![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mental disclipline ...
May. 24th, 2004 11:18 amI really should do more lurking on Colleen Doran's message board, because I usually come away with food for thought on the (infrequent, anymore) occasions when I visit.
She writes:
We know that if you spend a whole year working out and exercising you will get in good shape, but when you stop exercising, you quickly revert to a poor state of fitness. The same is true with your mental state. If you let your attitudes and habits get lax, after a matter of days, weeks or months, you may find that you have become an unproductive, negative person.
Ye gods, how true. And that has happened to me, badly, over the last year. My productivity on all things is HALF what it was when I quit working full-time. I'm getting more and more scatterbrained; I start projects and don't finish them (well, I've always done that, but I haven't been this bad about it since I was a teenager); I spend hours surfing the net (heh, case in point) when I have something much more important to do ... such as, in this case, packing. My time-management skills are shot to hell. Procrastination and avoidance are my constant companions. The worst part is -- I've *let* this happen to me. It doesn't have to be this way. I can make all the excuses I like (I'm so busy; I have so many things going on; etc etc etc) but what it comes down to is ... I was too damn lazy to keep my mental discipline tight, and that's why I feel like I'm drowning in responsibilities now. I've reaped what I've sown.
There's nothing like moving across the country to make you do some assessment of your life and values. I've essentially taken over the second bedroom of the house into a studio/library -- I used to share with Orion, but he's since moved all his computers into the basement to join his woodworking shop down there, and that's his center of operations now. So the second bedroom is almost entirely my space ... and it's a goddawful mess. It looks the way I imagine my brain would look right now, were thoughts to take concrete form. Well, I suppose it's understandable that it's a mess NOW, since it's filled with half-packed boxes, but it was hideously disorganized even before, and cluttered up with things I don't need and projects in various stages of completion. Packing would be so much faster if I'd been organized ahead of time. As it is, I'm trying to organize as I go along, and get things packed away in boxes with similar things, and figure out how much of this crap I really need to keep. And it's taking frikkin' forever.
I don't want to live the rest of my life this way. I want to clean up my mental space so this doesn't happen again. How do you design an exercise program for your brain?
She writes:
We know that if you spend a whole year working out and exercising you will get in good shape, but when you stop exercising, you quickly revert to a poor state of fitness. The same is true with your mental state. If you let your attitudes and habits get lax, after a matter of days, weeks or months, you may find that you have become an unproductive, negative person.
Ye gods, how true. And that has happened to me, badly, over the last year. My productivity on all things is HALF what it was when I quit working full-time. I'm getting more and more scatterbrained; I start projects and don't finish them (well, I've always done that, but I haven't been this bad about it since I was a teenager); I spend hours surfing the net (heh, case in point) when I have something much more important to do ... such as, in this case, packing. My time-management skills are shot to hell. Procrastination and avoidance are my constant companions. The worst part is -- I've *let* this happen to me. It doesn't have to be this way. I can make all the excuses I like (I'm so busy; I have so many things going on; etc etc etc) but what it comes down to is ... I was too damn lazy to keep my mental discipline tight, and that's why I feel like I'm drowning in responsibilities now. I've reaped what I've sown.
There's nothing like moving across the country to make you do some assessment of your life and values. I've essentially taken over the second bedroom of the house into a studio/library -- I used to share with Orion, but he's since moved all his computers into the basement to join his woodworking shop down there, and that's his center of operations now. So the second bedroom is almost entirely my space ... and it's a goddawful mess. It looks the way I imagine my brain would look right now, were thoughts to take concrete form. Well, I suppose it's understandable that it's a mess NOW, since it's filled with half-packed boxes, but it was hideously disorganized even before, and cluttered up with things I don't need and projects in various stages of completion. Packing would be so much faster if I'd been organized ahead of time. As it is, I'm trying to organize as I go along, and get things packed away in boxes with similar things, and figure out how much of this crap I really need to keep. And it's taking frikkin' forever.
I don't want to live the rest of my life this way. I want to clean up my mental space so this doesn't happen again. How do you design an exercise program for your brain?