Technolo(zzz)s

When I first started writing (technically typing) this blog for some reason I decided to start by putting the date at the top and it made me laugh because I remember when I first started blogging for some odd reason I didn’t want to post back to back days. I would make sure a certain number of days had passed before I posted again. I guess I was just making sure people had time to read what I had previously written however when I first started writing these, I never had the intention of actually posting them so it doesn’t make any sense.

Anyways…

Third day in a row of writing and it feels so good. I’ve made a few changes in the past few days so I can’t say all of my progress I have felt recently is because of writing, but it must certainly has contributed to it. I don’t think I was actually engaging my brain enough which caused a cluster of thoughts and a decline in sleeping. I got a Fitbit for my birthday which tracks my sleep stages (I’m not 100% confident in its’ abilities and data) and it had a good 80% of my sleep in light sleep. For about a week I was getting less than 30 minutes of REM sleep and it didn’t have me hitting deep sleep at all. I didn’t trust it because I wasn’t waking up feeling exhausted and I felt as if I must have been sleeping deep, but according to this piece of technology it was saying I never got there. Regardless of whether it was right or not, these past few nights I have hit over an hour of deep sleep and an hour and a half of REM sleep. I woke up STOKED!

As I said, I still don’t trust it, but if it is feeding me lies then at least it is lies I want to hear now.

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast that said if you own the first hour of your day then you are more likely to own the entire day. What you do in the first hour of waking up is so important on how the rest of your day plays out. Immediately I thought that’s it, I’m not looking at my phone for at least an hour. Admittingly so I had fallen into the trends of the worlds and the first thing I would do when I woke up is check my phone, any messages or missed calls, any new emails, check ESPN for what games are on today, and sometimes flick through my social media feeds. TERRIBLE.

I am pretty fast and efficient at doing it all so to me it only seemed like a quick five minutes which isn’t that big of a deal, right? Wrong. I realised that all of this time I talk about being you, becoming yourself, and not letting the world dictate who you are and what you can become, that I was still playing victim to the world. If I look at my phone first thing then my head is going to become filled with the latest news, pictures, people’s comments, and so on. Your brain can’t ignore what it is seeing and reading so then it is going to start automatically forming ideas and desires for the day.

I never gave myself the time to wake up, evaluate how I am feeling, and decide what I wanted to accomplish for the day and focus on. It was easy to wake up and not grab my phone right away, but within minutes I was like ah what is the weather going to be like, I should probably check to make sure my parents didn’t message me, and then the curious mind was telling me to see if I had any messages on social media. I restrained from checking all social media, emails, and even the weather because I decided that even the weather shouldn’t control what I do with my day. I did do a cheeky look at my phone messages to make sure I didn’t have any texts because let’s be real, I’m too old now to just receive boring, non-important texts. If I had a text then it’d be from my family and I should probably look at it.

As I said earlier I have made a few changed recently so I can’t say that my productivity today is directly linked to not picking up my phone, but I can say my day today has been extremely more productive. Things I typically wait until 3.30pm to do I did at 9.15am, I did two and half hours of course work, FaceTimed the fam, cleaned a bit amongst other things. Now I have been writing for probably close to 30 minutes and it is only 3.30pm.

I guess this plays into the idea of how people say it is always easier to get things done when you are busy, it is when you only have one thing to do that it takes forever. When I wake up looking at my phone, not allowing myself to process anything for the day then I typically have formed ideas the night before of what I want to accomplish, but when the day comes I go about them nonchantly. When I woke up this morning without looking at my phone, I didn’t have anything else to do other than to get started. Once I got started, it has been easy to keep going.

One of the other changes I have made is that I have signed up to a free online course through the University of Queensland in Australia on Corporate Innovation. It’s part of a MicroMaster’s programme that you can pay for to get a verified certificate or you can just take the course for free, but some of the assignments are limited. It’s been great and beneficial as now I can feel myself learning again and thinking of new ideas or putting concepts together. I do believe that is what I had been missing all this time as I have been progressing personally, but not necessarily gaining any new skills.

In my few short days of making these changes and engaging the brain a bit more I have found it funny that my energy levels have increased. Funny to think that the more I do the more energy I have, but that is how it is happening. I use to be exhausted and falling asleep by 9pm, but now I am easily staying up until 11pm and still waking up at the same time. As they say use it or lose it.

Perhaps watching NBA and NFL all day on the tv while I attempt to multi-task isn’t the best way to motivate me and keep me moving.

I’m happy to be making these changes and to be progressing in a direction I want to go, but it is important to remember that the honeymoon stage doesn’t last forever, nor does motivation and energy. Plan ahead for the droughts and lulls, just keep moving forward.