Tag: goals

Week Links – 2018/12/23

It’s nearly Christmas and I’m spending time with family, so just a few links this week!

  • Shawn Blanc’s Plan Your Year workbook has been updated for 2019. I’m really excited to sit down with my wife and plan our upcoming year. We did it for the first time for 2018, and it really helped us put more thought into how we were going to spend our year instead of ambling from one thing to the next.
  • Jocelyn K. Glei’s upcoming RESET course sounds interesting!
  • Six Years With a Distraction-Free iPhone – After removing Twitter from my phone, I noticed I’d often replace that habit with checking email or Slack instead. After reading this post I’ve removed those apps from my phone too.
  • How a Password Changed my Life – I remember reading this a couple of years ago but it came up again this week. Neat idea!

Tweet Less, Do More

My wife and I spent some time last week planning some goals, events, and projects for 2018. Among other things, I’d like to read more, blog more, and be more intentional about how I spend my free time.

A first step to achieving this: on the 1st of January, I deleted Tweetbot from my phone. If I want to check Twitter, I can do so on my iPad, but I’ll only look once a day. The payoff has been great, even after only one week:

  • I used to be a timeline completionist (I had to read every tweet), but now I’m letting it go. It’s freeing.
  • I’ve found I’m no longer carrying my phone around the house, everywhere I go. Why did I do that before? What was so important?
  • It’s not just that I’m carrying it around less though. I’m using it less in general. I feel less attached to it. I don’t feel anxious if I don’t know where it is. The other day I left the house to go and work from a cafe, and accidentally left my phone at home because the need to have it didn’t really occur to me.
  • I’ve started charging my phone in a different room at night (not the bedroom), so it’s not the last thing I look at before bed. I also don’t rush to get it first thing in the morning – I’ll generally pick it up before work. Again, it’s one less thing to think about.
  • Instead of constantly checking my phone, I’ve started ensuring my Kindle is always to hand. Before bed, I’ll read some of a book. Any downtime I want to fill, I can read some of a book. As a result, I’ve already read two books in the first week of the year, and that’s unheard of for me in recent times.

Hey, and here I am writing a blog post.