Second Life Log

I am in the middle of the audio book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. The emphasis of this book is on working on the core of your habits, your identity, to help guide yourself to who you want to be. I think this quote typifies the idea the best: "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become... as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity... The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do." https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-James-Clear-audiobook/dp/B07RFSSYBH/

Near the end of the book Addiction, Procrastination and Laziness by Roman Gelperin, it offers advice to prevent forgetting tasks. When you think of a task to do, but don't have the proper frame of mind to do it, you should write the task down to remember later when you are in the proper frame of mind. The book suggests writing it somewhere prominent so you will be more likely to see it. Thus, a whiteboard makes an excellent medium. The book also points out that if you leave the task up for long enough, it becomes "part of the scenery" and you begin to ignore it when you see it. Thus, you should only use this method for one-time tasks, and either cross it out or erase it when you finish the task. What follows are conclusions I made myself. A question came to me after reading this: what about longer/larger tasks? The answer is simple: break that task into smaller tasks, and write the next step on the board. Then you complete the task like the other tasks, and you can put th...

Whenever you feel the urge to do something, that is a strong signal from your brain of a direction that is important to you. It is equally important to capture that thought/feeling, as it is likely to fade quickly, and then be forgotten. Then, later, you can review it when you are ready to act on it, and away you go! IMPORTANT:  This should be a QUICK exercise to capture the MOMENT when it hits you. Don't feel bogged down by details. If you can't get a lot of information down, that's fine. If you can capture the passionate moment, then you're doing it right. Here's an example; I will break down the parts in a moment: I want to make a mobile to-do list app to help people with productivity . Reason: I would like to make a to-do list app that I have been using already. I have struggled with being productive, and I think that having aids around will help me to increase my productivity. Having a mobile app with helpful functions will keep those tools close at hand wh...

  I am still taking a sabbatical from working. To help myself be more productive, I'm trying a simple schedule based on a normal 9-5 life   After waking up, I have breakfast and get into some work. I take breaks as needed when I feel stuck, and around 4pm I release myself from work and go into play mode.   Currently the work I am doing is "whatever I feel is important to me", which happens to be mobile app development with React Native. I also have plans to learn music arrangement/production with Cubase.   All this is to learn how to handle myself and figuring out where I actually want to go with my life rather than just going with the flow, as I was doing for something like 20 years.  

I've noticed a couple of things that I've connected. One, when you have a list of steps to accomplish, it makes progression toward a goal easier to "digest" and proceed with. Also, a similar approach is used in video games, for the player to accomplish some in-game goal. Thus, it makes perfect sense that designating steps to get to a goal are important if you want to make progress toward your goal. If the steps are each doable in turn, you feel less overwhelmed and are able to take action. As you proceed through the steps, you feel you are making progress, and you feel more motivation as a result. In video games, this pattern is often used for the player to have more power within the game, eg more strength, greater weapons, and so on. This same method can be used to a certain extent in real life. If you have a goal that will make you feel more "powerful", and come up with doable steps to reach that goal, then the process will be similar to video games, and c...

I came up with a model for how drive, goals, and motivation will help you start work on and complete a project. This thinking was generated from the book The Motivation Myth by Jeff Haden , with the section named "How to start when you're 0 percent motivated". As a quick aside, that book refers to motivation as a feeling you experience after doing work. To account for this, I call the feeling to accomplish something drive . The question I seek to answer is "what is the key to starting work toward a goal when you do not feel 'motivated' to do so?" Here is how the cycle of work happens. You start with a drive to accomplish a goal . You want the goal to happen. If you don't have strong enough drive for a goal, you are not likely to do all the work needed to get there. With the drive to accomplish a goal, there is something that starts you working on that goal. This will be unknown for now, but I will come back to it shortly. With that initial p...

One cause of procrastination is the fact that while you desire a result that requires work, you may feel a stronger pull towards more immediate rewards than the later reward of doing work toward that goal. To put it another way, you would be far more open to a tangible reward now than a nebulous reward at some unknown point in the future. While it is possible to have enough willpower to overcome this temptation, willpower is finite, and can often fall short of the needed level. The way to combat this is to combine an immediate reward with work towards a future reward, also referred to as "temptation bundling" by the book Finish What You Start by Peter Hollins. This appeases the immediate desire for a reward with work towards a future reward. This reward helps bridge the gap in required willpower to do the work. In fact, the less you have to rely on rewards, the better. If the rewards you use are finite in nature, such as watching your favorite tv series, then you will quickl...