Last month I blogged for Safari about successfully changing fields, being fearless, and improving yourself through reading and learning. My blog post received a wonderful response, and I am proud to share that this month I begin my official new position as Safari’s Customer Success Manager. I am staying with my team and am super excited to make our product more useful to both our new and existing customers. I’ll be blogging intermittently about what I’m doing, learning, and making with Safari.

While I believe what I wrote in that post, I’ve felt a bit hypocritical because it’s come to my attention throughout this long, dark winter that

I waste a lot of time.

So much time! From time spent writing emotive letters that I never send to time reading the Wikitravel details of places I want to visit. I sleep late on weekends, occasionally drink too many glasses of wine on weeknights, often eat way more than an allotted portion while distractedly checking my phone during dinner, and spend hours looking at pairs of black pants on the Internet that I will never buy. (I love black pants, particularly loose, comfortable ones. Let this link be a hint to anyone who ever wants to buy me a present.) I believe strongly that there is a healthy balance between time-wasting and productivity, and I am afraid that this winter I crossed my own line and need to work on getting myself back to my center.

I’ve always been an over-achieving time waster; I’m the kind of person who knows all the details of Madonna’s Wikipedia page and still somehow finds the time to do all the things. I manage to consistently find the time for birthday parties, lazy afternoons, potlucks, puppet shows, and performing while always submitting applications, papers, and my taxes on time. I have always volunteered with my community, whether gardening or teaching or manning a booth, and I try to be there both in time and spirit for my friends. I am a master of very little and a generalist who can do a lot of things adequately, including playing music, speaking German and Spanish, and holding intelligent conversation on about a million topics. My lack of focus is what drew me to the interdisciplinarity of American Studies and later Library Science, but

because I am okay at a lot of things, I have often felt like I am not good at anything.

My lack of mastery augments an incredible social knowledge that makes me great at cocktail parties, but not so great at specialized skills, particularly those that I have tried and failed to learn repeatedly like drawing or programming computers.

Lounging around and wasting time makes me stressed, and yet I find myself in Wikipedia holes, on Buzzfeed lists, mindlessly thumbing through Instagram, and Googling ex-boyfriends more than I would like to admit. I have an addictive information-seeking brain, and the Internet has been both an asset and a curse for me as I find myself up late, watching the bar below my apartment close, absorbing both everything and nothing at once. (Pro-tip for other addictive minds: Never begin a television program with a seemingly unlimited number of episodes at 9PM on a week night. You will regret it.)

The Internet has made it easier to live vicariously through others, which is another double-edged sword that often makes life feel more complicated than it actually is. All my friends, professional contacts, and the celebrities who interest me seem to be living fulfilled lives, so I submit to the worst kind of voyeurism, one that’s tinged with envy and the feeling that this life could be mine if I were only more “_______.” This kind of time wasting makes me want to delete all my Internet history, take a shower, and maybe smash my phone against a wall. Even admitting that I do it in a public manner makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but I think it’s important to recognize this is a human byproduct of the Internet age.

I’m not taking the capitalist tack that says all time has to be productive, self-improvement time, and one only has to read a Romantic novel to realize that people actually probably were not more productive in “olden days.” (I wonder how much time a Jane Austen heroine spent staring at the wall?) Instead of judging or feeling shame, (both feelings that society unfortunately encourages,) I want to practice weening myself off behaviors that don’t make me feel like my best self and hope that others feel inspired to make similar changes for their health and the health of their communities.

In order to kick off this process, I did what I do best, and what I do to make most of my decisions: I made a chart.

I titled the page:

“Be more productive. Overcome winter blues. Get moving.”

The chart’s four cardinal directions pointed to:

• Have to do
• Want to do
• Do less of
• Do more of

I brainstormed for about 25 minutes and then wrote a list of the immediate tasks I needed to do within the next week in order to make these “productivity hacks” reality (excuse the jargon.)

I wasn’t sure what was going to come out of the exercise, but when I looked at the page, I was surprised to see that most of my “negative” behaviors revolved around a few, distinct categories. In making the chart, I saw that “worrying about the opinion of others” came up 4 times, “relying too much on technology” came up 5 times, and “drinking less frequently” came up 2 times. (My 26 year old hangovers are much worse than my 21 year old hangovers!)

In contrast, doing creative work like playing music, dancing, and writing came up 7 times and giving back to my community came up 4 times on my “positive” behavior list. Being kinder to my environment, both in terms of resources and social awareness also came up frequently.

I am going to use the weeks leading up to my 27th birthday to take some steps towards doing my best work and realizing my unique talents through this exercise and others encouraged by productivity experts. I am also going to use this month to research improving productivity and share out my findings on this blog.

It’s time to focus on my creative and nurturing self and feel more alive in my body this spring. Winter has been hard on all of us Bostonians, but in adapting my behaviors to fit my goals, I am taking the first steps toward a daily practice to be my best self.

 

 

http://jennierosehalperin.me/productivity-rules/