No Wasted Time

I recently had two insights related to the concept of no wasted time.

It is part of my 2018 goals to be more "productive" with my time, which is to say to be aware of the voice and the emotions that make me want to "turn off" and go veg out to tv, YouTube or Facebook instead of doing things that I will feel regret over in the future for having not accomplished. I realized a couple of weeks ago that spending an hour watching my DVR'd shows is not "veg time" or even wasted time; it is an explicit course of action, and not necessarily one whose intent is to ignore other tasks but to take that time to tune out and by passively entertained. The fault, if any, in that decision is not in the ignoring of other, higher value tasks but in the choice to withdraw from presence. The latter is accompanied by the ignoring of other, higher value tasks, but I was not making the choice with the intent of having lack of something but gain of something, and that gain was mindlessness, non-presence. So the key to uncovering why shit wasn't getting done isn't to focus on the "why do I ignore these tasks" but on the "why do I choose non-presence".

My second insight came recently when I was on my daily stand-up conference call with my team, and I was doing work on my laptop while on the call as I always do, when my name was called for my update. As I scrambled to get to my notes from whatever app I was using at the moment, I became aware that I had no idea what anyone who had spoken before me had said, so even though I could relate my updates from the previous day, I had no idea if I needed something from anyone else nor if I needed to update any specific person or project with my accomplishments. Simply put, in my decision to "multi-task" (which is a real computer concept but a bullshit concept for humans) I had made an explicit decision to be less productive. I'd made an emotional decision tied to my desire to complete the task I'd been working on instead of putting it aside and thereby chose not to make the decision to be present in the stand-up. In a sense, I associated being engaged in the stand-up as "wasted time" and continuing on my current task as "higher priority" when the truth is effectively communicating with my team was the higher priority in that moment.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Forced birth is slavery

The Supreme Court of the United States appears to be on the precipice of making the most heinous, inhuman ruling of law since the Dred Scott case. There is no way to sugarcoat the gravity of the stakes. Restricting abortion rights denies a person of their humanity. Fundamental to issue of abortion rights is the concept of bodily autonomy. If a person does not have the right to dominion over their own body, which certainly must be denied in order to deny a pregnant person the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, then truly, a person does not have any other rights at all. Without the self-evident right to bodily autonomy, a citizen of the United States loses all of the following rights which have been sacrosanct since before the Constitution was drafted, before the Declaration of Independence was signed: Freedom of speech Without control over their own body, a person does not have the right to articulate, write or type words. If the state has control over a person's body, the s
Read more

The Right to Bear Arms is Outdated and Needs to be Repealed from the Constitution

The 2nd Amendment grants citizens the right to use a certain technology. It does not say "right to defend themselves" or "right to carry swords". It says "right to bear arms". The historically and contextually accurate interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is the states have the right to defend themselves against an aggressive federal government by using war technology which was, at the time of the drafting of the Bill of Rights, guns: manual rifles and hand pistols which could fire 1-2 bullets per minute. If the intent was enable states to defend themselves, then clearly they must have the right to match the war technology of the aggressive federal government against whom they have the right to defend themselves. The concept that the right is limited to guns is historically-bound and irrational, as it does not advanced through time along with literally every other right and law in the Federal Code. If the aggressive federal government uses technology to adv
Read more

Joshua stopping the sun

I would argue that a spherical earth is in fact anti-(Abrahamic religions). There are several passages of "historical events" in the Old Testament that cannot possibly be true unless the Earth is flat and stationary. For example, Joshua stopping the sun in the sky for 12 hours and then starting it again. If Joshua had stopped the rotation of the spherical Earth, every object above ground, including the oceans, would have lurched forward at >1,000 mph, not merely killing almost all life on the planet but turning it to jelly. The story only works if the lightbulb is "out there" and we/Joshua are the ones who are stationary. Technically, yes he could have bent the light waves from the sun, but since the sun simply continued on afterward, that bending must still be in place today. The new curvature through space-time must have accounted for not only the sun but for literally every single light particle in the entire observable universe, because we are not physically
Read more