Building a Habit: Using the net less

What I became aware of was that using the internet had become a habit: something I didn't think too much about, I just sat down and surfed (at home, at work). Sometimes an hour would pass and I snap out of my netdaze and wonder what I'd been doing.

That's an hour of my life I could've been doing something with. And each of those hours could be multiplied by several times every weeks.

It wasn't just the big hour-long blocks of my life that I was concerned were slipping away. There were the 'five minutes' here, the 'ten minutes' there. The "I'll just check one thing" net-checks that spiralled out of control until I'd find myself on a website dedicated to the covers of 1970s science fiction novels with no real idea of how I'd gotten there.

My time is valuable ... and I needed to make myself understand that. So I decided to apply some basic reward and punishment strategies to my internet use. The reward was money (effectively, pocket money I'd give myself to spend on anything I wanted - guilt-free) and the punishment was working extra time at work, unpaid.


I started by giving myself a certain number of checks per day; I tried to make this number quite large, so it'd be easy to achieve. So I started with giving myself 10 trips to the internet every day. Not only that, but I decided to be generous: checking the internet at lunch-time and between 7pm and 7.30pm would be ‘free’. They wouldn't count against my 10 trip limit.

I also introduced 'penalty zones', times when using the internet counts for double. For the first hour after I wake up, between 10 and 11, and between 3 and 4; these are the times when I really want to be working on my own stuff.

After two weeks, I dropped down from 10 internet visits per day to 9 (and then kept dropping it every two weeks after that). That's when the tension really began. I started feeling the limitation, but I also started to feel the habit breaking.

I discovered two things about myself through doing this:

+ a lot of my internet time is ego-driven; I'm checking to see if anyone's replied to a post I've made, or to an email.
+ I completely under-estimated the perniciousness of 'just wanted to check just one thing', that impulse to google a random piece of information and then be led astray into the glorious and seductive wilderness of the internet.

I'm at 5 internet visits a day now, and I'm going to keep it at that level for a while to consolidate the habit. This feels like a behavior I'm going to have to manage for the rest of my life, because I suspect it'll be very easy for the browsing and googling to slowly creep up if I don't pay attention to it.

Doing this has felt good though - I definitely have more disposable time, and I've been feeling less stressed.

The New Thing (Part Three): Making writing fit

Two years. That's how long it took to mentally get to a point where just sitting down to write would freak me out.

Thirty minutes. That's how long it took (with the right tools) to completely flip my brain from that to seeing writing as an opportunity.


But while I was stoked that that had worked, I was becoming aware of another source of stress underneath that: stress from trying to fit writing into my work and personal life.

Some numbers: after a normal day of work, I have maybe two hours (max) where my brain is clear and active, before it starts shutting down and going to sleep. And before work, I probably have 20 to 30 minutes of free-ish time, which I often spend surfing the net. With about two-and-a-half hours of good brain time available to me, I realised I needed to create a routine for writing that I could fit into my life - a routine that would place as little pressure on me as possible.

A couple of years ago, I read a book called 'Margin', which talked about the idea of creating free time and breathing room in your life (much like the white margins that surround the words on a page). The way I had been writing - focusing on a big project, spending all my free time on it - had been filling up the page with words and leaving very little white space.

Two Things


After reflecting on it, what I realised is that when my life is going well, when I'm productive, feeling good, and not stressed at work ... then I can handle working on two extra projects. That's any big project that's going to take a lot of energy to move to the next stage (or finish!). And it's not just writing. It's anything from my '12 things to do in 2 years' list. It's blogging. It's two extra things in my life.

So here's my starting point: If I want to have margin in my life, I have to limit myself to two things. For instance:

• Finishing a draft of Bad Family to send to Simon and Malcolm for peer review is a thing.
• Spending six weeks going to ceroc, to learn to dance is a thing.
• Writing this series of blog posts about The New Thing? It's a thing.

What I didn't consider, for the longest time, was that the blog is a Thing. Writing this blog has been so important to me that I've felt like I've had to do it, even if I had lots of other stuff going on in my life. But what I realised was that blogging can't be an 'extra' thing that competes for my available writing time. It's better for me to think about blogging as just one way I can express myself through writing, and these book analyses and multi-part essays are just one of the possible 'things' I have the space in my life to write about. (That means there will probably be further changes to what I blog about, but I'll let Future Steve sort that out ...)

