Self-improvement: Justifications on Mental State

They say people are good at justifying their actions, whether good or bad. I suppose that's true since I'm doing that now for why I slept 12 hours earlier without eating anything. No, it's not jet lag since I could have woken up 6 hours ago.

Brief disclaimer: To be noted is that justifying actions often makes more sense to the justifier than other people. For me, it was apparent enough that to give in to temporary madness is to have greater focus later.

I have noticed my hunger for creating knowledge and doing projects is directly linked with my physical hunger for food. However, just physical deprivation isn't enough. There is also often the important condition of no outside distractions. This is especially true for activities that I deem boring but necessary to do.

This other condition is universally applicable but hard to apply during daytime since inevitably I do not want to be cooped up inside when the sun's still shining. If I look at today, my thoughts earlier were as such: If I wake up now, I will most likely go to a coffee shop where I'll proceed to work and eat some food. Then a few hours later, I'll socialize, come home, and sleep.

This doesn't sound like a bad arrangement but I knew that I needed more time than a few hours. When I get home I indubiably will not do more work since I'll already be satiated for the day.

This can be resolved by preparing a mental state where I can do more work. This is analogous to the phenomenon of supersaturation where under certain circumstances a solution can contain more dissolved material than under normal circumstances.

Here, analogously I can do more work if I put myself in a state of greater pressure by depriving myself of food and outside distractions which is much more likely at night when everyone else is sleeping.

What I've been wondering for some time now is whether there's some healthier alternatives to reaching this supersaturated state. Self-deprivation of food is not a sustainable process in the long run and not interacting with others at certain times may not only be considered selfish and unreliable but also miss important opportunities.

Self-improvement: Efficient Management of Time

There is a difference between someone being effective and someone being efficient. The former is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. The latter is doing things regardless of their importance in the most economical manner.

For instance, a door-to-door salesperson is very efficient at selling door-to-door but he is utterly ineffective. He could just use email or direct mail.

Two things to keep in mind that might be fairly obvious but often overlooked are:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.

2. Requiring much time does not make a task important.

The key is realizing that WHAT you do is far more important than HOW you do it. Efficiency is only secondary to effectiveness.

How do you become more effective? The key is having more time by doing less. OK. what does that mean? Many people define a to-do list. But how many people also define a not-to-do list? Probably not many do.

A daily to-do list should only have one or two items. Just ask yourself this simple question: "If I can only do one (or two) thing(s) today, what will it be?" How you identify these crucial items is as simple as asking yourself "If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?" Make sure that you accomplish the task listed in your to-do list no matter what by the end of the day. Be realistic with your daily milestones but don't make them too easy to achieve! If you have to sacrifice a social life or a late charge on loans for it so be it.

Just setting one or two tasks a day is already cutting your workload dramatically. But you have to do some them efficiently. This can be forced through using a timer on a stopwatch or this website:

http://e.ggtimer.com/5minutes

(or 1hour or whatever after the second slash)

This is a set limit on the amount of time you have in accomplishing the task. Remember that you're still expected to finish the task by the end of the day so be generous with yourself.

To generate a not-to-do list is almost as easy as generating a to-do list and there will actually be more items. Ah, don't you feel good being lazy? Haha. Simply ask yourself what are the top three activities that I use to fill time to feel as though I've been doing something important. These are aka crutch activities, things that you do to avoid having to do things you really have to do but still have a little value so you don't feel completely bad. You might put things like watching the Discovery channel on TV, reading online news or blogs, and reading random books at a bookstore.

Another thing to note is managing interruptions. You might have the best plan in the world to execute your well-defined goal of the day but then you get that phone call from someone and you end up talking for over close to 2 hours. Then an urgent meeting that you just have to attend. Then some emails to send off. By the time you have lunch and get back, the day is about half over and you haven't even started on your daily goal.

What to do? Actually, it's tips that should go into a general not-to-list:

1. No phone calls while you're working unless it's urgent. Let people know this beforehand by setting a voicemail which tells people when not to bother you. Eventually people will get it.

2. Make business phone calls exactly that. Business phone calls. Do not go off on tangents or letting other people go on tangents by talking about the weather and such. Know beforehand what you're going to talk about.

3. No emails except 2-3 times daily at set times that you check. Recommended is 12PM, 4PM, or 8PM. Do not wake up and check your email immediately. If you do it in the morning, you can get trapped in this email hole which'll take up a good portion of your morning. Also do not check it at night. That will just give you insomnia.

4. No social networking sites, online chatting, watching TV, or any other time wasters except after you've finished your task for the day.

