Activity: How do you spend your time?

Activity: How do you spend your time?

Throughout this blog I'm going to be walking you through some activities that you should run through as you read. These activities will help to explain the overall concepts but they will also guide you in evaluating yourself and defining where you would like to work on improving. Each activity is designed to build on the others that came before it, typically taking the output of the previous activity as an input into the next one. For now, start with this one too get an idea of where you currently spend your time.

Activity 1

What we’re going to do here is try to find relatively specific buckets in which you spend your time. There is an assumption here that if you spend a lot of time doing something then you’re good at it, I realize that this may not be the case but that’s alright for our first pass at identifying your activities. We’re going to make a list and use it later to determine if you’re going down the path that you want to and if you’re ultimately going to end up being the person that you want to be.

Activity 1: Tasks

  • Write down 15 things that you do frequently. Keep this list handy as we’ll be revisiting it throughout the book.

    • Avoid things that you're knowledgeable about like "tractors". Maybe you're often fixing tractors so “fixing tractors” would be your thing.

    • These should all be verbs, something that you can do.

    • "At any point in the last week you may have found me _____."

Activity 1: Example

Since this is the first activity, I’ll also introduce that I’ll be providing my own analysis of myself as an example to show what I’m intending to do here. It is best for you to do the activity yourself before looking at my example since I don’t want to accidentally influence you into doing something just because I’ve done it.

My examples of activities that I do frequently are:

  1. Meditating

  2. Walking

  3. Playing with my daughter

  4. Reading

  5. Yoga

  6. Recording podcasts

  7. Listening to podcasts

  8. Running

  9. Developing Software

  10. Listening to Music

  11. Cleaning

  12. Thinking about productivity

  13. Planning projects

  14. Meetings

  15. Financial planning

I’ve listed these in no particular order and I didn’t put any thought into them except for that they occupy time in my day. They stand out to me as things that take a majority of my time but they certainly aren’t all of my time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activity: How Balanced Are You?

In this activity we’re going to use your original list from the previous activity to determine where you’re spending your time. This should give some insight into who you are shaping up to be. Don’t try to analyze yourself at this point or pass any judgement, we’re just trying to get a baseline for where you actually are right now in the present. Tasks Take a moment to rank each facet for yourself without much thought. Are you more social or physical? Put them in the order that you feel fits you like: physical, mental, social. Go back to your original 15 things and try to classify each primarily as one facet. Many things could fall into two or three facets, try to focus on what you get out of doing the activity or why you do it and pick only one facet. How many are in each facet? Does this line up with your initial ranking? Should you reevaluate each facet's rank? Example Using my initial list that I built earlier I bucketed them as follows. Mental Physical Social Meditating Readi...
Read more

Social: Deeper Look

The social facet might be the hardest to conceptualize because there is more to this than just the people you interact with. Parts of socializing include communicating, even though the skill of communication is from the mind, the act of communicating is purely social. You could see the act of socializing as a way of trying to spread your idea of who you are and make it match up with how other people see you. This goes both directions, sometimes you learn more about your social self and it adjusts your inner idea of who you are but more commonly you’re expressing your feelings and beliefs to other people and they’re changing their mental model of who you are, this happens millions of times a day with everyone you meet. One example of something that I believe would be social is money. The things that you buy with money can influence all of your facets but simply having a lot of money in the bank would be social in my opinion. Think of money as a contract with other people that says you h...
Read more

Mental: Deeper Look

I'm going to spend the next few posts trying to dig deeper into each specific facet. I'm hoping to build a baseline for what types of things make up each facet. One of the most important points to make is that just because something is mental for me it might be social to you. It's important to think about things in relation to what they mean to you. I'm going to give you a framework to help you determine for yourself where different activities fall for you. Digging deeper into the mind and isolating it from the other two aspects we find that our inner self is the source of our ideas, personality, emotions, and education. We can improve the mind by learning and understanding how our inner self works. I like to think about this as being who I see myself as. Am I a funny person? Do I know a lot of facts? How quickly can I do addition? There are many pieces that make up the brain and its functions and those would all fall under the mind. Your mind is expanded by new experie...
Read more