(Future Steve?)

This isn't perfect

Through figuring all this out and applying this '2 Things' principle I seem to have stumbled into a good new space for writing - a routine for writing that fits into my life. As long as I write for 10 minutes a day, usually before going on the net in the morning and - if I can - when I first get home from work, then I'm happy. And seem to be making a lot of progress.

I'm definitely not saying that this is something people should try, and I'm not saying this routine is some perfect, finished thing. In fact, one of the great things I took from the Pixar talk is that there's no such thing as a 'perfect' way to live your life; it's just good to keep adapting to your circumstances and energy. I actually expect to keep refining and changing how I run my life every three to six months, and that's totally cool.


All I'm saying is that I have a new routine. Next: what am I going to do with it?

How is this series on the New Thing going to work?

This series on the New Thing has two phases. The first is going to talk about the head-space about writing that I've finally gotten into. I think there will be five posts about that, posting once a week.

In between those weekly posts, I'll have some Bonus Features which are filled with material that's related to what's going on. (One of the cool things about writing about the New Thing is that news and clips are popping up all over the place that feel inter-related to it).

At the end of those five posts (on 20 May), the series will shift into Phase 2.

The Have Done List: March

Rather than writing a to-do list, here's a list of things I did do in March:

• bought two seasons of Angel incredibly cheaply at the dump shop
• discovered (and developed a crush on) The Big Bang Theory
• used TV Gorge, before it folded
• started a game of Bad Family on Google Wave
• won poker (and 10 packets of Girl Guide biscuits)
• entertained a three-year old with a talking rabbit
• went body-surfing in Lyall Bay
• drove up and back to Auckland
• saw the Pixies perform Doolittle
• drove around Auckland by myself

Time Management: Tips and hacks

I thought I'd follow up on some ideas from the Facebook post about how to stop myself from wasting time on the internet. Please let me know your ideas for not procrastinating, both online and in real life.

* I've started breaking my internet addiction through giving myself designated 'offline hours' and a dedicated half-hour in the evening where I can do guilt-free browsing and read anything I want. Also: no internet before 9 in the morning (which, it turns out, is quite hard for me to stick to)

* As part of this, I went on a one-week media fast - no news sites, or political sites, or newspapers/radio/TV. This felt great, and freed up an amazing amount of time.

* I built up some strong negative emotions (like loathing, frustration, or boredom) towards particular websites - which motivated me to block them in my hosts file. This means I can't access these sites without manually unblocking them. Seems to be working - I don't miss them, and I think I *wanted* an excuse not to go back to them. (And unless Facebook makes some changes to its new homepage design - which has made the site way more irritating - it's another site that might be joining this group.)

* Decided to not follow or read blog posts comments or discussions - this is tougher, but I've realised that I don't really process these conversations very well. They sort of swim in a haze through my eyes and brain and don't really sink into my long-term memory. A complete waste of my time, really, to look at them or check back in on them.

* I've re-categorised all my Google Reader feeds, allocating them to either 'Must Read' blogs, 'Skippable' blogs (where I can delete their posts if I'm running out of time). I also have a Probation' category now - where I put all the new blogs I'm subscribing to. I give them about a month in Probation and then decide whether to unsubscribe from them or not. Having a Probation category has also prompted me to delete several big blogs from my feed - most notably Aintitcool - which has significantly reduced the amount of infocrap I need to wade through.

Also a big shout-out to Billy from the previous Facebook post: he introduced me to the studyhacks site, which led me to this long but good talk by Merlin Mann about time and attention, and his recommendation of the 4 Hour Work Week was the tipping point into me getting the book out and having a read. Fascinating stuff.

What about you? What do you do?

Interested in discussing how to organise your life?

I'm thinking about doing a series of posts about ways to organise your life so it runs more smoothly. The series would draw off books and blogs I've been reading over the last 5 years, and stuff I've been trying out in my own life. It'd cover a mix of big and small stuff, like:

- to-do lists
- managing projects
- keeping track of the big picture of what you want to do with your life
- paying bills on time

Is this something you'd be interested in? I imagine it'd depend quite a lot on people asking and answering questions in the comments, so I thought I'd throw it open for discussion now.

