Layered Thoughts

Alright so I did my 7th workout of the last 8 days. Other than feeling pretty sore in the legs, I’m overall stoked with myself. As long as I make sure to get to the gym at the right times (the Pacific Beach 24 Hour Fitness is a Bro Fest, dudes with their hair done wearing nice clothes and shit) it’s an awesome experience. Yesterday I even pulled off an hour and forty five minute workout!

Right now I’m just trying to get my whole body back into workout mode, trying to get over that initial soreness shock that comes with not working out consistently for a long time. Probably in another week or so, I’m hoping to either find a good workout plan to follow or just design my own (designing my own would simply take longer, so I’m still up in the air about it). Since I’ll probably design the workout plan in a spreadsheet, I’ll be sure to upload it here for anyone who might want to follow along.

Other than that, I’m just trying to get my life back on track in regards to productivity. I have a bunch of projects I want to do personally as well as professionally so I need to step my game up and make things happen. As I go through that, I’ll probably be writing some posts about how I’m overcoming certain addictive qualities I have with using the Internet.

Also, I’ve adopted a little system that Jerry Seinfeld apparently uses to stay consistent with a long running project. He simply has a big calendar on the wall in his workspace that he puts large red X’s on each day he does what he’s supposed to do. As the “chain” grows, he becomes more and more reluctant to break it. Simple, but it seems pretty cool. I’m going to test it out with this blog. I printed out a simple month of May calendar using Microsoft Word and I’m going to put an X over each day I write a blog post. I’m obviously getting a late start as it’s already the 10th, but hey, it’s something. 1 day down! Peace

I just finished up a 4 hour late night work blitz and feel much better about my progress on the project now than before I started. I was slowly slipping behind little by little with making the right amount of progress so I decided to just buckle down and catch myself back up. So here I am at 3:18 AM finishing up the night. I’ve really gotten hooked on listening to mellow, ambient music through my headphones as I work.  Letting music play through your speakers is OK but it still leaves you vulnerable to audible distractions from the area around you.  But if you instead throw on your headphones and play some mellow tunes, you’ll be distraction free and ready to kick some virtual ass. So nerdy.

Anyways, I’ve been listening to Groove Salad over at Somafm.com as I’ve been working.  It’s really mellow and slow, most likely just a few beats and melodies, never anything fancy.  But it’s great for keeping you focused while also not stealing your attention away, like most popular songs do whether you like it or not. I’m also downloading some ambient tracks so I don’t have to suck up whatever bandwidth I have with streaming tunes.  I found a great plugin for Winamp as well that let’s you record each track of a streaming radio station on the web and save them to your computer.  I did it earlier and captured about 15 of the songs I had heard on Groove Salad.  Pretty Sweet.  I’ll explain how to use that tool in another post. Til next time, good night.

I’ve always known that I have a potentially unhealthy fascination with the internet.  Some would argue it’s with good reason; there is literally everything on the internet. Everything. But recently (last few months I would say) I have seen myself and my work output drop significantly.  I’ll have bursts of creativity and productivity from time to time, but for the most part I’ve just been screwing around online reading about stuff that I will probably never touch again.  A perfect example of the effects of this is my bookmarks folder in Firefox right now.  There’s hundreds of sites in there that I’ll probably never go to again, but at the time I found them, they were THE thing that stole attention for some period of time. Or even better is my RSS reader.  I used to religiously check my news feeds multiple times a day, a pattern I only recently broke, simply because there was too much shit to read.  I subscribed to too many blogs and literally felt like I was drowning in information everytime I logged in, so I just quit. I have 898 unread blog posts in my newsreader right now, and I would say the last time I logged in was about two weeks ago. 898 Even if I would have kept up with reading the newsreader everyday, that’s still somewhere between 50-100 blog posts a day to read.  At first, those subscriptions served the purpose of keeping me in the loop for a few different fields I was interested in, namely web design, web development, programming, and the Packers.  Now they are just remnants of something that started me on my path towards information addiction and subsequently, information overload. That overload has killed my ability to produce work.  The lack of work output has seriously affected my life in a few areas that I wish it never did and I am truly sorry about it. I did a search for information addiction on Google a few minutes ago (please refrain from pointing out the irony of searching for information about information addiction on the internet, I know it’s hypocritical). There’s actually a wikipedia entry about information addiction, albeit a short one, as well as another entry about internet addiction.  Upon reading both of those, I realized that I was actually suffering from some sort of disorder.  Basically a technological ADD. There was also an interesting blog post about what I came here to write about, although the author took a little bit more of a literary approach to the description and prescribes a bit more serious solution to the problem than what I would like to take right now.  But there was a quote in there that really got me.

“Information is an analgesic. It not only dulls the pain involved in actually Getting Shit Done, but if you do it right, it actually feels like you’re doing something, instead of avoiding doing something.”

That sums up my reason for why I check these sites everyday so obsessively.  They make me feel like I’m getting something done when in reality, I’m just treading water in the pool of progress while everyone swims past me. So what steals my time and why?  I spend a lot of time on Hacker News, simply because it’s a constantly updated social news site about web startups and technology and programming that actually contains intelligent discussions for each post.  Sounds harmless, but I have come to read it so often throughout the day that it is interfering with the deadlines that I need to adhere to to ensure that I can maintain a way of life that is comfortable and healthy.  I also sit on Reddit a lot, railsforum.com, myspace and facebook of course, and random Google searches that lead me onto weird informational journeys to places that I’ll probably never need nor even return to in my life. I’ve developed an idea in my head that I need this information.  I need to keep searching and traveling the interwebs, learning about new ideas and concepts and tools.  But in reality, I only need what is important for making sure I can be happy and can make people around me happy. A lot of my friends know about my random ideas that I have constantly. I call my girlfriend a few times a week telling her about my new million dollar idea.  But I never do anything about them.  Or at least I haven’t yet. And it’s not because I can’t.  I have the knowledge and skills to do nearly all of them right now, or at least the means to find out how to do them.  I’m just so obsessed with information and other people’s stories and projects that it’s impeding my own ability to succeed. And that’s just plain bad. So how do I fix this? Well, it’s basically going to come down to me breaking the habit.  There’s not really a treatment for the problem that I can see.  I just have to stop. So that’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to stay off of all of the social media sites I go to everyday during the week.  I will only let myself go to those sites on Sundays, generally mine and everyone else’s laziest day of the week.  The other six days of the week, I will only work on the projects I have in my head and on paper, write on this blog (this might entail a little bit of internet research, but I’ll keep it limited as I have a few pretty good topics in my head that I really would like to write about, and I’m really starting to like writing on this thing, so I’ll let this one slip), and keep on pushing towards making a better living for myself and the people around me. I’m going to experiment with a few different ways to keep myself organized and focused.  The first I’ll start using is some sort of To-Do list system.  I’ll be writing about what I find works the best in the future for sure. I owe it to everyone around me just as much as myself to start making more progress in life.

The scariest thing in the world is to look back and realize you’re in the same place you were a few months ago.