Envoyé à partir d'un téléphone mobile Sony Ericsson
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Simply simplify
Three months or so ago, I sat with a friend for six hours, writing down my personal goals for the next 3 to 5 years.
Two weeks after that, I sat down again, on my onw, to finalize what we had started and detail my goals into specific, timely actions. (yup, that's also something I learned from Aiesec)
One month after I had completed my action plan, I realized that I was not tracking my actions. I could not know if I was living my life according to my own priorities or not. So I started tracking.
Two weeks of tracking later, I realized that I needed to update my action plan, in order to incorporate a gross estimate of the time I was spending on my priorities: was I getting enough time to sleep, to read books or watch a movie, to spend time with friends; was I getting enough time to work?
Now, after one month of detailed tracking, I realize that it is very hard to keep within the limits I set to myself. To grant each of my personal priorities (including work) the right amount of time in order to achieve my goals. Because there is always a temptation, either a project that I want to study more in detail at work or some procrastination opportunity at home.
My daily life is getting in the way of my personal goal.
Recently, through a couple of well-meant links and thought-sharing from a great friend, I came accross an interesting idea: simplify.
The first link I surfed was http://zenhabits.net/. It is a perfect starting place for pragmatic, long-term thinking about how to implement your long-term plans, your life dreams, your great-idea-that-you-just-never-get-to-start. It has a lot of content revolving around personal organization, without being pushy or arbitrary.
From then, I discovered http://mnmlist.com/ . It is about minimalism. You had guess, had you not? ;)
There is a lot of truth and evidence in the posts on that blog, but it takes a lot of change to go from mass-consumption to life-streamlining to minimalist-living. That guy has gone very far, and he is keeping his own possessions under 100 items (or keeping blog posts under a certain number of words ;) ...), and having a lot of upper-limit numbers to a lot of things. I have not been that far, but I took some ideas already, that I mention further in this post. If you want to know where your life stands today, as regards simplicity, try any post from the top #20 posts. I would be surprised if there is not a single idea that you can start using today already.
In the past 2 weeks, I have undertaken three significant actions:
1. I have tidy-ed and cleaned up my bedroom. That involved a lot of thinigs going OUT of it; some to the trash, some to other places in the house. Not necessarily the best way, but at least it is out of my room. I have simplified my library, not the only books featured on my shelves actually reflect pretty well py personality! (there is philosophy, economics, Aiesec, comics & mangas, EU policy drafts and the UN charter...)
Consequence: The moment I was done, I could feel my mental space expanding, all the mind clutter stress flying away. It feels good, and healthy, to be in an environment that has nothing un-necessary on the floor, or getting in the way of your movement. Also, I felt more "at home": the room felt more like my place than it had ever before.
2. I have reduced my use of mobile phone: in transportations, considering that the mobile signal is poor in the subway, I got to reduce my exposure to electromagnetism (I am not debating whether it is dangerous or not). I think that I should be able to have my mobile 'off' at some point of the day. So it is that time: commuting to and from the office.
Consequence: I use that time to read a book, or close my eyes and think about a situation, a time of the day that I want to understand better. During my 8-day experiment, I did not read or think about anything, I was just looking at people, all the other passengers, and I found it can be quite boring ! So I figured reading is a good way to use that commute time.
3. I applied to myself the minimalist desktop; one from mnmlist that can be found here. I did that on both my office laptop, and my personal netbook. My pro laptop actually has exactly the same image as the minimalist guy, with the same quote, and I used a more personal photo for my netook.
Consequence: Here, only positive aspects. I never use desktop icons anyways, so not having them displayes suits me fine. I managed to remove even the "trash can" from windows desktop, ask me in a comment if you wanna know how ;) and I have all the essential shortcuts in the "quick launch" area of my auto-hide taskbar.
Closing words for today : Simplifying your life is not easy. One quote goes: "I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead".
But simplify is simple, in the sense that you have it in you. It starts with your will to simplify and get rid of things. And it is not absolute, it is mostly iterative: you go over those things, thinking you need them, at some point you will realize that you never read that book or never wear those socks.
