jakebe | Entries tagged with self-improvement

Yesterday's Infomagical challenge was to have a conversation at least seven minutes long with someone about a topic important to you, either over the phone or in person. So...how was it? Was it harder than you thought it would be? Easier? What did you talk about? And did you learn anything from the conversation?

I had planned to chat with my husband about his Dresden Files tabletop role-playing game yesterday, but we ended up talking about Warcraft with my husband and my best friend after seeing the movie. They were both not fans, to put it mildly. Which put me in the position of being the film's sole defender -- and even on a good night's sleep with a bit of hindsight I have to say that it's not as bad as everyone has been saying. I think Duncan Jones worked hard to ground an inherently cartoonish world and mostly succeeded; it wasn't perfect, it might not even be good, but I liked it anyway. If you've ever had a long period where you were a die-hard Warcraft fan, you should see this movie on the big screen. It is made for you, to put yourself as immersively as possible in the world of Azeroth.

One of the things I came away from the conversation with is the idea that disagreement doesn't have to be a personal attack. Even though I think a lot of the criticisms that have been lobbed at the movie (yes, even from my husband and best friend) are a bit unfair, I see where they're coming from. And hey, just because I like -- or even love -- something doesn't mean I can't at least recognize its flaws, or the points where it leaves people cold, right? So yeah, good talk guys. I can't wait to talk movies with you again sometime.

Today is the last day of our Infomagical week. If you joined me for these last five days of challenges, thanks! I hope that you've learned a bit more about how you interact with technology and where your relationship with it can improve. If you've just been reading these posts, thanks to you too! I hope you've gained something from reading about my experience. Or at least found it interesting.

The challenge for today is to take what we've learned about ourselves, how we consume information and that feeling we get when we're chasing our goal and wrap it all up in one wonderful burrito of purpose. (I really want a burrito for lunch, you guys.) Today, we think about the lessons we've learned this past week and figure out how to apply it to the rest of our lives moving forward. What is the one big thing that we want to change in our lives as the result of this experience?

For me, the big lesson is the value of focus and prioritization. I have this tendency to say "yes" to way too much stuff, and even discounting the chronic depression, ADHD and poor time management skills there's simply no way I'll be able to get to everything in a timely fashion. Focusing squarely on single-tasking Monday gave me a window into a world in which I sit down with one project until it is finished, working hard on a single thing to make it the best thing it can be. That felt good! I want more of that in my life.

So, from now on, I'm going to shrink my focus down to the most important things to me. If there isn't time for other things that are distractions anyway, so be it. I'll read less Cracked articles, or spend less time on Facebook. I'll stop reading articles on professional wrestling. (Well, maybe not, but I'll read fewer of them.) What I do with my time and my technology will hopefully push me towards becoming a better and more complete storyteller, someone who knows the value and transformative potential of stories, someone who uses them for a very real and tangible benefit.

The Infomagical podcast for today is definitely worth a listen if you have about 15 minutes; it talks about the value of priority in your life and the cold reality that you must make conscious, difficult choices about where you choose to spend your time and energy. Tech, it's mentioned at one point, makes a wonderful servant but a poor master.

So if you're bouncing from Facebook to Twitter to blog to blog to blog -- stop. That's allowing yourself to be mastered by technology. Instead, make a conscious choice when you sit down at the computer, or take out your phone. Every moment brings a new choice; what is the best one to make? That's something only you can decide, and if you want your tech to be a tool instead of a tyrant, it's worth it to spend some time thinking about your decision.

Here's the full list of blog posts and Infomagical challenges this week. I'm not sure if the page will be up next Monday, but if it is you can sign up to take the challenge here. Thanks so much for following me on this experience.

Day 1: A Magical Day / Zen and the Art of Single-Tasking
Day 2: A Magical Phone / The Minimalist Phone
Day 3: A Magical Brain / You Shall Not Pass, Meme!
Day 4: A Magical Connection / The Art of Conversation
Day 5: A Magical Life / One Priority

It's that time. Best of the year lists are popping up all over the pop-culture and entertainment blogs. Books, movies, TV shows, art installations, plays and musicals, even memes are being reviewed so we can try to make sense of the past twelve months. We spent how much time obsessed over that back in February? What really were the best things ever last year, now that we've had time to temper our breathless enthusiasm? What are we actually embarrassed for even liking at this point?

2015 was a big year for me, personally. I made the decision to speak up for causes that I'm passionate about in ways I never had before, and that opened up connections to folks online I'm so glad I got to make. I've shared my perspective as a gay black Buddhist who spends a lot of time pretending to be a jackalope online, my experience with my mental illness, my opinions and fears about telling stories. I've stepped into black geek, social justice and furry writer spaces, and I've found that those communities are homes I'd been searching for all my life. It's been a transformative time.

