Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

So I used to have a problem with shoes. Not a problem with owning them – although you could argue, at the point where I had twenty-odd pairs of converse sneakers, there was a problem there as well – but a problem storing them. I’d wear a pair of sneakers out for the day, shuck them off after arriving home and sitting on the couch, and then I’d forget to move them to the cramped box of shoes in my wardrobe after I finished watching TV or reading.

This cycle would continue over a week or two, until all twenty-odd pairs of sneakers were residing on my living room floor and I’d trip over them in the morning when I wandered to the couch with my coffee. It wasn’t terribly efficient, but it was the path of least resistance.

Two months back I acquired a shoe rack. It spent about twenty-four hours living in my wardrobe, which was not a good place for it, then migrated to the spot beside my bed where I’m most likely to get dressed in the morning. I haven’t left my shoes on the floor since. I get home, I shuck them off, and they’re either on the shoe rack immediately or they get moved there the moment I’m done with whatever urgent thing distracted me (usually, at this point, new episodes of Riverdale).

The thing is, I always  knew what I had to do do – put my goddamn shoes away – but I’d never sat down to tackle the problem of why I wasn’t doing it until the middle of January in my 39th year on the planet.

And really, this is the core principle of every productivity system I’ve ever come across. I’ve spent a large chunk of this year talking to people about systems, from Accidental Creative to Bullet Journal to my ongoing obsession with tracking every aspect of my life with white boards and spreadsheets, but no-one I’ve talked to has ever sat down with a system and been unable to think of all the things that should go on their to-do list. They know what they’re meant to be doing, just like I knew that life would be immeasurably better if I put my shoes away every day instead of tripping over them while ferrying my morning coffee around.

A good productivity system isn’t about looking at what you’ve got to do and putting it on a to-do list, it’s about looking at how you’re going to do it and why you aren’t currently getting around to it. Sometimes the problem is process, sometimes it’s mental; more often than you’d like, it’s a combination of the two.

The problem with putting shoes away wasn’t the desire to do it – it was having a place for them go that made sense and fit with my lifestyle.

I’m basically spending 2017 looking at a bunch of problematic parts of my house that are just like my shoes. They were the January project, my desk became the February project, and March has become all about my kitchen where the places I stored things really failed to mesh with the way I’d actually cook.

The end result was a lot of cheese sandwiches and take-out orders, but a weekend spent hacking the shelf space and reorganising the pantry has made it a hell of a lot easier to convince myself I should cook things.

I inherited my father’s roll-top desk over a decade ago, after my parents renovated their study. It’s travelled with me from apartment to share-house to apartment, sitting in lounge rooms or the corner of my bedroom, frequently serving as a site for storage and the accumulation of junk rather than an actual work place. This is the tyranny of a modern workspace where a computer is prominently featured, and the desk was designed for an era where computers weren’t really a consideration. It was always easier to buy a small computer desk that sits in the corner work there when I needed an actual desk,, and spend the rest of my writing time on the couch or the bed.

This weekend my problems with the desk came up against another problem: the PhD needs space to spread out when I’m working, layout out research books and notepads and index cards with raw ideas so they can be absorbed and synthesised into the current work-in-progress document. Compact computer desks aren’t ideal for that, and my original plan of going to the university campus to get work done has shown itself to be a problem due to the sheer number of distracting people to catch up with on campus.The two spaces in my apartment capable of handling that kind of sprawl were the roll-top desk or my coffee table, and my shoulder was already hurting from too much time on the couch.

And so I spent some quality time cataloguing all my points of hesitation about using the desk as a workspace, addressing them one by one in order to eliminate my resistance towards using the desk as it’s intended instead of dumping bills and pulling the top down.

The computer issue is much less of an issue now, thanks to laptops, but the older design of the desk still left me with a couple  of other problems I’d never really noticed. For instance, it’s a particularly high desk – the desktop is about 82 cm off the ground – and the seat of my office chair was only 41 cm off the ground. This made typing at the desk profoundly awkward and unergonomic, until I ducked down to my local office works and acquired a new office chair that sat higher and positioned me at a comfortable typing/writing height.

That’s not the only change I’ve made. Other shifts include rearranging one of the draws – the desk has fantastically deep drawers for storage – so it is the repository of the blank notebook archive, and moving the stationary draw I never really used from the left side of the right so I don’t have to reach across my centre line to pick up a pen or an eraser with my dominant hand; I invested in a sleeker, nicer in/out tray so that I don’t have the option of letting things stack up so much.

All of these are little things, yes, but they were still a slight drag on my process the moment I even thought of working at the desk that contributed to the feeling that doing something else was preferable.

Over the weekend I did the bare amount of changing and testing to get me working at the space, in addition to setting up a long-list of things to try as I settle in to really fine-tune the process. For now, it seems to be working okay, and it has a distinct advantage in its ability to literally shut down my access to work when it’s finally time to settle and relax without feeling guilty.

I didn’t make a big deal about leaving social media, mostly because I haven’t actually left. I still check Facebook a few times a week. I still hit twitter and check in on my feeds. I have so many friends who use Facebook chat as their default messaging system that I don’t have the energy to retrain them or myself, and I still Instagram  because I like the way it forces me to pay attention to the world around me.

What I did do, back on January 1st, was remove all the various apps from my phone so I wasn’t using social media twenty-four seven. My access is desk-top only, and since I don’t log in at work, that limits me when it comes to Facebook and Twitter.

That isn’t quitting social media, but holy hell, it feels like it. My average usage has dropped to about 15 minutes a day, which is enough that you suddenly realise how social media has become the dominant communication medium of our time.

Suddenly I have some empathy for those folks who post annoying “I am leaving social media” posts, because dropping out of sight without telling people is actually problematic. Questions are left on walls. Plans are made without your input, because things never come through on the channels you actually monitor. Occasionally, someone will check in to see that you’re still alive, because they haven’t seen you posting much.

My Facebook wall, in particular, has become the digital equivalent of an answering machine. Not even a terribly efficient answering machine, given the set-up of notifications.

This is not the promise of Facebook, which is all about instant access to people. Facebook is meant to make communication easy, which is its great advantage as well as its greatest flaw. Every time I log in, there is a reminder that I am using Facebook wrong. I am, for the record, completely okay with that.

But letting people know that you’re no longer using social media correctly seems like the kind of thing that would save a whole lot of time.