Personal Development For Distracted People

I'm sitting here looking at a pile of things that need to be done.  I can't do all of them.  The weight of all this stuff is crushing me.  I've got a free evening, shall I devote it to clearing my backlog? I am going to try something radical.  I'm going to set a timer for 2 minutes, and spend 2 minutes of every job I have to do.

All Things Must Pass is the title of an album by George Harrison.   And he's right.  Nothing lasts forever.  Even the earth we stand on will at some point be destroyed by the anticipated expansion of the Sun as it swells up to become a red giant star in some 5 billion years - absorbing the innermost planets of the Solar System in the process.  I dare say most people have come across that fact at some point in their lives.  I don't think many of us are too bothered by it though.  A hundred years into the future is difficult enough to imagine.  Five billion is way more than our brains can cope with.

I am taking one of my periodic breaks off of Twitter at the moment. This might be a long one. The lockdown is bringing problems and opportunities.  I want to be totally undistracted to cope with the former and grab the latter. I enjoy the cut and thrust of Twitter. It’s a source of great deal of fun and also education. But I find it narrows my time horizon.  I enjoy the constant stream of novelty.  But it keeps my focus on now not the future.

We choose the mindset we need for a particular situation. We do it instinctively all the time.  We don’t bring the same set of behaviours to buying today’s lunch that we use to buying a house.  We’ve got a whole basket of bundles of decision making processes/social behaviours/action patterns that we switch between.  They are a bit like switching between programs on your computer - you use a word processor to write, a spreadsheet to do sums. 

I've been experimenting for a while with ways to increase my personal productivity.  My business is at the stage now where I have more enquiries than I can cope with, but not enough cash to invest in much extra help.  To make matters worse I haven't optimised for multiple operators on a lot of what  I do, so I can't yet easily delegate quite a lot of the stuff. 

I have been cutting down a lot on Twitter, but I noticed that yesterday - which was a rather disrupted day due to having to do a long drive mid morning - had me creeping back onto it.  Fun as it was I got to bed relatively late.  I think I am going to have to impose a strict ban on it during the week.  It isn't so much the time I spend on the platform itself as the mental cycles it takes up thinking about it between sessions.  I suppose it is all part of being a social animal.   The reason Twitter is so addictive is that it forms a social group.  It is quite likely our brains developed to cope with the social interactions of living in a group.  Twitter provides that.

I really want to get into the habit of waking up early and starting work straight away.  I realised that the biggest obstacle to that was my Twitter habit.  I think I have neutralised that by making the first thing I do in the morning a Duolingo session.  This works very well as it forces me to concentrate and now I have got up to 85 concurrent sessions I am very motivated to do it.  As a side effect, it is improving my language skills, albeit slowly.  So once I have done that I am ready to roll, but I am still pretty low in energy and so although I am getting some stuff done I am not really ploughing into it all with the great effect I think I should be.  I think I can tackle this in two ways.  The first is to get into the habit of doing some regular activities that have relatively low levels of brain-power required.  The obvious one is getting my books up to date. I can only do this with a laptop - my phone isn't really up to it in the way it ...