Today I realized I’m a huge hypocrite, and it’s not helping my youngest child.
Coming home today, I learned about a smart phone challenge they did on one of my favourite podcasts, Note to Self. The two goal of this challenge were, to get people to realize how much they used their phone, and to help them reduce that dependency.
They brought up research that explored the consequences of phone addiction. For example, if you take pictures all the time, of everything in your life, you actually don’t remember it as well. You also never let yourself get bored, which is required for deeper thoughts and coming up with new ideas.
I’ve said this a few times before, but it’s never really stuck for me; it’s hard for me to self regulate when it’s a FOMO thing.
Today I realized that I was trying to get my kids to spend less time on their devices while doing the exact opposite of that in my life!
Such. A. Hypocrite.
Only and idiot does the same thing expecting a difference result, so this time in addition to deleting Tweetbot off my phone, I’ve asked Christine to hold me accountable.
Hoping it sticks this time and that extra time I’ve gained can be productive.
I just finished reading Cal Newport's Deep Work and I have a new commitment to improvement.
This book, more than anything else I've read, highlighted not only how prone to distraction I am, but also how harmful that is to my personal and professional growth.
For a while now I have felt a little "lost". Nothing major but a feeling that I should be "better" at "stuff". This book explained to me why I felt like this and gave me ways to fix it.
This quote really hit home for me:
...efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction...
Key components of doing more Deep Work:
I am going to start by:
It will take some time, probably over a month, to train my brain to not crave those distractions, but I will do this and get more productive.
I have been doing Crossfit for 4 years and I've noticed over this last year I have not improved very much.
Today I figured out why. When I am doing the workout and I feel I am too tired to continue, I stop and rest for a few seconds. This is not how one gets better.
What I should do, of course, is do at least one more rep. Always push myself to go one further or for a few more seconds.
My mental weakness stops now.
I use Statamic to power this site. It is super powerful, flat-file CMS built on Laravel with a great community, great support and very accessible team members.
One of its great powers is that it is very extensible via Addons. I've written several free ones and one paid one.
In the Slack group I've both helped people write their own or done contract work to build what's needed.
There is a subset of people however, that would like to learn how to build addons themselves, but don't know how to start.
As I know how to build addons, and really enjoy coaching/teaching, I decided to create a series of courses to walk people through building the various different types of addons. My first, Addon Development 101 is in a couple of weeks.
You can register here: https://silentzconsulting.com/courses/addon-development-101.
I'm very excited to help people learn.