It’s a beautiful summer evening, the breeze is soothing and sultry. I’m parking my car on the way back from dinner, and there’s an abnormally abundant number of parking spots available in my neighborhood.
Instant thought – people are out having a good time in this summer evening and I should be out there too.
This FOMO anxiety is the real deal. I feel like everyone is living a better life than me. Having more fun. I feel guilty for not finding something to do to enjoy that summer evening, even though I had just had a lovely dinner with my partner.
It’s a whole new angle on my anxiety that I’m just now starting to be aware of. It’s connected to why I over-plan weekends. Or why during the current thing (dinner, stroll, dancing), I’m planning the next one. I’m always thinking about the optimal way to get everything in.
Really really detracts from my ability to be present.
And I think that if I were able to be present with my current activity, serendipity would happen and I would find myself enjoying that evening in a healthy and organic way. For sometimes if you over-plan, you’re underwhelmed, and disappointed.
I’m thrilled to be observing these thought patterns. Awareness is always the first step.
Writing a plan for the day the night before. Learned this from Jocko Willink.
It gets things out of your head and onto paper.
There’s nothing like the feeling of getting started in the morning, seated at your computer, and being completely unsure of what to work on.
I feel like my life is chaos.
So many things I need to work on. So many more things I want to work on. Then there’s all the shit that I don’t want to work on but I have to do/deal with and this list only seems to grow as I get older.
The plan the night before will help identify what is most important so that I can start there in the morning and focus on those key items throughout the day, particularly as new issues pop up, requests from colleagues, fires to put out, etc.
But another thing to try to hone for which I don’t have an answer quite yet is the skill of triaging. There may be things on my To Do list that I’ll simply never get to. Definitely things on my ‘To Read’ list.
It’s an art trying to see a whole pile of stuff that you want to do and figuring out how to do the most important / impactful stuff.
Our brains want us to do the easiest things. These are usually not the most impactful.
I guess I could use a little more Eisenhower’s urgent/important principal matrix in my life. I’ll add it to the To Do list.
It’s a dopamine addiction that needs to be managed.
The hard part is in today’s society, going cold turkey on quitting phone has too many implications. I’m not sure I could continue to hold the job that I have without a phone, let alone a smart phone.
But damn are the consequences really starting to be apparent, both in my personal life and in society.
When I wake up, my instant and overwhelming urge is to check my phone. I wanna see what messages came in over night. I want to check the news to see what happened in the world, especially in these turbulent times.
Coupled with coffee and a cozy blanket and this first-thing-in-the-AM phone use fills up my dopamine cup so damn well. And then correspondingly derails my gratitude practice, my journaling and meditation practice, and my path to a full exercise workout.
That workout really needs to be non-negotiable so I end up skipping things, doing 5 mins of pushups, and telling myself ‘at least I kept the habit alive‘.
Bottom line – I think it boils down to the phone. Smoking cigarettes used to be a cornerstone habit for me that would inform all other habits – good and bad.
Since quitting smoking, I think the phone is the new cigarette for me.
It’s not just on the weekday mornings. I can find myself spending all weekend buried in my phone. Feels like it’s okay because it’s a rest day and that’s what I want. But I wake up at the end of the weekend not feeling rested. I have the anxiety of what was in my phone that I’ve been steeped in all weekend. And I’ve simultaneously neglected all other forms of relaxation and presence like nature, sports, listening to music and much more.
I’m not quite sure the answer here. If I can’t get rid of my phone, how do I improve my relationship to it? I think my first step is to hide it somewhere at night, so that it requires effort to retrieve in the morning. It should take enough time to uncover that my brain can derail that addictive action and refocus to one of my desired pursuits.
I also need to think about playing with the ‘digital wellbeing’ settings a little better to make sure I can’t really access news / twitter / crap before the day starts, while I’m supposed to be working, and then close to bedtime.
How to get myself to a stage in my career where I can forgo at least the smartphone for the bulk of my existence? No clue, but I’ll keep the world posted if I figure it out.
One of the most difficult things about life, especially as its complexity grows, is prioritizing and figuring out what is important in the moment.
Think about that task list and how to assess what’s the most important thing to work on of the thousand other things on the To Do list. Fucking difficult. There’s the Eisenhow Matrix which has been used to illustrate the difference between important, urgent, not important, and not urgent. But it’s just a mental model.
I find this to be especially difficult in balancing the To Do List of your personal life with that of work. Figuring out how to prioritize mental health, relationships, physical health, and the demands of others on your time, are really complicated and it doesn’t seem to stop. Every day this skill gets tested from the moment we awake.
With children this skill seems to become honed even further. The working parent of young children likely has very little time for frivolity. It might even be an interesting exercise to pretend you’re a parent. A lot of productivity advice would tell you to look at your To Do List each day and determine what the most impactful thing to get done that day would be.
In today’s world of instant communication, there are so many more relationships that people maintain than they did 100 years ago. Between texting, email, and social, you can quickly get lost in the unimportant, and worse, fall onto someone else’s timetable. Don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning!
Email, texts, calls are all people inserting themselves onto your To Do List. A successful friend of mine would always say to people who are putting stuff on his To Do List, “Am I on your timetable?”
I absolutely love that. It’s a constant effort to stay on your own time table, figure out what’s important, and prioritize it ruthlessly.
