I think once in a while we should all take a minute or two out of our hectic lives and look back at things, put them in perspective. If you ever woke up at your desk in the morning, with your work attached to your face, you know what I mean. If you enjoy your work that much, then I’m all for it, but if instead you ask yourself why for brief moment while you rush to your car, then you need to ponder the question further.
The oldest Stargate, found on the Ancients' Destiny ship. Solar flares affect stable wormholes which would allow you to travel in time, therefore solving all of your problems. Copyright MGM.
It hit me one Tuesday morning, when my devout alarm pinched my eardrums at exactly 6:00 AM; that dreaded, yet so necessary high pitched sound woke me up from what I believe was a REM(rapid eye movement) phase. In particular, that Tuesday morning, I woke up face down on the keyboard. Counting the number of single character lines that were laid down in TextMate while my conscience checked out, I deduced that I was out for little under 4 hours, which appeared to be ‘too little, too late’ for my neurones, who, at that very moment, were banging on the pipes with a steel wrench and shouting ‘Get back to sleep’.
Then I realised that something wasn’t quite right, but couldn’t exactly put my finger on the issue. Of course, I didn’t have any time to spare; I was supposed to be out the door at precisely 6:15 in order to catch the bus which usually arrives at 6:21 with a standard deviation of under 3 minutes.
8 hours later I was back home, exhausted. Not unlike the other 185 days of the school year, as you might surely think by now. I realised, that the things that I loved to do, like preparing dinner and a cup of warm earl grey, writing for MakeUseOf or this venue, reading Lifehacker, all of them without exception had become a chore, a nuisance, just another task that had to be done. In this induced state, I was trying to do everything and the effect was that I couldn’t do anything properly, even when sleeping at the desk. The only way to solve this problem was for me to work increasingly faster until I reached a relativistic speed (let’s say 96%*c).
So I sat down, paper and pen in hand and I asked myself, what’s important, what to I actually need to do in order to accomplish my goals. I noticed that an activity titled ‘Trying to have a girlfriend’ was taking too much time, effort and did not produce any consistent results. Therefore that was the first to go out the door. Now seriously speaking, I decided to shave off some of the non-essential activities and prioritize. I started focusing my learning time to just the important stuff like math, english and physics. I then maximised down-time by dealing with trivial homework on the 30 minute bus ride. I also deleted the Boot Camp partition which contained something truly evil: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Since it was my exam period, I also decided to take a leave from MakeUseOf.
And tell you what, I’m glad I followed through with that plan. I’m feeling much better, I’m rested. I’ve got that feeling that I’m finally breathing after being a long time underwater. Sure, I haven’t written any articles in quite some time, but I’m afloat at school, and having a semblance of personal life, that is, outside of my room. All I’m saying is that everyone should take the time, once in a while, to put their life in perspective. And there’s no better time than these weeks. It’s up to you to turn off the BlackBerry and go for a walk. Ask that girl out, sip your coffee peacefully in the morning. Small thinks make a difference. Don’t be part of the sheepeople. Think different.
I think once in a while we should all take a minute or two out of our hectic lives and look back at things, put them in perspective. If you ever woke up at your desk in the morning, with your work attached to your face, you know what I mean. If you enjoy your work that much, then I’m all for it, but if instead you ask yourself why, for brief moment while you rush to your car, then you need to ponder the question.
It hit me one Tuesday morning, when my devout alarm pinched my eardrums at exactly 6:00 AM; that dreaded, yet so necessary high pitched sound woke me up from what I believe was a REM(rapid eye movement) phase. In particular, that Tuesday morning, I woke up face down on the keyboard. Counting the number of single character lines that were laid down in TextMate while my conscience checked out, I deduced that I was out for little under 4 hours, which appeared to be ‘too little, too late’ for my neurones, who, at that very moment, were banging on the pipes with a steel wrench and shouting ‘Get back to sleep’.
Then I realised that something wasn’t quite right, but couldn’t exactly put my finger on the issue. Of course, I didn’t have any time to spare; I was supposed to be out the door at precisely 6:15 in order to catch the bus which usually arrives at 6:21 with a standard deviation of under 3 minutes.
8 hours later I was back home, exhausted. Not unlike the other 185 days of the school year, as you might surely think by now. I realised, that the things that I loved to do, like preparing dinner and a cup of warm earl grey, writing for MakeUseOf or this venue, reading Lifehacker, all of them without exception had become a chore, a nuisance, just another task that had to be done. In this induced state, I was trying to do everything and the effect was that I couldn’t do anything properly, even when sleeping at the desk. The only way to solve this problem was for me to work increasingly faster until I reached a relativistic speed (let’s say 96%*c).
