Personal development
I’m going to try to start doing some personal development. I found Steve Pavlina’s blog (I forget how) and started reading about self-discipline, which is a big weakness of mine. I suck at it. My main problem, I suppose, is consistently doing the things I need to do to keep myself in peak performance. Things like eating well, and consistently, exercising consistently, and sleeping consistently. I’m going to start out by committing for 30 days to get up (right away) at the same time every day. I almost started this morning, but my alarm was set for 8 AM instead of 7 AM, like I want. (I’ll probably push it to 6:30 after a while.) And if that starts to work out for me, I might try polyphasic sleep. (If I decide to do that and succeed, according to Steve I’ll be “one incredible human being”. We’ll see how that goes.) I imagine that once I’m being quite productive with my 14-16 hour day (and that might even go up a bit after I stop sleeping in) I’ll still feel that I don’t have enough time to get everything done that I want done. I have so many projects! And so little discipline (and later, time) with which to do them!
I think my biggest worry is increasing my self-discipline. What metric should I use to gauge progress? If discipline is like a muscle that gets tired when it’s used, then do I need to track all of the different things I do that use up discipline? How quickly should I add in new things?
After I get my sleep in order, I’ll start trying to exercise consistently. (My main problem with that is knee pain.) Exercising supresses my natural anxiety and fidgitiness (which is exacerbated by my ADD medication), and helps me sleep better. It encourages my brain to stay in alpha states more than beta states. And once that’s done, maybe a bit of attention to my diet. But probably more important than diet is being able to work productively. And my main problem with that (besides not getting enough sleep and exercise, and so being foggy-headed) is being able to discipline myself to work consistently in the face of certain temptations. So I’m going to start, today, a bit of progressive training, along the lines of this. I’ll accept the fact that I don’t currently have the capacity to work for 8 hours during an 8 hour work day. (In fact, it’s much less than that.) So instead of forcing myself to completely abstain from distractions, I’ll create four two-hour blocks of time during the day, and set off the first part for working, and nothing else. If I don’t have the ability to get any work done during that time, I can stare at my monitor. For the rest of that block, I’ll do whatever else besides work, or maybe even work if I can manage it. Then, when I’m able to consistently work during that time, I’ll increase the time period. (The article recommends simply shortening your work day, but due to my circumstances that’s not really an option.) Eventually I hope to have it up to 100 minutes out of every two hours. (I don’t really care to push it beyond that.)
August 11th, 2006 at 22:25
I messed around with my sleep habits for a behaviour mod. experiment in university. I moved my sleep time around the clock, going to bed one hour later every night, to see the effect it would have on me. I found that I am really tired from 5-7 in the morning and evening. So, the polyphasic sleep technique of just sleeping 5-7 twice daily might actually work for me. And the experiment really helped me understand why I can’t get up at 6 a.m.!
Good luck with self-discipline work. I prefer to accept that my life will always be a bit of a mess. Whatever works!
August 12th, 2006 at 9:41
I actually think I have a condition (delayed sleep phase syndrome or something) that makes me have a lot of trouble getting sleepy around bedtime. I have a Golite light box that I use for light therapy, which really helps with this. (It also helps with SAD, but I don’t have that.) If you want to try getting up earlier, it might be worth trying light therapy.