My 21 day commitment of turning off my laptop by 9pm is an interesting project. After the first two weeks, I am finding:
- It forces me to concentrate. Watching the clock tick down, I get things done quickly and efficiently before 9pm.
- I send more e-mails: I don’t stress over making detailed and comprehensive responses, and am learning to effectively communicating my message with less.
- The time after 9pm is a great stress relief. Being able to let go in the evening creates space that I don’t fill with the pressure to get things done.
- On the down side - my posting has disappeared in the last week.
Strangely though, I feel out-of-balance. My previous 21-day stretches incorporating exercise, meditation and the creativity project have vanished.
Prof. Srikumar Rao, in his course, Creativity & Personal Mastery, states that anytime you are trying to change your behavior through an act of will, you are doing harm to yourself - instead you should focus on who you are being, and let the change happen naturally through you. In a way, these 21-day commitments are an attempt to force myself to change - and perhaps not the most effective way to bring about change.
June 7th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Hi Adam
I love idea of the 9pm rule! After the MBA I think I’ll give a variant of that a go, although I fully take-on board your thoughts about how this fits in with a CPM approach.
Interesting to think of forcing change on oneself as ‘doing harm to oneself’. Many of the CPM exercises increase awareness of parts of oneself that one might like to change - how should one go about implementing those changes?
By investing in the process, not the outcome, I presume it IS okay to focus on the PROCESS of change, so long as one doesn’t invest in the outcome)? If so, is the change really ‘doing harm to oneself’? Choosing to walk a different journey, to flow outside the grand-canyon of our a habits, is (for me at least) one of the points of CPM. I’m not sure where it will lead, and I’m not ‘forcing’ a direction, so hopefully this is not ‘doing harm’ to myself.
From one possible point of view - Ensuring you have your laptop turned off by 9pm is possibly a goal you are investing in and forcing on yourself (’doing harm’). You say this helps releive stress and the pressure to get things done - perhaps it is the pressure itself (why do you feel the pressure to get stuff done?) that needs to be tackled rather than the outcome (ie without the rule you’d be on the laptop all evening)? … Just one possible point of view.
I’ll have a think about how I might factor something like this in to my life… Perhaps we can discuss a suitable approach over coffee over one of the next couple of weekends?
Cheers,
Dan
June 8th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Yea - the 9pm rule worked pretty well for a few months, and helped me sleep better, but then I stopped blogging because I used to do that in the evening… after 9 pm. Just read an article that Television Watching Before Bedtime Can Lead To Sleep Debt, so I guess it wasn’t just me!
I believe Prof. Rao’s point is that your actions follow your beliefs. If you try to change your actions without addressing your beliefs, then ultimately you return to where you were before (because you’re trying to be something else)… but when you change your beliefs, your actions change automatically.
It’s a good point about addressing the underlying stress that was there in the first place, as opposed to trying to construct a rule to make the problem easier to tolerate.