I created a todo list task for myself titled \u201cvalue my own time\u201d. It stemmed from a conversation I had with an older colleague who pointed out that it didn\u2019t seem like I valued my own time. He was completely right, and I suspect I\u2019ve always known this but it\u2019s a little jarring to hear it from somebody else.<\/p>\n
How do you evaluate how well you’re valuing your own time? It has to be about whether or not you’re achieving your own goals? Maybe. But let\u2019s pause and switch questions, because that seems a little too navel-gazy. What does it mean to value somebody else’s time? Let’s take the boss. I value his time, so I don’t send him stupid shit. I reach out to him only when I have something useful for him. But if I truly, truly valued his time then I would also be much more prepared for our 1-1’s. So maybe I don’t value his time as much as I’d like to think I do.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s troubling to realize that I still live in a very reactive rather than proactive state. My proactiveness kicks in in short little bursts, when really it ought to be systematic.<\/p>\n
I read a tweet earlier today that said \u201cnot many people realize that the point of GTD is to defer decision-making\u201d. You do a lot of work upfront by putting everything down on paper, but the point of that is to get it out of your head. To think of less things in a given point in time. To decide in advance to think about some things later, so that you can focus on thinking about some things now. I thought that was a very interesting and clever point of view, because every lazy person likes the idea of putting things off. And it\u2019s definitely satisfying to see a map of what\u2019s going to happen next, so long as you do go on to take action and make things happen \u2013 otherwise it just sits there mocking you as a reminder of your incompetence. (That\u2019s the point of the weekly reviews and trimming. I\u2019m on to doing my second one this week. How tragic is it that I\u2019ve been doing word vomits for years, writing hundreds of thousands of words, and yet never really stuck to a habit of weekly reviews for my todo lists and other obligations and such? I suppose that stuff just scares me. It reminds me of going to meet a teacher or a parent who\u2019s going to tell me what a fuckup I am, and how I need to be a better person than I am, and things like that. It\u2019s interesting how the subconscious tries to actively avoid these things. Well, I\u2019m going to try and do a weekly review every week. If I can cook, after being afraid of the kitchen, being afraid of fire and so on, then I\u2019m going to be able to do weekly reviews. And then I\u2019m going to teach myself to swim. And then I\u2019m going to run like a boss. And squat 100kg. I\u2019M ALLOWED TO DO IT. I CAN DO WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT TO DO. I DON\u2019T HAVE TO BE AFRAID. I DON\u2019T HAVE TO COWER. I DON\u2019T HAVE TO AVOID THINGS. I CAN FEEL THE FEAR AND DO IT ANYWAY.<\/p>\n
Alright.<\/p>\n
So how do I measure my own progress, then? How do I know that I\u2019ve begun to value my own time? How do you know when you value anything? You take care of it, pay attention to it, handle it with loving care. How do I do that with my time? I carve out time for things that I care about and I make it sacred. This was a thing that I talked about with the boss at my last 1-1 too \u2013 not particularly in terms of valuing my own time, but in terms of going after my personal goals by getting to intermediate states as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
For most of the past 4 years I\u2019ve been living in this weird lumpy state where I\u2019ve always got some work on, but I\u2019m never exactly working on it with fury. I\u2019m sawing slowly rather than slicing with acceleration, which makes progress dullingly, frustatingly slow. If anything, it\u2019s dulling the knife (which is my mind, in this metaphor, or just me). I think I may have made some bits of progress in bits and pieces, but overall I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve made a 0 to 1 shift. More like 0 to 0.2, 0.6, 0.3, 0.2, 0.1, etc. I want to break the barrier. What\u2019s the barrier? The barrier is one that I set for myself. When I can leave my work at work, and come home and focus hard on my writing, and on spending time with my wife, and once a week I can spend time entirely on my own, doing nothing work related. That means I need to get a lot more work done at work. One of my problems is that I\u2019m willing to allow work to be on my mind 24\/7. I should not do that. That\u2019s not a noble thing. It\u2019s not even an efficient thing or an effective thing. The bottleneck here is my own limiting belief. I know from past vacations that taking those breaks means that I get to come back to work with renewed vigor and attack my problems head on. So if I want to do better I\u2019m going to have to focus. Where do I start?<\/p>\n
I think I have to start with my goals. I think I\u2019m going to make finishing this word-vomit project my #1 priority for the remainder of 2016. Behind this will come my work and fitness goals. I need at least an hour a day to write 4 word vomits. That\u2019s not a lot of time. I might be underestimating something somewhere\u2026 I can write more when there\u2019s stuff in the back of my mind to write. Well I\u2019ve done a bunch of aggregation and created a bunch of lists of starting points. So let\u2019s just blaze through it and make it happen and see where we end up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I created a todo list task for myself titled \u201cvalue my own time\u201d. It stemmed from a conversation I had with an older colleague who pointed out that it didn\u2019t seem like I valued my own time. He was completely right, and I suspect I\u2019ve always known this but it\u2019s… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[342],"class_list":["post-10250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-time"],"yoast_head":"\n