{"id":9446,"date":"2015-06-23T15:00:38","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/?p=9446"},"modified":"2017-06-23T18:21:24","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T18:21:24","slug":"0384-designing-a-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0384-designing-a-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"0384 \u2013 express your values through planned actions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>TLDR:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Wake up early every day (so sleep early too)<\/li>\n<li>Review work daily (with accountability partner)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>So what&#8217;s my plan?<\/p>\n<p>I value&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>growth<\/li>\n<li>progress<\/li>\n<li>triumph over adversity<\/li>\n<li>Confronting my fears and making them my bitch, and being better and stronger because of it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Alright. So what am I going to do to express those values? What is the plan of action?<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. Wake up early every morning.<\/strong> I&#8217;ve woken up at 6am the past 2 days. This by itself isn&#8217;t very remarkable, as it&#8217;s a habit that can slip at any time. But I&#8217;m making an extra effort not to let it slip. I&#8217;ve gotten my wife onboard on this, so we both wake up at 6am together. We set multiple alarms\u2013 both our phones, as well as her computer. There&#8217;s a cacophony of alarms at 6am in the morning. We&#8217;re going to do this for 49 days, including the weekend. The past couple of nights we actually slept pretty late, out of habit or self-sabotage or something. But we&#8217;ve been determined to stick to waking up, and so we did. The day before yesterday I went for a run after waking up.<\/p>\n<p>Today I didn&#8217;t do very much when I woke\u2013 I was really groggy, but I got out of bed anyway and lay on the sofa for a while. I did leave\u00a0for work earlier than I usually do. But I&#8217;m not going to be too harsh on myself for that. The plan is to make the habit of waking early stick. If there are some withdrawal symptoms or initial inefficiencies, I&#8217;ll bear with them. I know from long experience that whenever I wake up early, naturally and well rested, I feel really, really good. I make better decisions. I have space to plan out my day, to do things better. So I&#8217;m going to keep setting these alarms. We&#8217;re tracking our streak on a calendar taped to the wall, so it stares at us every morning when we wake up.<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. Beyond that, I&#8217;m also committing to voluntarily sending my boss a daily email update of what I&#8217;ve done.<\/strong> The idea is similar\u2013 it&#8217;s to create a structure that I need and want to commit to, so that things get done regularly. And it&#8217;s a really small quick update anyway. The process of doing it clarifies my thoughts about what I&#8217;m doing, and the PROSPECT of doing it makes me want to make sure that I have something worth reporting. So as a result I tend to subconciously pick my tasks better (as opposed to what I often used to do when I wasn&#8217;t accountable to anybody\u2013 I&#8217;d pick vague, open-ended tasks and spend the entire day exploring things without getting anything done).<\/p>\n<p>In a sense, everything I&#8217;m trying to do is really just trying to unlearn the habit I have of spending large chunks of time doing random, undefined things. I suppose if I were really wealthy or something, I might be able to afford living that sort of life. But even then, I do it beyond my own inclinations. When I&#8217;m exploring, it&#8217;s not exactly mindful, conscientious exploring. And it doesn&#8217;t have as much flow as I wish it did\u2013 I don&#8217;t always feel flow doing this weird random open-ended wandering. I guess because flow needs some constraints. You need to be working within some boundaries, some restrictions before you can truly experience flow.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I spend too much time completely unbounded, thinking that it&#8217;s freeing or liberating somehow, but it&#8217;s really not.<\/strong> So that needs to change, for my own happiness&#8217;s sake, for my own growth and my own learning. It&#8217;s much more satisfying to leave the office having done 3 simple tasks than it is to have spend the day contemplating and exploring without getting anything substantial done.<\/p>\n<p>So this experience is what I want to recreate day after day.<\/p>\n<p>I want to leave work everyday feeling satisfied. I want to publish a word vomit before I go to bed, that leaves me satisfied too. And I want to wake early, and go for a run, and eat healthy, and all of these things are little baby steps in the direction of progress and growth. They free up more cognitive capacity. When I fulfill my obligations, they get out of my head and free up more space for play.<\/p>\n<p><strong>It&#8217;s very difficult to truly enjoy play when you know that you owe people things.<\/strong> It has to be a very escapist sort of play\u2013 you have to sorta drug yourself, distract yourself,\u00a0zone out. And that&#8217;s only pleasant in the sense that the pain and fear and anguish is momentarily gone, hidden just out of sight. It&#8217;s like the pleasure you get when you take off your really tight shoes for a minute, before you put them back on again. And that is not a sustainable way to live. That is a really sad, unpleasant way to live.<\/p>\n<p><strong>And I don&#8217;t want to hate on myself for that.<\/strong> I don&#8217;t want to be cruel or unkind to myself for that. It&#8217;s unnecessary, and it&#8217;s also distracting. The real question is, what&#8217;s the desired end state? And what&#8217;s my plan of action to get to that desired end state? And what problems will I encounter along the way, and how do I visualize myself dealing with those problems, to make sure they don&#8217;t happen again? And then what steps do I need to take to make sure that goes according to plan? And when I&#8217;m done with that, what&#8217;s the next desired end state? This is a new language for me, but I intend to be fluent in it.<\/p>\n<p>When I&#8217;m done with this, I&#8217;m going to hit publish. Then I&#8217;m going to hand the laptop to my wife, and I&#8217;m going to go ink in the two crosses for the two vomits I&#8217;d have published. Then I&#8217;m going to scratch out the day, the 8th day in a row that I&#8217;ve done a word vomit. (It&#8217;s also the 7th workday in a row that I emailed my boss as I had planned.) And then I&#8217;m going to go to bed, relaxed because I know I&#8217;ve pretty much done my best\u2013 or at least I&#8217;ve done better than I&#8217;ve done so far, and tomorrow I will wake up at 6am, cross out the &#8221; woke at 6am&#8221; box for the 3rd day running, and smile because I&#8217;m making progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TLDR: Wake up early every day (so sleep early too) Review work daily (with accountability partner) So what&#8217;s my plan? I value&#8230; growth progress triumph over adversity Confronting my fears and making them my bitch, and being better and stronger because of it Alright. So what am I going to&hellip; <\/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":[],"class_list":["post-9446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>0384 \u2013 express your values through planned actions - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0384-designing-a-plan\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"0384 \u2013 express your values through planned actions - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"TLDR: Wake up early every day (so sleep early too) Review work daily (with accountability partner) So what&#8217;s my plan? 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