#9 | The Trap

I was headed to bed with my wife when we started talking about how our oldest was starting to figure out how to volunteer in a 2020 presidential campaign and that unbeknownst to her I had also reached out to a national political organization a few weeks earlier and their lead recruiter had tried to get ahold of me this week. We started discussing why I was interested in volunteering and then suggested a few other possible avenues since attaching myself to a particular political movement didn’t seem the most appealing. After we were done talking, my brain had ignited with a realization.

I realized I fell into the trap again. I had to write about this, so here I am, writing my second post for the night past my bedtime.

The trap I’m talking about is the need to be busy. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I had wrapped up a major project at the beginning of the year. The holiday season was over, and we were feeling settled in our house. I should have been in joy to get back some free time, to get back my Boredom.

However, I subconsciously managed to fill my time with busy distractions. I realize now at the end of January (when I’m writing this post) that I’m a bit exhausted. That’s because it’s been weeks since I’ve had a moment of Boredom.

At the first of the new year, I had a void of activities. Unbeknown to me, my unconscious goal in life appeared to be to fill this void with projects as fast as possible. This blog is one of those projects. The minimalism project that I talked about in the last post is another. Even though I haven’t put it as my top priority yet, mentally I’ve already been working on it. And then I reached out to multiple volunteer organizations and started contemplating adding more frequently recurring philanthropy to my life. The blog was unexpected, but the other two were already on my queued project list.

I was on the path to overloading myself again. All of these projects are good. All of them would add a lot of value to my life. Eventually, I want to do all of these projects. But doing them all at once destroys my foundational Boredom is my Goal philosophy.

Let’s analyze each one individually. I think this blog is important because it helps me focus my thoughts. It’s one of many different ways for me to sharpen the saw. I plan to continue the blog, but I need to wrap up a few months worth of content this weekend so that I can get it out of my mind for a bit.

Minimalism is something that is front and center right now. With the new down-sized house, I’m feeling cramped. If I don’t address this, then I won’t feel like we’ve entirely moved into our home. It won’t feel like home. Therefore as soon as I can queue up the blog, this will be my next project.

That leaves volunteering. Right now I have a few emails in my inbox that I need to address. These emails cause anxiety since I have a zero-inbox (I immediately process my emails, so my inbox is always empty or near empty). I have voicemails to return. I have a few mental todos after the discussion with my wife. Starting tonight, all of that is gone. Immediately. I cleared the email inbox. The voicemails marked read. Although I can’t physically remove the mental todos, I can decide I will NOT start a new philanthropy project right now. I can do that sometime later.

I have a monthly recurring volunteer event this weekend. That’ll be all I can do for the world right now. Until then, my contributions will have to be having a smaller consumerism footprint.

(Written 2019.01.24)

#8 | Minimalize All The Things

I’m excited to finally talk about the current and future instead of the past.

My wife and I had been talking about purchasing a home for over a year. With that kind of headway, we had time to prep for a move. Around that time, we watched the Minimalism documentary on Netflix and were intrigued. We already had a pretty uncluttered life, but we felt we could do better. Wanting to decrease the burden of moving a lot of clutter was excellent motivation.

Leading up to the move, I would say we got a perfect head start on decluttering making a move quite a bit easier and cheaper. It also helped with the fact that our new home is smaller than where we had been living. Space is at a premium, and if we hadn’t made that declutter effort, we would probably be drowning in our boxes right now.

Now that we’ve moved, I was eyeballing finishing the minimalism conversion once and for all. Just like I finally tackled my years-long attempt to organize my digital photos, I wanted to master this minimalism game.

A few months have gone by, and I still haven’t started. Then Marie Kondo released her Netflix documentary, and now it’s trendy. I think that sparked some renewed energy in my wife as soon after I found a bag of donate-ready clothes sitting in our living room. I’m almost ready, but not quite there. For me, this Blog hijacked my efforts. Once I finish pre-creating content, I’ll be prepared to go full blast on Minimalizing.

Why I wanted to discuss this project in a Boredom blog is because I think Minimalism and Boredom go hand in hand. If you fill your life with gadgets, distractions, clutter, doodads, flashing lights, and everything else, then you’ll always be preoccupied with something. Tinkering with all of that alone would keep you preoccupied. On top of that, there’s all of the overhead that goes into maintaining all of that.

There is the mental clutter that comes with physical clutter. Our brains can only do so much. What’s more valuable? Letting your mind spend it’s processing power on all of the essential things in your life or spending it on.

I’m excited to get through this project. And once it’s all done, I feel like a mental and physical weight will be gone from our lives. Maybe the first week of a minimalized house, I’ll sit in the middle of a room and bask in it’s Boring.

(Written 2019.01.24)

#7 | Saying YES!

In my first blog, I glamorized the power of saying “NO (thanks)”! I want to come back to that idea to clarify that mentality. Saying “no” is a powerful thing and can be used in either a promising way or a detrimental way.

