As people close to me know, I've been using a free relatively new web service called Stickk.com to track small goals once a week and provide whatever small nagging motivation I might need in order to follow through on them. The idea behind stickk's service is the same proposed from the behavioural economist Ian Ayres' book "Carrots and Sticks". My brother got me into the web service after having read the book and I had read a similarly written book by another economist Dan Ariely called "Predictably Irrational" which posited partly that our motivations lie very much in the idea that we often take great measures not to lose anything however arbitrary the stakes. I am finding that the approach is working but with a few caveats.
My goals so far without going into detail have been to spend time learning more about technology (three hours weekly), Spend time writing every day (15 mins a day or 1 hr and 45 mins total), and learning a couple new chords or a song on the ukuele/guitar (0-1 hr). My thinking with these goals was to find a balance between the logical, spiritual, and playful sides of my consciousness and it seemed to be working fairly well during the first months. I enjoyed going back and forth between learning new chords, writing a bit of a short story, or devoting time to learning a new element of web design. I still couldn't quite control the bursts of unrelated thinking and revelry and found that my creative side which I had the benefit of a lot of time in college to nurture became so overactive that it would eat into the time that I felt I wanted to to devote to these things. After my brain spun round and round so many times, it left me exhausted on the sidelines and then all I could do was watch helplessly and hope that I would find some extra time to continue later on.
My completion percentages have always stayed in the range of fifty to seventy percent completion for all the tasks mentioned, and in the course of completing them I may have found more clues about why it has become so difficult to concentrate on just these few tasks. I could blame it on e-mail, but I check my mine infrequently so long as I am not logged in or have a sync widget checked on my Android device. I also could blame it on the fact that I have been half-heartedly looking for interim work during my time off this winter but to no avail have found that I check my e-mail and phone messages more often than I should just in the hopes that I get a paying gig to stave off the complete draining of my savings. These are trying times, but I have the benefit of a supportive wife and should not despair if I believe in what I am doing from day to day. So the question remains, what have I really been doing with my time?
I have yet to understand why my brain will immediately flit to thoughts unrelated to the task that I'm looking at simply because it can, and often when I have the time to complete a said task, I do not have the willingness or the attention span (the latter of the two being more important but debated as to whether it is real). The calming of the mind is an epic undertaking and one that shouldn't be taken lightly. Finding reasons to work towards unending goals becomes harder when faced with the prospect of publicly stating your aims to your loved ones but finding their support comes and goes as does the rain. Young children it can be said are different, however, and their love is boundless; they will hope and pray for your success for as long as you believe that you will be successful. A good manager of mine actually once told me "What can't be measured it follows cannot be managed properly" (origin anyone?), but that is not not say that success can be measured by any standard (i think those who try invariably corrupt its meaning).
My goals so far without going into detail have been to spend time learning more about technology (three hours weekly), Spend time writing every day (15 mins a day or 1 hr and 45 mins total), and learning a couple new chords or a song on the ukuele/guitar (0-1 hr). My thinking with these goals was to find a balance between the logical, spiritual, and playful sides of my consciousness and it seemed to be working fairly well during the first months. I enjoyed going back and forth between learning new chords, writing a bit of a short story, or devoting time to learning a new element of web design. I still couldn't quite control the bursts of unrelated thinking and revelry and found that my creative side which I had the benefit of a lot of time in college to nurture became so overactive that it would eat into the time that I felt I wanted to to devote to these things. After my brain spun round and round so many times, it left me exhausted on the sidelines and then all I could do was watch helplessly and hope that I would find some extra time to continue later on.
My completion percentages have always stayed in the range of fifty to seventy percent completion for all the tasks mentioned, and in the course of completing them I may have found more clues about why it has become so difficult to concentrate on just these few tasks. I could blame it on e-mail, but I check my mine infrequently so long as I am not logged in or have a sync widget checked on my Android device. I also could blame it on the fact that I have been half-heartedly looking for interim work during my time off this winter but to no avail have found that I check my e-mail and phone messages more often than I should just in the hopes that I get a paying gig to stave off the complete draining of my savings. These are trying times, but I have the benefit of a supportive wife and should not despair if I believe in what I am doing from day to day. So the question remains, what have I really been doing with my time?
I have yet to understand why my brain will immediately flit to thoughts unrelated to the task that I'm looking at simply because it can, and often when I have the time to complete a said task, I do not have the willingness or the attention span (the latter of the two being more important but debated as to whether it is real). The calming of the mind is an epic undertaking and one that shouldn't be taken lightly. Finding reasons to work towards unending goals becomes harder when faced with the prospect of publicly stating your aims to your loved ones but finding their support comes and goes as does the rain. Young children it can be said are different, however, and their love is boundless; they will hope and pray for your success for as long as you believe that you will be successful. A good manager of mine actually once told me "What can't be measured it follows cannot be managed properly" (origin anyone?), but that is not not say that success can be measured by any standard (i think those who try invariably corrupt its meaning).
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