As always, ideas and comments welcome.
Two weeks after that, I sat down again, on my onw, to finalize what we had started and detail my goals into specific, timely actions. (yup, that's also something I learned from Aiesec)
One month after I had completed my action plan, I realized that I was not tracking my actions. I could not know if I was living my life according to my own priorities or not. So I started tracking.
Two weeks of tracking later, I realized that I needed to update my action plan, in order to incorporate a gross estimate of the time I was spending on my priorities: was I getting enough time to sleep, to read books or watch a movie, to spend time with friends; was I getting enough time to work?
Now, after one month of detailed tracking, I realize that it is very hard to keep within the limits I set to myself. To grant each of my personal priorities (including work) the right amount of time in order to achieve my goals. Because there is always a temptation, either a project that I want to study more in detail at work or some procrastination opportunity at home.
My daily life is getting in the way of my personal goal.
Recently, through a couple of well-meant links and thought-sharing from a great friend, I came accross an interesting idea: simplify.
The first link I surfed was http://zenhabits.net/. It is a perfect starting place for pragmatic, long-term thinking about how to implement your long-term plans, your life dreams, your great-idea-that-you-just-never-get-to-start. It has a lot of content revolving around personal organization, without being pushy or arbitrary.
From then, I discovered http://mnmlist.com/ . It is about minimalism. You had guess, had you not? ;)
There is a lot of truth and evidence in the posts on that blog, but it takes a lot of change to go from mass-consumption to life-streamlining to minimalist-living. That guy has gone very far, and he is keeping his own possessions under 100 items (or keeping blog posts under a certain number of words ;) ...), and having a lot of upper-limit numbers to a lot of things. I have not been that far, but I took some ideas already, that I mention further in this post. If you want to know where your life stands today, as regards simplicity, try any post from the top #20 posts. I would be surprised if there is not a single idea that you can start using today already.
In the past 2 weeks, I have undertaken three significant actions:
1. I have tidy-ed and cleaned up my bedroom. That involved a lot of thinigs going OUT of it; some to the trash, some to other places in the house. Not necessarily the best way, but at least it is out of my room. I have simplified my library, not the only books featured on my shelves actually reflect pretty well py personality! (there is philosophy, economics, Aiesec, comics & mangas, EU policy drafts and the UN charter...)
Consequence: The moment I was done, I could feel my mental space expanding, all the mind clutter stress flying away. It feels good, and healthy, to be in an environment that has nothing un-necessary on the floor, or getting in the way of your movement. Also, I felt more "at home": the room felt more like my place than it had ever before.
2. I have reduced my use of mobile phone: in transportations, considering that the mobile signal is poor in the subway, I got to reduce my exposure to electromagnetism (I am not debating whether it is dangerous or not). I think that I should be able to have my mobile 'off' at some point of the day. So it is that time: commuting to and from the office.
Consequence: I use that time to read a book, or close my eyes and think about a situation, a time of the day that I want to understand better. During my 8-day experiment, I did not read or think about anything, I was just looking at people, all the other passengers, and I found it can be quite boring ! So I figured reading is a good way to use that commute time.
3. I applied to myself the minimalist desktop; one from mnmlist that can be found here. I did that on both my office laptop, and my personal netbook. My pro laptop actually has exactly the same image as the minimalist guy, with the same quote, and I used a more personal photo for my netook.
Consequence: Here, only positive aspects. I never use desktop icons anyways, so not having them displayes suits me fine. I managed to remove even the "trash can" from windows desktop, ask me in a comment if you wanna know how ;) and I have all the essential shortcuts in the "quick launch" area of my auto-hide taskbar.
Closing words for today : Simplifying your life is not easy. One quote goes: "I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead".
But simplify is simple, in the sense that you have it in you. It starts with your will to simplify and get rid of things. And it is not absolute, it is mostly iterative: you go over those things, thinking you need them, at some point you will realize that you never read that book or never wear those socks.
As always, ideas and comments welcome.
Monday, December 7, 2009
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