So I sat down, paper and pen in hand and I asked myself, what’s important, what to I actually need to do in order to accomplish my goals. By far I noticed that an activity titled ‘Trying to have a girlfriend’ was taking too much time, effort and did not produce any consistent results. Therefore that was the first to go out the door. Now seriously speaking, I decided to shave off some of the non essential activities. I started focusing my learning time to just the important stuff like math, english and physics. I then maximised down-time by dealing with trivial homework on the 30 minute bus ride. I also deleted the Boot Camp partition which contained something truly evil: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Since it was my exam period, I decided to take a leave from MakeUseOf.
And tell you what, I’m glad I followed through with that plan. I’m feeling much better, I’m rested. I’ve got that feeling that I’m finally breathing after being a long time underwater. Sure, I haven’t written any articles in quite some time, but I’m afloat at school, and having a semblance of personal life, that is, outside of my room. All I’m saying is that everyone should take the time, once in a while, to put their life in perspective. And there’s no better time than these weeks. It’s up to you to turn off the BlackBerry and go for a walk. Ask that girl out, sip your coffee peacefully in the morning. Small thinks make a difference. Don’t be part of the sheepeople. Think different.
think once in a while we should all take a minute or two out of our hectic lives and look back at things, put them in perspective. If you ever woke up at your desk in the morning, with your work attached to your face, you know what I mean. If you enjoy your work that much, then I’m all for it, but if instead you ask yourself why, for brief moment while you rush to your car, then you need to ponder the question.
It hit me one Tuesday morning, when my devout alarm pinched my eardrums at exactly 6:00 AM; that dreaded, yet so necessary high pitched sound woke me up from what I believe was a REM(rapid eye movement) phase. In particular, that Tuesday morning, I woke up face down on the keyboard. Counting the number of single character lines that were laid down in TextMate while my conscience checked out, I deduced that I was out for little under 4 hours, which appeared to be ‘too little, too late’ for my neurones, who, at that very moment, were banging on the pipes with a steel wrench and shouting ‘Get back to sleep’.
Then I realised that something wasn’t quite right, but couldn’t exactly put my finger on the issue. Of course, I didn’t have any time to spare; I was supposed to be out the door at precisely 6:15 in order to catch the bus which usually arrives at 6:21 with a standard deviation of under 3 minutes.
8 hours later I was back home, exhausted. Not unlike the other 185 days of the school year, as you might surely think by now. I realised, that the things that I loved to do, like preparing dinner and a cup of warm earl grey, writing for MakeUseOf or this venue, reading Lifehacker, all of them without exception had become a chore, a nuisance, just another task that had to be done. In this induced state, I was trying to do everything and the effect was that I couldn’t do anything properly, even when sleeping at the desk. The only way to solve this problem was for me to work increasingly faster until I reached a relativistic speed (let’s say 96%*c).
So I sat down, paper and pen in hand and I asked myself, what’s important, what to I actually need to do in order to accomplish my goals. By far I noticed that an activity titled ‘Trying to have a girlfriend’ was taking too much time, effort and did not produce any consistent results. Therefore that was the first to go out the door. Now seriously speaking, I decided to shave off some of the non essential activities. I started focusing my learning time to just the important stuff like math, english and physics. I then maximised down-time by dealing with trivial homework on the 30 minute bus ride. I also deleted the Boot Camp partition which contained something truly evil: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Since it was my exam period, I decided to take a leave from MakeUseOf.
And tell you what, I’m glad I followed through with that plan. I’m feeling much better, I’m rested. I’ve got that feeling that I’m finally breathing after being a long time underwater. Sure, I haven’t written any articles in quite some time, but I’m afloat at school, and having a semblance of personal life, that is, outside of my room. All I’m saying is that everyone should take the time, once in a while, to put their life in perspective. And there’s no better time than these weeks. It’s up to you to turn off the BlackBerry and go for a walk. Ask that girl out, sip your coffee peacefully in the morning. Small thinks make a difference. Don’t be part of the sheepeople. Think different.
I think once in a while we should all take a minute or two out of our hectic lives and look back at things, put them in perspective. If you ever woke up at your desk in the morning, with your work attached to your face, you know what I mean. If you enjoy your work that much, then I’m all for it, but if instead you ask yourself why, for brief moment while you rush to your car, then you need to ponder the question.
It hit me one Tuesday morning, when my devout alarm pinched my eardrums at exactly 6:00 AM; that dreaded, yet so necessary high pitched sound woke me up from what I believe was a REM(rapid eye movement) phase. In particular, that Tuesday morning, I woke up face down on the keyboard. Counting the number of single character lines that were laid down in TextMate while my conscience checked out, I deduced that I was out for little under 4 hours, which appeared to be ‘too little, too late’ for my neurones, who, at that very moment, were banging on the pipes with a steel wrench and shouting ‘Get back to sleep’.
