[ファブリス]

I come home, start clearing some to dos from postits lying around, clear email inbox, clear this, clear that, file this, file that, .. add something to personal wiki. Why on earth did I even start a personal Wiki?

It never ends. I just figured time management is another rat race.

And I'm getting tired of it. Where does it lead to? More time? So you can manage even more stuff?

Anyone successful with personal projects without feeling any pressure? You're my hero, please lay out the secret sauce.

I am in no way a master of anything but a quick prayer helps me stay focused.
Maybe a quick reflection of the general purpose of whatever the task is might help.

-Gyuujuice

I like the Will-do list: http://litemind.com/will-do-lists/

Look at what you are doing, and figure out what really, truly needs to be done.
Work on that, and then for the other stuff, just forget it. Take some time to just relax and do whatever you want, and worry about the rest of it later. It's not going anywhere.

Schedule time to play.

Items like "For the next 3/4/8/72 hours (or whatever) the world can take care of itself without my attention. I think I'll go for a walk and see where it takes me, " are hugely important for your spiritual (or, in secular language, "mental") health.

It sounds like you've learned how to press yourself to high levels of "achievement" and you're now faced with a question of balance: you're not happy to be so strictly self-managed 100% of your waking time. Maybe you can turn those tools on themselves: carve out pockets of time with no plans or expectations, a bit of wild time.

Make a Do-Not-Do-Ever-Again-List. Put enough stuff on that and you'll have a lot more time free.

The trick is to realize that personal projects are for you. They are not something you have to do and they aren't something that will destroy your life if they get dropped.

If you don't feel like doing something, don't do it!

Now, having said that, I've found that if I do 2 tasks at once, neither of those tasks seem like a chore or waste of time. Doing things while watching TV, for instance.

No biggie. You have 499,928,938,384,948 future lives to accomplish what ever goals you have. Relax and do what ever is both enjoyable and constructive now until you get tired of it, then move on to another enjoyable, constructive project.
Return to your previously unfinished work when ever the mood strikes you. More time? The only thing that separates one day from the next is the speed at which the Earth rotates. The world will not go into panic mode if you take a little longer to finish wiki. Where are the rats racing to anyways?

Oh yes, it's the temporal equivalent of nickel and dime-ing yourself to death.

I do two things: 1) I make a short (2-10 items, including phone calls) daily list of things to do and limit myself to those things. 2) I also give myself semi-scheduled chunks of finite time (until lunch, bottom of the pile, an hour after dinner, etc) as the spirit moves me, to clear a pile of paper, do a lot of short duration things, or work on a defined piece of a larger project.

This keeps me from letting that kind of stuff fill all my available free time, which it certainly will if you let it because, as you say, there is no end to it. As a bonus, a whole lot of stuff just falls by the wayside because it really wasn't very important anyway.

Look on the bright side.... you're never bored! Plenty of folks are.

bodhisamaya Wrote:No biggie. You have 499,928,938,384,948 future lives to accomplish what ever goals you have.

How does that work

liosama Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:No biggie. You have 499,928,938,384,948 future lives to accomplish what ever goals you have.

How does that work

I was being a little conservative with that number to avoid too much complacency. You actually have more than that

bodhisamaya Wrote:

liosama Wrote:No biggie. You have 499,928,938,384,948 future lives to accomplish what ever goals you have.

How does that work

notice the Buddhist name. Now, we can probably assume he is talking from Buddhist theology.

bizarrojosh Wrote:Now, we can probably assume he is talking from Buddhist theology.

Who's Theo?

bodhisamaya Wrote:

bizarrojosh Wrote:Now, we can probably assume he is talking from Buddhist theology.

Who's Theo?

I have no idea which you personally adhere to, but it seems like some Mahayanists don't really put as much emphasis on the myriad lives of the atman while the Theravadans do? Maybe Tibetian is more accurate? I don't really know too much about it so I can't really say much more than that.

Theravedans search for individual liberation whereas Mahayanas focus on others' welfare. Though there aren't too many pure Theraveda sects remaining. Sri Lanka is the only example I am aware of. Tibetans incorporate those two philosophies as well as the Vajrayana.

My name isn't really Buddhist, or even a word at all. It is something I made up combining two Sanskrit terms. It roughly translates as " Vow to be selfless".

As far as lifetime requirements, as long as the motivation is to hold the door while all others enter into nirvana first, whether it takes one lifetime or 99 trillion lifetimes is of no consequence. Each lifetime will be relatively free of mental suffering and so more of an adventure than burden.

BTW, I love 滋賀県. I lived there my first four months in Japan while working in a factory.

I'm マイペース, so I do not suffer from this problem. Even if you don't worry about time or rush, everything will 何とかなる.

Despite that, everyone who doesn't know me intimately thinks I'm ちゃんとやってる... Maybe I'm just efficient?

Jarvik is right-on. As long as what you do is in some way associated with improvement, do what ever the hell fells like fun at your own pace.

mezbup Wrote:Make a Do-Not-Do-Ever-Again-List. Put enough stuff on that and you'll have a lot more time free.

This!

My general criteria is that if I'm doing something for more than an hour a day (like chatting, watching TV, reading the news etc.) then it's probably a time sink. Then you either have to learn to do it less (which can be hard or impossible) or not to do it at all, ever.

