go away but by the time I do most of them, I have no energy to write. It's a trap I fall in constantly. And it's not like I don't know it's a trap. But it still keeps happening .

Jonathan said...

That would be an excellent thing to give up. You could set aside one time a week to update cv and check academia profile. Email you have to check more often, I guess, but do it after writing.