Deliberately spending time
Monday, 4 January, 2010 — mindfulness productivity
I’ve been reading New Year’s related tweets and links with interest over the last few days. New Year’s and resulting resolutions make for a favorite time to rethink prioritization and life lived. I’m in that considering group. I changed jobs not quite halfway through 2009 and became a manager in October. Consequently, I’m very deliberately studying my new role, where I want to go and how I want to get there. I’m also looking at personal goals.
Three books I’ve read in the last 12 months are shaping my thinking. I recently finished Leo Babauta’s The Power of Less. I eagerly devoured Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning after his presentation at the inaugural Developer Day. After I landed the new gig, but before becoming a manager, I read Michael Lopp’s Managing Humans.
I found more value in the last two books than in The Power of Less, quite probably since most of the material is very similar to what I’ve read elsewhere. If you’re familiar with 37signals and underdoing your competition, David Allen’s Getting Things Done or even Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Babauta’s not breaking much new ground for you.
But, what I have been focusing on after reading Babauta’s book is refining my processes of time management. Despite the book not striking me as original thinking, I may be working with it best in terms of actually getting my butt in gear and establishing new habits. Enter Pragmatic Thinking and Learning and something Lopp/Rands calls the Trickle List.
After reading The Power of Less I found myself thinking of several things I want to spend time on, and get cranky about when I don’t. I decided to use one of the techniques Hunt talks about — a mental map. On it went things I already do out of habit, things I want to start doing. It’s ambitious, more for the amount of things I want to try to get to, but I’m not planning on doing everything every day, either. Nor are these things that are particularly large. It is a helpful tool for me to see what spills out as important. I’m going to turn this into my own trickle list (possibly two, split between work and home).
As the seed of this post germinated, I saw two items on Twitter. The first was a tweet from my friend Steve Burnett, leading to the One Week Digital Cleanse. In a nut, spend the first week of the year without social media or spending time on empty net calories. Perhaps that Twitter/Facebook addiction isn’t so hard to break, after all. That’s more than I care to do. Instead, I’ve distilled what I want into this: Be deliberate about how and where I spend my time. What time I do spend on Twitter or watching Hulu is predicated on completely enjoying it. When it’s interfering with the other things I want to do and enjoy, stop.
The second Twitter item was from Dan Benjamin on New Year’s Day:
The change you experienced last night at midnight is available to you every moment of every day. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
While the New Year is a convenient time to decide on changing life, there is zero reason why right now is not a better time instead.