A couple of weeks ago I tried going about with my 3G data service turned off. Whenever I was away from a wireless source, I’d have nothing more than a really pretty phone.
The reason? I wanted to try and disconnect a little bit and step away from the glowing rectangles.
The experiment lasted three days. I faltered on a trip to the store one evening. Amy ran in to grab a few quick items, I and my daughters sat in our van and waited. The girls, they had Diego playing on the DVD player I got in November. I had nothing but my thoughts and my dummy iPhone.
Until I noticed my wife had left her iPhone in the car. Retina display? Faster than my 3Gs? Â AÂ Blade Runner form factor? Oh, baby.
I got caught. Something about using her phone for the data was “cheating” or something. I turned the data back on my phone after we got home from the store.
Tonight my mind has been racing. So many things I want to get down, get out, get moving on, it’s a mind-bending maelstrom in the old noggin and so, here I am.
I feel crappy. Not sick; only disappointed in my disorganization, my lack of focus, my inability to hammer out the things I want to pound on and move forward. I am disquieted by too much mental activity and can’t make much out of it.
And I guess that’s it.
Good blog post. Most of the time, all I read is aspirational posts that talk about what one can achieve at the peak of one’s focus. But most of us don’t operate that way. I get the same feeling you get daily. I think the ability to think and write about times when we don’t feel highly productive or not at our best is a big step to understanding that those feelings will always exist. It is ok to have them, and it ok to acknowledge them.
My general response is to take inventory of goals, and then commit to 15 minutes on the next step. Often if I can put 15 minutes of time into something it turns into an hour and something actually gets accomplished. Doesn’t always happen, but that is life.
Thanks for your candid post.
Have you tried a task manager? Throw everything into it and set aside some time every day (or every week) to go through it for ~30 minutes and triage it. It’ll help you keep those ideas organized and start thinking about ways to tackle them. I try to keep my tasks less than 1 hour — less than 30 minutes when I can.
FWIW: I’ve started using Flow (getflow.com). Haven’t decided if I’m going to pay for it or not, though. It’s nice to have a web-based task manager, though, so you can jot ideas down from any computer. The free version of Basecamp is also a good place for that type of thought process.