5. No meetings unless absolutely necessary. Meetings for the most part wastes a lot of time. Agree to no meeting where there's no clear agenda and end time. Otherwise, make excuses if you have to for why you bailed a meeting early or why you couldn't make it at all. Of course, always ask someone to email what was talked about at the meeting. Reading the email will take up a fraction of the time of going to the actual meeting. Repeat this enough times and people will get used to your permanent absence. Of course, you have to do actual work. Just make sure you do more work outside of meetings than in them. Let people know what you've done through more efficient means of communications--like talking to them when you actually have a problem or emailing status updates.

There you go. Just follow your to-do-list and not-to-do list (including the general ones listed above) and you should be on your way of using your time much more effectively. With these tips, you'll find that you have more time to do things that are not work. Remember that being overwhelmed is as bad as doing nothing. Having these lists daily will help make sure you fall into neither category.

Literature: Smoking in Solitude

I gave my following thoughts some embellishment; in other words, I lied about certain parts to make it more interesting from a writer's perspective. Still, it is true that I often find music to be directly linked to my train of thought. I wonder if most people find that to be true as well?

Solitude is nice. I was smoking a cigarette on my front porch while waiting for the water in my pot to boil. My headphones resonated with Trinah's "Every Day" while I exhald puffs of smoke. I really don't like smoking. That's why I had to drive home first and drink some caffeine first. I didn't have coffee at home so I had to do with tea. It's close enough to the lyrics and feel of the song.

At the moment, as I'm standing there quietly with the ember of the end lighting up in front of me, there's just the feeling of this moment as part of a larger picture. I'm part of a scene frozen in time. I thought of the scene in Waking Life where Caveh Zahedi and David Jewell were talking about the holy moment. Since I used to watch the movie about every other day I guess relating life to Waking Life still comes up pretty often in my mind.

David Jewell is definitely not the greatest poet alive, I couldn't help but think. Too much pretentious repetition, I thought pretentiously. Still, some of it can be oddly catchy which is why I glance over his stuff sometimes. Like "which way. this way. that way. left way. no right way. find a bright way. and then a night way". I have no idea what it means but maybe someone can rap it.

I tried it and decided that I sounded very lame. This is better left to bling bling professionals with too much money and time on their hands.

The ends of the stick were curling up like a wounded caterpillar. I mildly flicked it and watched absent-mindedly as the ashes fell down the railway onto the first floor. There was no one there so nobody yelled at me. The primary advantage of living upstairs is that gravity is typically on your side.

Half-way there and some ways more to go before all that's left would be smoke and ashes. Once this burns up, these thoughts would be burnt up with it. This moment is not eternal which is why my life is far from being a Haruki Murakami novel. I also don't interact with cats if I can help it and there's no weird metaphysics. His novels are ridiculously annoying in its melancholy but still oddly delicious in how it twists your mind. I'll have to switch to a different song like Space Cowboy's Falling Down with the Paradiso Girls to get my mind off of cats and metaphysics. Electropop has the consistent tendency to dropkick me in the head and knock me out into the real world. Wham!

Self-improvement: Cycle of Thoughts and Moods

While wondering why I was feeling mildly depressed earlier, I had a mild epiphany. Negative moods like depression is definitely not a bad thing. In fact, I realize now that sometimes I like to be unhappy. Without these negative moods, how can I come to revelations like this one?

Moods are not meant to be controlled but they should be influenced to form right proportions.

One should not expect to be happy all the time but neither should one expect to be depressed all of the time. An excess of negative or positive moods surely limits one's experience and perspective. The trick is to attain the right proportion of all these feelings so that life can be experienced in its entirety without being blinded by overwhelming joy or overwhelmed by hopeless despair.

Moods cannot be controlled directly but thoughts can. And a consistent string of thoughts form the mood. So if one can direct the thoughts into a coherent picture, the mood naturally forms. The idea is to control one's thoughts.

How do one control one's thoughts? Besides just forcefully controlling one's thoughts (which may be very hard), there are multiple options to indirectly affect it as well. For me, these two work well:

1. Do things that are conducive to certain thoughts.

2. Go into environments that influence thoughts in a certain way.

For instance, if I want to feel depressed and alone, I'd like to find myself in an abandoned construction site on a wet cold day doing absolutely nothing but thinking. If I want to feel happy and sociable, I'll hold a party or talk to random people. If I want to feel imaginative and creative, I'll write my novel. If I want to feel focused and alert, I'll write some code or work on building something.

Many people have the notion that they have to feel a certain way to do something. But it's really a cyclic approach. One can do something because one feels a certain way. On the other hand though, if one does not like how one feels at the moment, why not do something or go somewhere to change one's thoughts so as to change one's mood?