I've had to change, personally and professionally. At my day job changes in ownership and company structure forced a shift in my position, and I found myself learning technical skills that have always frightened the living shit out of me. Months later, that fear is still with me -- but I've learned how to make peace with it. I know how to use that discomfort to sharpen my focus, to be careful, to pay attention to what's necessary. The lessons I've learned from that experience I'm trying to apply to the rest of my life.

December is upon us, and we're all making one mad dash through the last holidays of the year. It feels like we're rushing through a time that we should be taking slow; the days are short, the nights are long and cold, well-built for silent contemplation. I've spent so much of my life letting my reflexes take over how I act on what I think and feel. If fear motivates my behavior, I've often let it with no questions asked. If anxiety demands comfort, I indulge in it. So many of my actions have roots in an automatic stimulus. I feel x, I do y. It didn't matter for a long time that these reflexes no longer serve a useful purpose, or worse, hold me back. I use them because I've always used them.

I've been making a persistent effort to live deliberately. I've become more consistent with my meditation, and taking the awareness cultivated on the bench throughout my day. I'm still new at this, though, so I fail quite often. When I'm overwhelmed force of habit reasserts itself and I fall back on those same ingrained behaviors. But I've gotten better at recognizing when I end up on those tracks, stopping for a minute to ask myself if I want to be there, and repositioning myself when I need to. As with everything, it's a work in progress. But progress is being made.

Everything we do throughout our lives is a choice that we've made. It can be difficult to take stock of our options and pick the best one, especially in the many moments that make up our days. Emotions demand action, we're often pressed for time, and our emotional reflexes have been well-honed. But it's helpful to double-check whether they're still useful after a certain point. We're often in situations where our first response -- our reflexive one -- doesn't fit, and it'd be better to go with something else. It's hard, slow work to do, but that awareness pays dividends sooner than I thought.

I've learned a lot more about myself this year. Learning about how my anxiety is on a fairly sensitive trigger helped me realize all the ways it influenced my decisions; I'm now working on consistently short-circuiting that system to make smarter choices. Learning that I have issues with ADHD has allowed me to recognize that there are certain things my brain will just never be good with. Far from simply letting myself off the hook with that, it encourages me to work harder (and more efficiently) by knowing I need to rely on something external instead of my own brain. Timers, to-do list and calendars have become essential; follow-through is not something I'm great with, so finding ways to make sure I finish what I start needs to be baked into every process. In this situation, knowing my limitations hasn't made me feel lesser; it's allowed me to work within and beyond them to do a lot more than I thought I could.

This year has been great. I've made a lot of progress, and I feel I see myself and the world around me a bit more clearly than before. But there's still work to do. I can be better still about how I manage my time. I could be more efficient with my projects, work through them more quickly by making sure I'm on task when I've set myself to be. Learning to be comfortable with my fear and anxiety is never something that will end. It's a project I'll be working on all of my life. But the work becomes more familiar with time and practice. Maybe it won't be easier, but I'll get better at it.

And working on the connections that I continue to make will be a big focus next year. Now that I've finally found and understand community, working hard to be a productive part of them is something I really want to do. I want to support my neighbors, both in the real world and online. What are the best ways of doing that? How can I help through my perspective and experience? What can I do to help us be better?

I'm so grateful for this year, even though it's been difficult at times. I'm thankful because it's brought me closer to so many of you. I'm really looking forward to the work of continuing what I've started here next year. I'm really looking forward to helping bring us all closer together.

So good old

ransomdracalis sent a link to an article from The Art of Manliness in response to my last post, and I have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit. The idea of framing the habits you want to create as a "20 Mile March" is quite a good one; it reinforces the emphasis on consistency, long-term thinking, and breaking up this enormous, impossible task into smaller chunks that you can actually measure your progress on every day. What's more, by making it just enough of an effort that you have to push yourself, there's that small rush of satisfaction you get when you manage to pull it off far more frequently.

Right now I have several marches in mind, but I'm trying to simplify even further. Really, they revolve around two things that I've been trying to give more and more priority to for the longest time: fitness, and writing. At the moment I weigh 196 pounds, more than I've ever weighed before. And unlike a lot of my friends I really don't have a good frame for it. Narrow shoulders, small back, thin limbs. Most of my weight is slung onto my belly, which collects fat to the exclusion of almost everywhere else. I'm not SO concerned about my weight as I am about having this huge tank that distorts all of my clothing and pushes all my belts down quite a bit. It's...not the way I want to look.

So, as far as fitness goes, my 20 Mile March is basically shrinking my stomach enough that I feel good about it (or not quite as bad). The best way to measure that is by taking a tape say, twice a month, and aiming to lose...I don't know, a 1/4-inch from my waist a month. I can achieve that goal by maintaining a healthier diet that's lower in fat and calories, and by exercising on a regular basis.

To that end I've signed up for one of Fitocracy's Group Fitness programs. I've chosen "Level Up Your Running," because running is my exercise of choice. There's always weirdness with it, though, where I'm hurting my knee or ankle, my legs feel tight, etc. etc. I'd like to have some sort of structure where I can check in and make sure I'm stretching, eating, drinking enough to actually exercise on a regular basis. The program starts on the 21st, and I'm really looking forward to it. In the meantime, I'll try to continue cutting out candy/sweets, curb my snacking, and at the very least exercise four times this week.

