Productivity strategies

On my birthday, my new laptop arrived. With this laptop, I was able to smoothly (albeit with the computer fan running noisily) play Subnautica. It was a great game, and one of the most immersive I have ever played. Furthermore, it took me less than 30 hours to (almost) finish, although I did a few restarts and lost data from a bug. So I played it somewhat obsessively last week, once again barely finishing my schoolwork on time, and then on Monday I (nearly) beat the game. I played some Factorio after that, but then I started reading an extremely long fanfiction. It was my second time reading it, and the first time was just a year ago, but it was as good as I remembered. It’s approaching a million words though, so that consumed my Tuesday and Wednesday. Now I’m finished and not feeling any attraction toward video games or fanfiction.

Although I didn’t work much toward my goals, I wasn’t completely unproductive. I’ve done plank exercises for the past ten days, sometimes both morning and evening. They were easy last week, but they’ve gotten a lot harder. Last night and this morning’s exercises came close to making me want to give up. I also did rowing on Tuesday.

While I rowed, vacuumed, and then while I cooked dinner last night, I listened to a course on Skillshare about motivation. Although the author (clearly not a native English speaker) had a few verbal tics that annoyed me, it was a very good course. I had three takeaway points from it. First, have a planning period (or as I like to think of it, a programming period), and an action period. During the action period, think as little as possible, change as little as possible, and whatever you do, don’t think about changing. That was the possibly the strongest point and the most practical. The second point was about finding the purpose for your goals: “think about how your life would be different once you achieved your goals.” I’ve never really thought about this, so I want to give it a try. Finally, “find several situations in your everyday life that relate to your goal, and use them to remind yourself of how much you want to achieve your goals.” For example, if you look in the mirror every day, when you do so, think about how much you want to lose weight or build muscle. For the programming period, since I mostly have ideas about what to do, I only need to fit these actions into time slots. That’s not suitable for a blog so I won’t write it here. The other two are more verbally-based goals, though.

Here’s some brainstorming about the second point--what is my purpose? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Okay, what do I need to do to be able to do that? Develop a closer relationship with Him, imitate Christ, and learn to love the church (God’s people). Well, that middle one kind of encompasses everything, but anyway. Prayer, Bible reading, and memorization directly apply to the first. To the third—I guess my people journal is a related goal, though I’m not actually sure if it works. Speaking of which, I have only written one entry in that. I need to write some more.

Working is also a part of glorifying God, a part that is vague for me. What is my purpose in working? That’s difficult to answer. Most essentially, I need to provide for myself and have enough to give to others. There are branching aspects from that trunk. I need to make enough to provide for a family if it should be in God’s will to grant me one. I want a job that will sharpen me, one in which I can feel that I can learn, improve at, and make progress over years. Saying it that way, it sounds like a not-too-tall order, so I guess it’s not accurate enough. As a teacher with relatively little experience, I almost can’t help but improve. Making progress over years though, maybe that does help it be specific enough—in Japan at least, I didn’t really feel able to do that. In Russia and Vietnam I was able, but I felt too disconnected from people in Russia, and in Vietnam… maybe I was too restless, but I also felt frustrated with my inability to make a difference in the students’ lives. So I should add that to my purpose—having a perceptible and positive effect on people’s lives. Wow, that actually might be a difficult requirement, and I’m not sure I can even think of a non-healthcare related profession that would qualify in the absolute sense. But if we take “positive” in a broader sense, I suppose even collecting trash would do.

Since work is related to residence, I’ll go ahead and list those goals/requirements too. Given my experience in Russia and my first months in Japan, I need to be connected to a community, and not just at church (although a strong church community might suffice). On the less necessary side, I want to be able to live in or at least be working toward living in a place that is quiet and comfortable. The latter probably refers to being modifiable—can I change the sink knobs and the toilet seat? Come to think of it, I could probably do that most places since neither is permanent. Ugh. But I have much less control if I go overseas. Finally, since variety has always been a large part of my life, I would probably prefer to have a job that I can separate from the rest of my life.

That might have gone off-track from my goal setting, but I think it was good to write those ideas down. Now for the actual exercise—how would my life be different? For the most important goals, I think I would value my time with God and other Christians more, I would have a desire to serve other people, and I would grow in wisdom. I also hope I would feel direction better in my life, or maybe that I would be better able to respond to it. That sounds good. How about the career/living-related goals? I would feel more comfortable about my place in this world, about who I am and what I can do. I think I might be able to connect to people better because I would feel more permanent and therefore more ready to commit to them. Wow, if that’s true, I really shouldn’t leave the country, and maybe I shouldn’t even admit to myself the possibility of leaving. That possibility is about 75% of why I’m studying in grad school now, though, so it might zap my motivation to study.

On that note, I might need to find a new motivation to stay in school. Well okay, maybe not. Teaching isn’t such a bad job, it’s just insufficient for a family and doesn’t give me much free time. The free time probably won’t be much of a concern for the first year or two, because everything will be new and I won’t have time to be bored. Do I really want to teach language arts, though? Honestly, I would like to give it a try. I’d like to keep my options open though, and being able to teach more languages is the main way I see to do that. I’ve got enough qualifications in programming that if I put in a week or two of work I think I could produce a program that would be sufficient to demonstrate my ability for teaching purposes. Spanish though, that’s a long road that I should get started on soon. Well, I have gotten started, I just need to keep going.

With those long-term goals better established, now I want to consider my unrelated goals. Exercise is necessary to keep myself healthy and in a good frame of mind, and I would also like to improve my body image. Rubik’s cube is a quick, painless activity that gives me confidence in my ability to fulfill goals, as well as helping me maintain focus on schoolwork at times. Violin… well I like music, I want music to be a part of my life, and practicing violin (being a mostly physical activity) can give me clear results which boost my confidence. Right now, I’m not sure I have the willpower to practice—I’m not excited about any song, my acoustic is out of commission, and I don’t have a way to make the cool app function with my electric violin. Unless I find some way to output to a speaker, my electric violin is only useful for practicing. Decent transmitters specifically for that purpose seem to be expensive, and a cable seems uncomfortable. In conclusion, I’m not going to concern myself with violin for the rest of this month, just like I haven’t for the first half of it, hah.

Now for other goals that I haven’t really addressed this month. I want to work on making things. To do this, I need materials, which are a pain to procure in the current environment. I’m not sure that I want to work on this every day, but it is unquestionably a better use of time than playing video games or reading fanfiction, so it would be best to make time for it to avoid reverting to the others. Related to that, I want to read books before I go to sleep, preferably related to history. The hardest part of this is finding the books. If the library were open, it would be no problem, but as it isn’t, I really only have the books in my house to read. So I’m going to pile them up and read them, and if I get bored of one I will allow myself to swap it out without guilt. This should help me avoid fanfiction.

Okay, now I’ve got three fun(ish) books and two less fun books to choose from. Unfortunately, only one is actually historical non-fiction. Nevermind, looking in the office there are plenty more interesting non-fiction books, but I’ll start with this one since it’s on my bookshelf. Now I need to come up with a plan for my projects, and a plan for my time.