Produce more, consume less
I had a long break (relatively speaking) over the New Year. Lots of time to think, lots of time away from the computer. I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions as such but I did a lot of thinking on goals, direction, what makes me happy, how to spend limited time etc. I came up with a simple goal for this year:
Produce more, consume less.
Produce more what? Hold on a moment…. I’m having a flashback to Maths class where my teacher is shouting “5 what? Apples, oranges, monkeys?” after I wrote down an answer without units.
The answer is anything that makes a positive difference, great or small. So anything from web sites to blog posts, to email replies, to meaningful conversations with people I meet, to taking more photos. Consuming less means less RSS reading, to web site surfing. I don’t watch much TV any more because of the time it robs you of, but web site surfing is about the same. It seems more intellectually fulfilling, and depending on the sites or feeds you do learn stuff (A new fave is http://betterexplained.com/) but it is still pretty passive and requires a magnitude less effort. It isn’t a patch on actually doing stuff, actually creating stuff. So that’s what I am going to start doing.
I’m also going to try out an experiment resulting from a quirky thought I had. “What if the only application I used was Thunderbird (my email client)? So no web browsing.” My guess is that I would reply to mails and stay in touch better with friends and family. Once I set up email to blog posting and maybe some way of finding out the latest footie result without a web browser, I’ll give it a go for maybe 5 days (Mon-Fri) and see what happens.
HELLO!
My new years resolution (I figure why try and make more than one?) is to catch up with old friends – so far you are the first – well I don’t know anyone older (or something…)
When I saw the heading on this post I thought you were going to be talking about environmental stuff (one of the more interesting things in my current personal decision making criteria) – but now you’ve started me thinking in a whole different area.
That’s good I think…
Barry
Hi Barry,
Great to hear from you, did you have a good Christmas? Yeah, keeping in touch with close friends and family is a big factor in my thinking. I realise it is one thing that keeps me sane yet I’ve been neglecting doing it.
Environmental stuff is important too but who was that sung “how are you going to save the world if you can’t save yourself?”
I’ll scoot you an email sometime this week.
I am actually trying to spend less time (or at least scheduled time) in my email, as that seems to be my greatest time robber. And am actually getting more done with a new application I started using for GTD. I wrote about my experiences with it in a recent post on my blog at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com