TV, radio, social news sites all are on my Do-Not-Do-Ever-Again-List because I can't seem to limit myself to under an hour a day.

Funny enough, the only exception is Japanese =) (~2-3 hours a day)

bizarrojosh Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:

liosama Wrote:No biggie. You have 499,928,938,384,948 future lives to accomplish what ever goals you have.

How does that work

notice the Buddhist name. Now, we can probably assume he is talking from Buddhist theology.

We can also assume that I'm not stupid. I meant how did he pull such a figure.

liosama Wrote:I meant how did he pull such a figure.

I have a hidden wisdom place just above my meditation cushion that I pull numbers like that out of...

I use this:

http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

I have several lists:
- Personal-general
- Work-general
- Work-ProjectA
- Work-ProjectB
...
- Personal-projectA
...
- Futurestuff/maybe

Whatever that has several steps depending one on each other I create a new project, it can be either personal or work. Studying japanese can be a project if you have steps.

Whatever are single items with no dependences I put them in the general list

Anything that I have to do, anything I remember at anytime I write it down on the list it has to be written down.
For instance my personal list has a "call personX" and a "figure out the money for partyX" I have to do.


That site allows to have tags. So I have a tag as "inmediate" for anything not depending on anything. So, if I have the time and energy I could start doing it right now.

Also, all the personal stuff has a personal category and the work stuff a work category

Also that site allows for "virtual lists". Lists that are created by the result of a search

I have 2 virtual lists.
One for "personal and inmediate" another for "work and inmediate".
I have also installed the Chromemilk extension on Chrome. Listing the "work and inmediate" at work and listing "personal and inmediate" at home.

So at anytime, either when I come home or I am at work, I have one click away a list of all the stuff I can do, some of them with a deadline (for instance 30 minutes everyday using this site).


Now I only need to forget tentations and start finishing stuff of the lists. The hardest part

[ファブリス]

A lot of these suggestions sounds like more rat race to me

What I had in mind was this sense that "self improvement" is often "money race" disguised into something else. After all time is money right? So if you manage your time, in the end it's still a money race. And a money race leads nowhere. It doesn't lead to happyness or tranquility. I think there was a study out there some guy interviewed the richest men in the world, all of them said their new lifestyle didn't bring more peace or tranquility. Of course it didn't make them worse, but it was just different. They traded one kind of stress for another.

So my post was just a mood moment where I was sick of filing all these "to do" things.

When you write software, it never ends. There is always room for "better".

I always have had this feeling that much of the time I spend on a computer is a distraction. I just can't really point the finger at the thing I'm running away from

Lately I realised I kept judging a friend of mine who spends nearly all his free time, and evenings playing games. He doesn't seem to ever "wake up" from this. And I figured I'm just as addicted as he is, only doing something slightly more creative or useful with my time, yet in a sense it's still a distraction. Funny thing is we're both running away from something. Everyone is running away from that something, with TV, "self improvement", sex, food, drugs, whatever. I read a book lately that spoke about this on even a greater scope: basically it was saying the whole of humanity in the past century has been running a mad race with science to define everything out there. All the while we have completely turned away from the inside, that is our consciousness. We're all restless, improve this, improve that...

I honestly don't feel negative about it, it's just a sense of something I've never really put to rest. I don't buy into all this, there's something else. Someday I swear I'll figure it out


@wildweathel: very thoughtful comment.. perhaps part of the pressure I feel sometimes comes from days when I still valued myself based on my skills and other's appreciation. Maybe I am still too demanding with myself sometimes.

@ファブリス You're asking very philosophical questions. Consider reading about Buddhist teachings on suffering. There's more out there, but it's certainly a good starting point. Keep in mind that if you try to squeeze the world in a certain framework, then everything that you see is made to fit within the frame. Look at the world through the lenses of atomic theory, and then everything becomes atoms. Look at the world through as if its a set of complex programs, then the world becomes a set of complex programs. Look at the world as if it is a rat race, and witness everything become a rat race...

ファブリス Wrote:I read a book lately that spoke about this on even a greater scope: basically it was saying the whole of humanity in the past century has been running a mad race with science to define everything out there. All the while we have completely turned away from the inside, that is our consciousness. We're all restless, improve this, improve that...

Yo, mind giving me the title of the book? I'd like to read it. Since I wholeheartedly disagree. Humans have been trying to define things from antiquity, which I believe is the crux of our consciousness.

But, I do agree with you in some sense. There's a book I saw (but haven't got the chance to find on pdf free) it's called "In Praise of slow"

author Wrote:Across the western world more and more people are slowing down. Slower is better: better work, better productivity, better exercise, better sex, better food.

Don't hurry, be happy. Almost everyone complains about the hectic pace of their lives. These days, our culture teaches that faster is better. But in the race to keep up, everything suffers - our work, diet and health, our relationships and sex lives.
Carl Honore uncovers a movement that challenges the cult of speed. In this entertaining and hands-on investigation, he takes us on a tour of the emerging Slow movement: from a Tantric sex workshop in London to a meditation room for Tokyo executives, from a SuperSlow exercise studio in New York, to Italy, home of the Slow Food, Slow Cities and Slow Sex movements.

http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.as...tid=516173

"Slow Sex movements."

lol

ah the memories