The types of things to say “no” to are those that are unimportant in your life. What is unimportant is very arbitrary for each person. Everyone has their criteria to deem what is important or unimportant. Once they determine their criteria, “no” should only be said for everything in the unimportant bucket.

For example, I have personally deemed TV time and social media as unimportant. Those are clear cut cases to me. Less clear case examples would be travel, most social outings with friends, and my favorite pastime of playing video games to name a few.

On the other hand, things that are important to me I can break down into four major categories: sleep, exercise, family relationships, and healthy eating. Looking over that list, pretty much everything is contributing to what amounts to a healthy lifestyle. Focusing entirely on these categories is extremely difficult, but the path is determined.

Having a quest for Boredom has helped to ensure I say on that path. By saying NO to most detours, it makes YES so much easier. But staying on track wasn’t enough since there is a difference between meandering down the path and power walking down that same path. So I set out building projects focused on these categories.

To dig deeper, let’s take a look at sleep. Everyone knows how important getting enough shuteye is yet America is a sleep-deprived nation. I’m naturally a night-owl, but as I age, I’ve learned to appreciate being an early birder. Accomplishing an entire day's worth of before most people even wake is refreshing. But wakeup time nor hours of sleep is enough. Consistency is key, something I struggle with the most. My old routine was to sleep fewer hours on the weekdays and play makeup on the weekends. That was never very efficient though. As I enter my late thirties, I can notice those inefficiencies having a more significant impact. Therefore, I now have a single bedtime and wake time seven days a week.

Being that waking up AND going to bed early consistently is not natural for me, Boredom helps me achieve this goal. When I say NO to the majority of the distractions in my life and focus on saying YES to the major categories, I can go to bed fulfilled most nights feeling like I made an impact that day.

This particular sleep goal is now “done.” Defined, tracked, and 30 days completed. I break the habit occasionally for a day or two, so I have to stay diligent, but as every week goes by, it’s becoming more of a foundation for my life.

The same thing was applied to exercise and to building stronger individual relationships with each member of my family along with a family relationship with all. I haven’t tackled food yet, but I’ll be starting that soon.

Replacing "NO" with "YES" to what matters most has become an empowering decision.

(Written 2019.01.16)

#6 | Procrastination? What's that?

Enough about the past, onwards to the present. I found something exciting happening as I was planning out writing this blog.

First, I created a posting schedule. No more than once a week, posted on Thursday. If I don’t have ready for that Thursday, I don’t post for the week. Simple enough, nothing special there.

Once I had my schedule, I wrote my first post. As I was writing, my subconscious flooded me with concepts for additional posts. By the time I finished the first post, I had taken notes for a half dozen posts to write. After a few days, the queued concept-posts quickly grew. Still nothing special here, hopefully, I have enough ideas to write about this topic for a while.

At this point, my Boredom philosophy came into play. Creating the blog and the first post or two was a rapid burst of energy. I completed that in a couple of days. Having to write a blog post every week though? As soon as one post went out, I would have to start thinking about the next post. Blah.

I felt a bit suffocated. I could feel the anxiety increasing. I wanted to be Bored, but it’s hard to be Bored with something hanging over my head. I had to change something; otherwise, I knew I would abandon the blog altogether. So I thought about guidance my wife had mentioned about doing for some of her content creation.

For her stuff, she intended to queue up a couple of months of content even before launching any new effort. I also thought about an artist I've been following, Walter Ostlie. In his vlogs, he'll discuss his schedule for drawing pages of his comics. He aims to be weeks or even months ahead of a publish deadline so that he has time to do all the various non-drawing tasks required to have a completed page. That also gives him a buffer in case he's not able to draw for a few days or weeks. Genius. Following their example, I decided to write as much as I can in advance.

You might have noticed that I’ve included a (Written YYYY.MM.DD) at the bottom of my posts. That’s the day I wrote something. For example, I wrote this post on 1/15 but assuming my schedule remains the same, plan on posting it on 2/7. I figured since a lot might change in that amount of time, I should document when I wrote something.

This system seemed good. I was able to bust out a few posts right away, then was buried with work and couldn't touch the blog. Got back on it and wrote a few more in two days. Got sick so took a day off. Now I’m back at it and hope (crosses fingers) to be able to knock out three more in the next three days. As I’ve gotten further ahead in my posts, my anxieties have gone down.

And this is where I realized I had changed. I felt I was becoming bummed that I didn’t have the free time to be Bored. I missed the feeling of having nothing to do — no looming deadlines, no tasks filling my head. I missed roaming the house looking for things to clean up or quick projects to knock out. Even though I had written down the posts, so I didn’t have to remember them, I still knew they were there. I wanted them gone.

You could say that in my quest for Boredom, I virtually eliminated any desire to procrastinate.

(Written 2019.01.15)