papertygre

OK, last year fizzled out half way through. Time to regroup.

Almost done with Invisalign.

Only my lower left wisdom tooth ever developed (does that make me a mutant?) so it was a relatively painless thing to get done. It took a while for the little hole to fill in.

I began training two and a half weeks ago. Only 42 and a half weeks to go!

I haven’t watched TV habitually since I was about 13, and at this point I can’t imagine how I could have time for anything if I did watch TV.

But the thing about this goal is, other activities can be just as addicting as TV: the Internet, social group participation, reading novels, etc.

The real problem is being too passive about your goals and your time. Avoiding an activity just because it’s fun but unproductive is not a good way to enjoy your life. There’s nothing wrong with watching TV, or doing anything else that’s fun and passive, so long as you set limits before you start and keep your doing of it in perspective with your goals and dreams.

Of course being hypnotized by the box is not a good way to live your life. But getting rid of the box won’t fix that automatically. Unless you go to the root of the issue, you may just find something new to be hypnotized by.

No, really. Feeling the need to compulsively finish everything you start is a good way to prevent yourself from getting any more creative ideas.

Besides, “finished” is a relative concept. So often, you think you’re finished but more can be done. Or alternatively, maybe something is already done enough in a functional way, but some sense of obligation makes you think you have to do more even though you resist that idea on a visceral level, resulting in procrastination and projects growing stale on your to-do list.

Better to develop a sense of realistic priority in order to retain a playful attitude toward getting stuff done.

I have been feeding old bookmarks into del.icio.us. Made significant headway about a month ago when I dumped a couple hundred links in from my browser’s bookmarks menu in various “check me out later” folders—boy was that satisfying. The key was to tell myself I didn’t have to read them all, I could just file them and that was OK.

Still have another large bunch to go for the next time I have an evening to kill.

It might be fun, but, what about all my other goals…

I’m partway there, but about half of my CD collection still has to be ripped. It’s time-consuming though, so at some point I want to resolve to rip 1 a day until it’s done.

I still have a laptop that runs Windows because sometimes you just have to use MS Word or IE, but someday I hope this will no longer be true.

Better idea to plan ahead and go to sleep sufficiently early. Ideally, an alarm clock isn’t even necessary.