Writing has the same dual-pronged approach. In addition to making sure I write consistently on a project, seeing it through to completion, I need to make sure I'm reading on a regular basis as well. I want to immerse myself in the world of writing -- creativity, I've found, flourishes best in a nurturing environment. Reading the work of other people who've sacrificed and worked to produce something can be really stimulating that way, and I like picking through a story to find out what works, what doesn't, and how it either succeeds or fails. My goal is to write 1000 - 1500 words every day, and read at least 30 minutes every day. I think that between reading and writing, that's about 90 minutes of time a day to devote to it. I have that, somewhere.

That's the plan, starting today. We'll see how I stick to it.

The month of September was a little weird; Ryan was away for two weeks, and after that there was the general madness of Rainfurrest 2013. I had a lot of fun in Seattle, and I'll be writing about it over on the blog tomorrow. Came home with a pretty bad case of the crud though, which pretty much sapped my will to do anything useful. I wasn't able to recover from the disruption to my schedule as well as I would have liked, but that's fine I suppose. It's a good opportunity to try and catch up.

That's what I'll be focusing on this month -- trying to make sure that I manage to do everything I want to do. Personally, I'd like to keep up with my diet and exercise (you guys, it's seriously gotten bad the past few weeks), and make sure that I write every day. There are so many things I'd like to do -- between keeping up my personal journal here, updating the blog three times a week, preparing my Pathfinder game and writing short stories on a regular basis -- that I need to be disciplined and organized in order to pull that off. It also means that I'll need to prioritize writing and personal goals over a few other things. That might be difficult, since I have a hard time saying no.

Professionally, I'd like to get a better handle on time management and recovering from interruptions to my workflow. (It's scary how easily I can slip into corporate speak now.) I have a number of regular reports that are due every week, projects that I've targeted to complete by the end of the quarter/year, and all the other little things that keep popping up for me to deal with. Making sure I get everything done requires more focus and efficiency than I have, but I'll be trying my best to build those qualities.

I'm really intrigued by the idea of being a disciplined creative; at this point, I'll have to concede defeat on pretty much every writing goal I've made for this year, but I can salvage my creative progress by trying to end the year on a good foot and position myself for a very productive year after this. Professionally, I think I'll be trying to build good general work habits, and try to learn a few skills that I can take with me somewhere else. I don't see myself leaving my current position any time soon, but I have an eye towards expanding what I can do in the future.

You might have noticed that I didn't post a blog entry detailing how I did with my goals in February. That's because I really didn't make any progress towards them, whatsoever. I joined a few friends on their Whole30 adventure last month (it ends on Wednesday), and my priorities suddenly shifted from writing to making sure I was able to have meals that fell within the very strict standards of the program. While my body was figuring out what the heck I was doing to it, I spent most of my time at home cooking, cleaning dishes, or looking up recipes. It was a very interesting lifestyle experiment, and I'll be writing about it a bit later. However, it left me with little -- if any -- time for writing.

As a result, February is a lost month. As it stands right now I still have only one short story written, and that's a re-draft of a bit of fluff I published about a year ago. I'm glad to have done the Whole30 diet, and it's rekindled a love of cooking that I'm happy to have again, but it forced me to take my eye off the ball in a way I rather it didn't.

So this month I'll be trying to get back into the habit of writing (while trying to maintain healthier eating habits). That means waking up a bit earlier so I have at least fifteen minutes of writing time before work in the morning. I could also take my laptop with me on the train so I could get in more writing either going to work or coming back a few days out of the week. And I'll certainly have to put my foot down in the evenings -- I have about three or four hours of time when I get home, and at least 30 minutes of it has to go to writing.

Starting today, that means I'm hoping to have at least 45 minutes of writing time every day. It'll be hard to do, but I've subsisted on a diet of meat, vegetables, fruits, eggs and nuts for 30 days. If I can do that, I can certainly do this.

I'm still working on a "commission" for Rask Husky that I'm tentatively titling "Tough Fit." Hopefully that will be done in a week or so, and after that I'll move on to the re-draft of the second part of the fluff story that shouldn't take very long at all. Once that's done, I'll be writing part three of a serial I've been working on for an APA that I'm a part of, and then working on a "commission" for Elrabin that's long overdue at this point.

That's four short stories put away this month, with one of them being submitted for publication. It won't quite catch me up to where I've been lagging behind so far this year, but it'll get me closer. I can't deny that I'm disappointed with what I've done so far this year, but I'll be trying to channel that frustration into productive writing this month. After a number of derailments, it's time to get this train back on the track.

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The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

A collection of words and fluff

Entries tagged with self-improvement

(#Infomagical) Day 5: One Priority

(Personal) Choices

Slow and Steady

Spooling

The Writing Plan for March 2013