Hacking Your Passions

Don’t want to lose this link to an article about Mirror Neurons and Happy People – it’s one of the biggest pieces to the jigzaw puzzle of hacking one’s passions I’m working on that I’ve found yet. It also explains… me, better than any attempts I have previously struggled through, particularly the part on happy people.

“Remember the flight attendant’s advice… you must put on your own oxygen mask first.”

Sometimes I experience a sensation that feels like Writer’s Block, but it stems from an inability to decide on which topic to focus on rather than the inability to come up with a topic in the first place. Today I can’t seem to make the decision on what to focus on, so instead, here’s a bunch of tips on circumventing Writer’s Block. I’ll try to apply a few of them towards getting some focus on the posts later this week.

I am pretty confident that if I asked twenty people to list the six most important things in their life, I wouldn’t get anyone to respond with “watching television”. So why are we spending one sixth of our lives watching TV?

“According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.”

Until recently I was drinking caffeine as though it was a life requirement of the air or water magnitude. I definitely felt the low if I didn’t have it after a while, and I needed to be at or near peak performance to get my work accomplished at the level I like to operate at. Recently, I discovered just through trial and error a few of the things mentioned in this article about concentration in the section about Concentration and Your Body. I have one cup of coffee in the morning first thing, and a big tumbler of water along with it, and then I stick to water the entire rest of the day – no soda, coffee, or other caffeine or sugar sources. And now that the weather is getting nicer in Phoenix (under 100 degrees at noon), I’m spending my breaks at work out in the courtyard by a fountain, just smiling and thinking about the day, breathing in the fresh air for a bit. I definitely feel significantly sharper these last several days than I have in quite a while.

Procrastination Dash – “a short burst of focused activity during which you force yourself to do nothing but work on the procrastinated item for a very short period of time.” I especially appreciate a variant of the concept called “Fill Your Hands” – grab a bunch of stuff around your house until you can’t hold anything more, then put just that stuff in the place it is supposed to go.

This assumes there is a clear place where things should go that are strewn about, of course. This certainly was not always the case in my bachelor days.

One of the core ingredients in efficient time management is spending time on what you value most. You also probably want to make sure you’re getting an appropriate Return On Investment (ROI) from the time you are spending on any particular task. lifehack.org posted an article recently on How Not to Overspend Your Time On a Task.