Mind the Beginner

Today I’d like to present you with a long list of things to increase your comfort zone. But before we have a look at that, I’m sure you’re wondering why in Buddha’s name would you want to do that. After all, you’re sitting there in your comfy chair, air conditioning, coffee at hand and not a care in the world. Nice little plush bubble your in, nice and safe.

Now, let’s have a small experiment before we begin with the list. What if the air conditioning failed on you right now and slowly the temperature starts to rise. Quickly it will become less comfortable right? You’re used to room temperature and now it’s very warm here indeed. You’re uncomfortable, perhaps sweating a bit.A single drop of sweat starts rolling down your back.

If this never happened to you before that single drop of sweat might just make you want to take a shower right away. It’s ” icky” or whatever… or at least, you do your best to avoid such things (even though sweating is human) and so this is definitely uncomfortable. What if someone can smell your body odor?! Hell on earth for some people.

But what is it exactly, a single small drop of fluid slowly making it’s way down your back. Is that really so terrible? When taking a shower you’ve got millions of drops. Get the idea? You’re not comfortable with a single drop, even though it’s not the end of the world. It won’t matter in a few hours let alone in a week or so. Don’t make such a big deal out of something small.

The list

To get more comfortable I suggest looking for slight discomfort every now and then and here are a lot of ideas:

1. Postpone  showering for a day
2. Turn of the air conditioning
3. Do NOT drink that coffee
4. Sleep a few hours less for several nights
5. Turn off the TV
6. Turn off the PC
7. Turn off ALL power for a day
8. Limit your food to just bread and water for a day
9. Under-dress/”forget” your jacket
10. Leave the car in the driveway and take the bike
11. Leave your mobile phone at home
12. Same goes for laptop/iPod
13. For 30 seconds, run as fast as you can. (not as fast as you think you can)
14. Don’t sit down if standing is possible
15. Get off the bus a stop earlier
16. Drink nothing but water for a week
17. Don’t eat until your stomach has growled for an hour at least
18. Sleep on the floor
19. Take a short walk, barefoot
20. Eat something you’ve never eaten before
21. Drink something you’ve never drank before
22. Take a cold shower
23. Lie down on the floor in a public place
24. Cut all your nails short
25. If you’re a clean freak, make a huge mess
26. If you live in a pig pen, clean up

I could go on endlessly but what I’m actually talking about is: Do something you normally don’t do, experience something new, explore your discomforts and inflict them upon yourself. Right now you have the choice to do those things. Next time the air conditioning breaks down, that single drop won’t phase you if you’ve experienced it before and know it’s not a big deal.

An exercise in discomfort

And now an extreme challenge in comfort, try the following:

Grab your backpack and pack a change of clothes, a toothbrush and perhaps a book. (No laptop, other electronics or food) Do this all in less than 5 minutes.

Now walk out the door, close it, and don’t go back inside your home for at least 48 hours. If this is too easy for you, I’ve got four aditional levers for you:

1. Get away longer than 48 hours, let’s say 72
2. No hotel/motel or other payed place to sleep
3. Leave all types of money behind, you’re not allowed to spend a cent
4. No contact with anyone you know

Of course, if you level up, the restrictions of the previous level still apply. I dare you, give it a go.

Over time people get all to comfortable and become afraid of things that only a few decades ago were daily life. Get out of that comfort-bubble and refuse to get back in. If it’s comfortable it’s potentially dangerous, anything comfortable will have power over you if you don’t watch out.

Good luck and enjoy the discomfort

Yesterday was another one of those days, having great plans for the day and all kinds of things to do. In short, a productive day.

And then the day actually is there, getting up late, procrastinating through lunchtime. Surfing a bit, managing to do one of the many things on my list (formatting and reinstalling my laptop) and eventually going for a long session of in-line skating (20 km or so).  A productive day you might think, but nowhere near the amount of productivity I had planned.

The biggest problem was I had all sorts of things I had on my list that I told myself I “must” do. The only two things not on that list were reinstalling my laptop (I wanted to, it wasn’t a must) and going in-line skating (again, I wanted to do that).  This blogpost got form in my head during those kilometers.

The common factor between the things I wanted to do was that I wanted to do them and it wasn’t a must. The common factor between all those other things were the label “must do this”. Reinstalling the laptop took the better part of an hour, in line skating roughly an hour and a half. So that leaves a lot of time in the day. What happened?! Where the *bleep* did all my time go…. what are the timesucks?

ToDo vs. Contentment

Timesucking is a major issue with everyone trying to be productive. However, before we explore those there are two camps in productivity:

In the blue corner we have those who want to do as much as possible in a day, keeping to-do lists and trying all kinds of lifehacks to squeeze more productivity out of everything.

In the red corner we have those who tell us that we must select that one thing that will make us feel content “if this is the only thing we do today” and tell us to drop the to-do lists.

I’ll leave it to you who you put your money on. However, both camps have the same problem: Tempus Fugit

Timesucks are all around us, to you, my appreciated reader, even this blog is one. To me, checking this blogs statistics is one. If this blog wasn’t useful to me in some way this blog would be a total timesuck as well.

But of course there are more out there

• TV Did watching TV ever get you to make some progress in life? In areas that really matter?

• Plugged Gaming Your fragging skills might get better, but did playing games teach you a valuable life lesson, get something done? If all you could do today was play a game on your PC or console, would you be happy with your accomplishment?

• Unplugged gaming I’ve spent a lot of my time in highschool playing “Magic, the Gathering” and I still have thousands of cads (and 11 decks I play with every now and then) A total timesuck. It didn’t get me a lasting social network, it costs loads of money and if I spent all that time practicing guitar I’d be the next Steve Vai, that’s how much time got sucked. Gaming isn’t good for much other than useless skills. The only exception is that I learned to barter and haggle which might be useful in traveling to countries where these skills are part of daily life.

• TV It’s a huge timesuck. As a random statistic: it turns out that the average kid nowadays spends at least 3 hours a day in front of the cathode ray gun getting zapped.

• Internet You’re reading this blog, shouldn’t you be doing something else? They don’t tell you that online do they?

• Social media It’s been said before, how much time do you spend on twitter/facebook/myspace and whatnot. Is it all useful? Or are you just doing pointless things. Did you know you can schedule your twitters? This means you can scheduled notifications about your blogposts so you no longer have to log in to twitter to tel everyone and running the risk of getting timesucked.

• TV I’m sure I mentioned this one before but it’s huge.

• Cleaning This is my personal favorite when it comes to procrastination. My room is at it’s cleanest during exam weeks. I end up cleaning the inside of my pc and sorting the magic cards I mentioned earlier before I commit to doing what I need to be doing. Ow… my bookcase is a mess, I’ll be right back…

…I think you get the idea by now.

I’m going to give you two homework assignments. You can do them if you want, it’s not a must. Afer all, making something a must will most certainly put it on the bottom of your list.

1. Unplug your TV for a week.
2. Identify the timesucks in your life and bust them!

I’d love to hear about the timesucks you identified and how you busted them. Please do tell us all about it. Thanks