Bad Family: 100 words a day

The re-writing of Bad Family (*) has been warming up over the last week or so (although it'll have been just over a month, by the time this entry is auto-published).

(*) My game about dysfunctional relationships, family sit-coms, and the struggle to get what you want by the end of the episode before your big sister screws you over.

Really, it feels like the writing is happening at the intersection of seven personal productivity hacks that I've been using for a while:

1. I've set up the home page of my browser so that the Google Docs page where I'm writing Bad Family is right in my face whenever I go online. Using Google Docs also has the advantage of making it easy to work on it anywhere.
   
2. I have started a Seinfeld chain - basically, the idea that if you can see you're making progress every day, you don't want to take a day off (and break the chain). You can see my chain for Bad Family here.
   
3. I'm using an idea from Mark Forster called the Current Initiative, which is that you choose one project that you want to make progress on, and make it the very first thing you do each day. So, when I wake up I write on Bad Family for 10 minutes. I also make it the first thing I do when I get home.
   
4. After reading 'In Praise of Slow', I'm putting less pressure on myself to complete this game RIGHTNOWASSOONASPOSSIBLE. By taking the pressure off, I'm trying to make it more fun.
   
5. I'm writing it with a specific audience in mind. This is a hack suggested by Jonathon Walton - writing it to a particular person gives it a more personal voice. Hopefully it also makes it a more enjoyable read.
   
6. I'm making this my main writing project for the next two months (till the end of July). I'm now alternating a period of serious, focused writing with two weeks of playing around with various projects, finding out what's fun.
   
7. I'm writing 100 words a day. Again it's a suggestion by Jonathon Walton, in this thread on Story Games.

Basically, I'm looking forward to 'finishing' this thing. Not only will it tie off the last Old Thing I've been working on, but it'll also allow me to release Matt, Karen, and Gino's artwork into the internet.

EDITED TO ADD: I've also been 'gameifying' my writing - finding easy levels (sections) to complete and working on them; gradually I'm working my way up to the harder levels.

Useful links

I've been cleaning out the backlog from my Google Reader. Here's some stuff that survived the cull from last week and the last year:

Mint.com provides us with 30 free ebooks to learn about personal finance.

Trent at the Simple Dollar discusses how to build a master information document. This is:

a guide to the executor of your estate, containing all important information not contained in the other documents and also explaining online account access and other such information, like where a safety deposit box key should be and such. This may also include personal letters to people for them to read in the event of your passing and so forth.

Trent also talks about creating a silent room to enhance productivity.

Dane lists 20 things you shouldn't do when starting a business.

Jenni links to Instructables and Wikihow - two sites that tell you how to do most of the things you need to know how to do. (And happy 5th blogday, Jenni!)

David Milch (Deadwood) discusses writing.

David Simon (The Wire) gives a talk at Harvard University.

Useful links

Here's the stuff that made it through my cull of Google Reader this week:

Let's make some animated movies. I haven't played around with either of these sites yet, but the tutorials make it sound like it simply a matter of typing and clicking to create a short film. (h/t Pulp 2.0)

Xtranormal
Goanimate

Also over at Pulp 2.0, Bill Cunningham talks about having a 'pulp notes' file, a nice tool for storing fragments of dialogue and ideas for later use.

Let Michael Caine teach you about film-acting.

I link to Morgue linking to Matt and Jon's applications for the Evil League of Evil. Really good, sharp characteristions from both teams (and I suspect Morgue might also find himself in contention for his 15-second cameo as the Devil's Advocate.)

Vincent Baker has written a new fantasy RPG. At the moment it's free, because he wants to see if it's readable - is it communicating the play experience he wants?

Here's a hack to improve pretty anything in your life. I first read this on Seth Godin's blog, but Trent over at the Simple Dollar generalises it.

The Casual Kitchen compiles a whole bunch of links on low-cost cooking.

An overview of some of the thinking about climate change we'll be doing as a society and as individuals over the next few years. Check it out.

Some Paul Krugman and Americablog linkage to analysis of the financial crisis:

• A solution
• A history and a solution
• The G8's report back

If you want to kick arse at folding t-shirts, then here's how: (a 22-second instructional video)

Have a great week

Links - Learning & Project Management Tip

I haven't gone through either of these articles thoroughly yet, but it seems like there could be some useful nuggets here:

77 Tips for learning.

101 Tips for project management.