Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

I was catching up on twitter and noticed my friend Kate Cuthbert posting about Romance at MWF. It’s…rather good news:

I HAVE HAD TO BE QUIET ABOUT THIS FOR MONTHS. IT HAS BEEN SO HARD!! I’m so so so happy that A Day of Romance is now out for the public! Come and see the devastatingly talented writers talk frankly and intelligently about writing about love at #MWF19 I CAN’T WAIT. ❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/8lTYXQEhRt

— Kate Cuthbert 📚 (@katydidinoz) July 10, 2019

For those who can’t see the image in the quoted tweet, it features a shot of the Day of Romance program that looks something like this:

And, oh god, that looks good. It’s the 8th of September, and you can grab the full details for each event over on the Melbourne Writers Festival website, and it’s a rather spectacular program in terms of content and talent.

I’m frankly jealous of all the folks in Melbourne who get to go to this. And you really should.

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When I first read Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, a book about the way our brain transfers certain tasks become encoded as routine tasks in our brain, one of the things that stood out was the hypothesis that bad habits never really go away. Once a certain sequence of tasks is encoded in the basal ganglia, it’s there for good.

Sure, you can force the routine into the background and override it with new sequences. And you can kick your conscious brain into gear and tell the basal ganglia it’s not needed for this particular task. These are great, but given the same, familiar circumstances and no particular overriding conflict, the old code sneaks back into your life and you find yourself doing things you had hoped to leave behind.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday engaged in a little habit-hacking as a result, setting up obstacles to prevent me from falling into old, less-productive morning routines. The first cab off the rank was setting up a Freedom Schedule every morning, curbing my access to certain websites and programs on my phone and computer.

This includes some of the usual suspects–Facebook, Twitter, a handful of web forums I frequent–but it also includes tools like Photoshop and Vellum, which can eat the bulk of my day if I put my focus on publishing rather than writing.

(Case in point: I just paused to figure out what to say next, and automatically typed the web address for Facebook out of habit. Freedom cheerfully brought up the green butterfly screen informing me that I’ve blocked this site for the morning, and so I’m back here finishing this post).

What’s really working for me, with regards to Freedom, is the ability to spread a block across multiple devices, which means my morning moratorium is in effect on my work PC, my play PC, my phone, and the old phone that serves as our media centre.

No matter which I reach for, the block is in effect.

We cleaned the apartment last weekend, trying to drive a stake through the heart of the debris that had accumulated through the rolling hell that was the month of March. I took this snapshot of my desk prior to tidying it up, capturing the accumulated mass of bags, stacked notebooks, and paperwork that hadn’t been processed.

I have a process for cleaning my desk these days–drawn, unsurprisingly, from a quick YouTube bit Marie Kondo put together for a UK magazine back when her book came out. It runs through a five step process:

1. Take a moment to refocus on what the space is used for, and how I’d like it to be used.
2. Pull everything off and group them into Notebooks, Papers, Misc Stationary, and Sentimental Things (Anything that doesn’t fit into those four categories probably doesn’t belong on my desk)
3. Keep the things that help me ‘spark joy,’ which in this context means ‘do my job better’ as much as ‘makes me happy.’ Although I feel free reign to be specific about pens in this context.
4. Discard the stuff that no longer has a place.
5. Put things in an order and store vertically where possible–all my laptops/tablets now get stored in an old magazine file, while all my notebooks sit upright in a decorated box that makes them easily accessible.

I have this process written down in my bullet journal, tucked away on page 60. When this journal is done, they’ll be transferred to a notecard and tucked into a desk draw, so they’re always really accessible.

Because the biggest point in hesitation after shit, I should tidy my desk is figuring out what the first step is. And having a documented process means I can start without having to answer that question–the first step is checking the process list and doing the first thing on it.

For things like a desk, where cleaning often means making dozens of small decisions about what to do with paperwork or things that have not yet found a permanent home, cutting down on the basic decisions makes it way easier to get started.

I started tracking my days in half-hour increments after finishing Laura Vanderkam’s Off the Clock: Feeling Less Busy While Getting More Done. Unlike Vanderkam, I track things old school instead of using an excel document: Every morning I wake up, note the time in my bullet journal, and mark off a series of half-hour increments down the page.

Then I fill them in as the day progresses, noting the time spent faffing about on the internet and actually doing work. Noting any major turns in my day, where somethings happen to redirect my attention. Often, noting down word counts achieved or specific things read.

It’s not the first time I’e done this–all sorts of productivity advice suggests doing this sort of thing to get a firmer understanding of how you’re actually using time–but those usually suggested doing it for a week.

I just hit the end of my first week, and I plan to keep on going this time. What I’m really interested in the kind of data Vanderkam gathered by doing this exercise for years, both in terms of the data collected about patterns as they shift and the increased mindfulness about how time is used.

Still, there is something to be said for even a week of doing this. I’ve already realised that the activity I like to call “Digital Faffing” takes up both more time in my day than I’d like, but also casts a long shadow over my psyche. Basically, I can spend 45 minutes checking things out on the internet–social media, blogs, checking numbers on various book sales sites–and my brain will take that 45 minutes and assume that I’ve just wasted two hours and therefore suck.

The time wasted doesn’t match the level of self-loathing I feel for wasting that time instead of getting something productive done. And that means the half-hour can quickly become more than that, simply because I’ve already started down a dark path of procrastination and self-loathing and it will forever will it dominate my destiny.

As is traditional when I start tracking these kinds of things, brains are an unreliable. My felt sense of how things are going is poorly calibrated with reality (which shows that deep study time will often blow out past the hour I allocate it every day, devouring three hours instead).

Tracking also reveals something useful: my online faffing also turns into something useful from time to time–fifteen minutes or digital faffing occasionally turns into a half-hour or hour spent engaging with a long-read, or picking up a half-finished online course and actually taking notes as i engage with it. Often, it will transition into some fine-tuning on the Brain Jar Press front–looking for upcoming promotion opportunities and adjusting copy.

Busy work, but useful busy work that does need some focus and isn’t currently in the laissez-faire approach to time management that sets in between Christmas and New Years celebrations.

And, ultimately, it pushes more of my attention onto the fact that the way I use time is a choice. There are obligations and demands, but also little gaps where I can take a step towards a long-term goal rather than surrender the half-hour to killing time.