Productivity

Productivity? I know what that sounds like: WORK. But here it really means a few simple tasks you can implement to build yourself as a writer, or just plain old person!

To start: limit your mindless scrolling. I frequently find myself falling victim to mindless scrolling. Whether it be tumblr or Facebook, once I get started, it is hard to stop. I even find myself subconsciously typing in the name of either site when I open a new tab in my browser. After this started happening, I became suddenly self-aware of how little these habits contribute to my life.

First Alternative: set a time limit. You can indulge in social media without getting swallowed up into it. This can be tricky as you will be going down, post by post, and all of a sudden a couple hours have passed! Maybe instead of a “time limit,” you could just be wary of your length of stay on a site in general.

Second Alternative: reevaluate how you want to spend your time. Do you want to spend your precious time wasting away on a mind-numbing website (with the occasional laugh or renewed insight) or doing something that has meaning to you? A thought that pops into my head when I am mindlessly on the internet is, All of this time I’ve been online I could have been READING! I have many books in my queue (and not my tumblr queue) and I realized I am not getting through them near as fast as I would like because I spend so little time actually reading.

How long can I go like this and still call myself a bookworm?

So my challenge, for me and for my fellow reader/writers, is to get away from distractions and be mindful of how what you are spending time doing is affecting you.

-Momento mori