Then I realised that something wasn’t quite right, but couldn’t exactly put my finger on the issue. Of course, I didn’t have any time to spare; I was supposed to be out the door at precisely 6:15 in order to catch the bus which usually arrives at 6:21 with a standard deviation of under 3 minutes.
8 hours later I was back home, exhausted. Not unlike the other 185 days of the school year, as you might surely think by now. I realised, that the things that I loved to do, like preparing dinner and a cup of warm earl grey, writing for MakeUseOf or this venue, reading Lifehacker, all of them without exception had become a chore, a nuisance, just another task that had to be done. In this induced state, I was trying to do everything and the effect was that I couldn’t do anything properly, even when sleeping at the desk. The only way to solve this problem was for me to work increasingly faster until I reached a relativistic speed (let’s say 96%*c).
So I sat down, paper and pen in hand and I asked myself, what’s important, what to I actually need to do in order to accomplish my goals. By far I noticed that an activity titled ‘Trying to have a girlfriend’ was taking too much time, effort and did not produce any consistent results. Therefore that was the first to go out the door. Now seriously speaking, I decided to shave off some of the non essential activities. I started focusing my learning time to just the important stuff like math, english and physics. I then maximised down-time by dealing with trivial homework on the 30 minute bus ride. I also deleted the Boot Camp partition which contained something truly evil: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Since it was my exam period, I decided to take a leave from MakeUseOf.
And tell you what, I’m glad I followed through with that plan. I’m feeling much better, I’m rested. I’ve got that feeling that I’m finally breathing after being a long time underwater. Sure, I haven’t written any articles in quite some time, but I’m afloat at school, and having a semblance of personal life, that is, outside of my room. All I’m saying is that everyone should take the time, once in a while, to put their life in perspective. And there’s no better time than these weeks. It’s up to you to turn off the BlackBerry and go for a walk. Ask that girl out, sip your coffee peacefully in the morning. Small thinks make a difference. Don’t be part of the sheepeople. Think different.
I think once in a while we should all take a minute or two out of our hectic lives and look back at things, put them in perspective. If you ever woke up at your desk in the morning, with your work attached to your face, you know what I mean. If you enjoy your work that much, then I’m all for it, but if instead you ask yourself why, for brief moment while you rush to your car, then you need to ponder the question.
It hit me one Tuesday morning, when my devout alarm pinched my eardrums at exactly 6:00 AM; that dreaded, yet so necessary high pitched sound woke me up from what I believe was a REM(rapid eye movement) phase. In particular, that Tuesday morning, I woke up face down on the keyboard. Counting the number of single character lines that were laid down in TextMate while my conscience checked out, I deduced that I was out for little under 4 hours, which appeared to be ‘too little, too late’ for my neurones, who, at that very moment, were banging on the pipes with a steel wrench and shouting ‘Get back to sleep’.
Then I realised that something wasn’t quite right, but couldn’t exactly put my finger on the issue. Of course, I didn’t have any time to spare; I was supposed to be out the door at precisely 6:15 in order to catch the bus which usually arrives at 6:21 with a standard deviation of under 3 minutes.
8 hours later I was back home, exhausted. Not unlike the other 185 days of the school year, as you might surely think by now. I realised, that the things that I loved to do, like preparing dinner and a cup of warm earl grey, writing for MakeUseOf or this venue, reading Lifehacker, all of them without exception had become a chore, a nuisance, just another task that had to be done. In this induced state, I was trying to do everything and the effect was that I couldn’t do anything properly, even when sleeping at the desk. The only way to solve this problem was for me to work increasingly faster until I reached a relativistic speed (let’s say 96%*c).
So I sat down, paper and pen in hand and I asked myself, what’s important, what to I actually need to do in order to accomplish my goals. By far I noticed that an activity titled ‘Trying to have a girlfriend’ was taking too much time, effort and did not produce any consistent results. Therefore that was the first to go out the door. Now seriously speaking, I decided to shave off some of the non essential activities. I started focusing my learning time to just the important stuff like math, english and physics. I then maximised down-time by dealing with trivial homework on the 30 minute bus ride. I also deleted the Boot Camp partition which contained something truly evil: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Since it was my exam period, I decided to take a leave from MakeUseOf.
And tell you what, I’m glad I followed through with that plan. I’m feeling much better, I’m rested. I’ve got that feeling that I’m finally breathing after being a long time underwater. Sure, I haven’t written any articles in quite some time, but I’m afloat at school, and having a semblance of personal life, that is, outside of my room. All I’m saying is that everyone should take the time, once in a while, to put their life in perspective. And there’s no better time than these weeks. It’s up to you to turn off the BlackBerry and go for a walk. Ask that girl out, sip your coffee peacefully in the morning. Small thinks make a difference. Don’t be part of the sheepeople. Think different.
Tags: management, productivity, time
