Do the Opposite - Personal Timetables, Power of Limitations, Defining Fears

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Thoughts on personal timetables and power of limitations
I'm going to share some personal stuff here, but I think a lot of us can relate to this. It's about the psychological tension between living an unrestricted, spontaneous life and being effective in your work (especially your own projects) by having a rigid schedule.

Since I was a child, I was terrified of timetables. To be more precise: I loved creating timetables for myself, but hated actually living by them. I would write out a perfect day where everything is planned - waking up, breakfast, school, homework, violin practice, and even a bit of 'fun time', but I never could adhere to that plan, definitely not more than for one day.

I would often procrastinate, but sometimes it was more about my inner impulse to live a more spontaneous life vs 'knowing exactly what I will be doing and when'. Despite my 'rebel' impulses, I understand that I need some structure in my life, I need to limit my activity in certain periods of time so that I can get more out of these hours. In this case, the limitation becomes extremely valuable.

That frustration stayed with me over the years, and that's why I think I've become so obsessed with learning about habit formation: how to acquire habits and how to perform consistently. I, of course, still struggle with this. However, treating things I must do as daily habits and not as parts of a unified timetable helped me relax about that part, allowing me to be consistent with the habits.

I'm also still experimenting with the timetables - I want to achieve consistency of output with everything I decide to do (and to choose that list carefully - an article by Leo Babauta that I recommend below is about that). I've learnt that having a particular, strict time of the day when a habit 'happens' makes the habit stronger. It works especially well if the habits are 'stacked together', as in: "I wake up at 7am. As soon as I wake up, I wash my face and brush my teeth. Once I've done brushing my teeth, I make a cup of coffee". More on 'habit stacking' is in a book "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, if you are interested in this.

Creating such blocks of habits allows me to get things done while also not panic about the fact that my life has become a rote. The idea is that there are 'timetable blocks' and everything not covered by them is fair game to spend as you like.

These days I want to create a definite 'timetable block' for working on my projects, ensuring that I make progress on them every day. I am thinking of a 2 hour block from 9-11pm. This time frame may move or grow in the future, but for now that should be more than enough. It's going to be a battle with Resistance every day to adhere to that, especially in the first couple of weeks. I will update you on how this goes, sharing what I learn - both positive and negative aspects of the experience.

"Why you should define your fears instead of your goals" by Tim Ferriss
I often go back to this talk of Tim Ferriss, which explores a powerful idea - that defining our fears may finally move the needle on our goals, if we were stuck. Here, doing the opposite (😉) of the normal, we move our attention away from our goals (what we want) to our fears (what our brain thinks we want least). Here's why it's a powerful process:

People tend to live their life with their dreams and goals (I'm the same way) always being right around the corner, in the future. When we day-dream, these dreams, projects and accomplishments seem so close and bright, so often it's enough for us to 'quench our thirst' for self-actualization - it feels like we are moving toward them, when, in fact, we are pacing on the same spot. Our dreams dangle in front of us like a carrot before a donkey - but, donkey is at least walking toward it.

If we know what we want, we don't we start taking action? There are layers of fear, hidden from our view, that stop us from taking the first steps. That discomfort is pushing us back from acting.

What I found in my own struggles with this, is that, when explored, that fear only stays powerful as long as it's vague. When we define it, it's not that scary anymore, it's too specific for that. In some cases when you define that fear and say it out loud, it sounds ridiculous and funny. Yet it was blocking you a minute ago.

Sometimes the fear can also be overcome by thinking: what can is the next small action I can do that will bring me closer to my goal.

If you want to start a clothing brand but are blocked by where to manufacture the clothes you've designed, you might decide to:
1) spend 3 hours finding 5 best offers for the volume you're looking to start with
2) Make a call to the 5th manufacturer in the list - so that the stakes are not as high as with 1st and you practice enough & know the competitors' offers by the time you get to the 1st.

As we are 'solving' these fears, exposing them one by one, we are getting close to our dreams.

Articles:
1) "Primer: When You Have Too Much to Do" by Leo Babauta
Leo shares his tips on how to simplify life in four steps, giving us powerful techniques on how to manage the complexity of our lives, overflowing with commitments, plans and demands. I especially liked the step of "triage" where we identify what we want to do today - the 'absolutely need to do these today' ones, and either eliminate (ideally) or push back the less urgent items.

Another great idea is scheduling time to simplify - a period of time each week where we sit down and review our projects, things we can say "no" to, the commitments we should abandon (over time we tend to collect these and they never go away on their own).

2) "Build a Side Project, Build an Empire" by Aytekin Tank
In this article Aytekin makes a solid case for creating and working on a side project. As they grow, they often become the your main activity, bringing enough money to sustain you so that you can quit your day job. He cites examples of famous companies and ideas that started as a side project, like Slack, Twitter, Etsy, Product Hunt, Unsplash and more.

Building/Creating a side project is one of the highest "time spent" to "life changing potential" activities you can perform.

Podcasts:
This time I want to recommend the podcast itself, not individual episodes :) If you are a developer, but you want to improve your understanding of computer science concepts OR if you are just curious about computer science in general - you will absolutely love BaseCS, created by Vaidehi Joshi and Saron Yitbarek . It walks you through the CS concepts from the very basics and builds up on these foundations. If you ever were scared by CS or by what other people told you about it, this is a resource for you.

Vaidehi originally created BaseCS as a series of Medium articles. The links for both the podcast and the article collection can be found below.

BaseCS Podcast
BaseCS article series


Tweet that made me think:

Ethos:

Quote:
"Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most."
– Buddha
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Keep doing the opposite,
Alexander Kallaway
Website: dotheoppo.site
Twitter: twitter.com/ka11away