On goals, the road to them, and life in between.
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? by By JOHN TIERNEY, New York Times
Mind over Mind? Decision Fatigue Saps Willpower — if We Let It by Maia Szalavitz, TIME
Yes, No, Maybe So: Defeating Decision Fatigue – Forbes
10 Ways to Limit Decision Fatigue
Does Social Media Mean Better Running? RunnersWorld
Giant Anaconda regurgitates a whole cow. Probably the most disgusting yet mesmerizing thing you’ll ever see.
The first time I really noticed a serious lack of mental energy was the final weeks leading up to my wedding. By the week before I was experiencing serious decision fatigue. I was so tired of weighing pros and cons and deciding what was best. It was extremely taxing to do so by that time. Shortly after my wedding New York Times published an article called Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? It was really enlightening. A few minutes later I realized that I was again struggling to have enough mental energy at work. As I evaluated what was going on, I found that I spent a lot of time making decisions. Since I’m in charge of my own schedule, decisions I had to make every ranged from ‘what will I do today?’ ‘what are my priorities’ ‘what should I eat for lunch?’ ‘what should I make for supper?’ on top of having intense meetings with people and speaking more and more in a second language. By November I was really tired of all the decisions I had to make all the time. I’m a really low structure person, so I love the freedom I have in my work, but I was finding it was stealing energy from my most important tasks: meeting with people.
Back in October I listed this interview in my weekly must read. It helped me figure out how to manage some of those problems I had last year. If you don’t have time to watch the interview, here’s the key thing I took away from it: your brain actually powers down when you’re engaging in a habitual activity. That’s why smoking is so hard to quit. It isn’t necessarily the nicotine so much as it is the rest your brain gets while doing that habitual activity. I bet you know where I’m going to go with this now.
Last year I took a step towards controlling my life and decided to do meal plans. I found that I was so tired after work that the idea of thinking of what to make was just too much, even though I really enjoy cooking! So Sunday evenings I make a meal plan for the week and go grocery shopping on Monday evening after work. Then I post the meal plan in our kitchen so I don’t even need to think. I’ve already decided what was best to eat what day based on what we were doing. Setting aside 30-40 minutes to meal plan and grocery shop every week at the same time saved me a lot of mental stress. It was a real turning point for me. This one switch had a real impact on my life.
This might mean different things for different people. Some might benefit from the meal-planning idea. Others might benefit from having a set schedule every week at work (if their jobs are like mine) where they have allotted time for their various responsibilities and keep that pattern every week so they don’t have to think ‘what do I do now?’ after an appointment. For business leaders it might mean sticking closely to your Strategic Plan, instead of changing and rethinking it every month. If you focus on executing, you’ll have more energy to do just that. If you’re a mom, maybe the habits that would be helpful to build is a routine/schedule with your kids so you have more energy to deal with their meltdowns.
The point is, when you’re not making 1000 decisions a day about what’s next or what your priorities, you have more emotional energy for the people/things that matter most.
So what about you? What habits or routines do you think would be helpful for you to incorporate in your life/work to avoid decision fatigue or wasting mental energy? Click here to leave a comment.
I’m a little embarrassed by how easy it was. I guess my life is not really all that busy or I can write like a machine compared to the first time I did Nanowrimo 8 years ago. But it was quite easy. Then I surprised myself by accidentally finishing two days early! These are not meant to be brags! I’m honestly shocked and like I said, embarrassed. I’m embarrassed because I’m hearing ‘ooh’s and ‘ahh’s about how I’m writing a novel (which isn’t a big deal because people do it all the time with Nanowrimo) and people make it sound like it’s hard when it’s just not. Not because I’m special, but because people are just making it out to be bigger than it really is. I think? That’s why I want people to do Nanowrimo. So they can see that it’s not that hard. Just like anyone can run a 5K, anyone can win Nanowrimo with the conditions in their favour.
This year I got to know a group of Montrealers who were doing Nanowrimo as well. I had a lot of fun encouraging them via twitter, writing with them in real life (the one time I was able to make it to a write-in), doing word-wars with them where we’d compete to see how much we could write in 10, 15, or 20 minute time slots. The first time I did Nano, I was keeping it a secret from basically everyone because I didn’t want to be embarrassed by my own failure if that was the case. Being open about it helped so much! I would never do it alone again. That’s torture.
My friend Diane suggested the browser plug-in StayFocused. You input the sites you want to block and what days/hours you want them blocked and it will simply not let you on them at those times. It was really revealing how in a split second I could open a new tab and be on Facebook, completely subconsciously! Even after I would just close the window, I’d lose my train of thought and be back. It was actually kind of eerie a few times. StayFocused helped me, well, stay focused.
This semester with my husband having to leave by 5:45 every day for class, it means that we eat early. It also means I can get a lot done if I actually have things to do and energy to do it with. I can only think of three days where my story was hard to write and it took me 2 hours to write my 1667 words. Otherwise, I pumped out my word count in an hour and then did other things. The main thing is having motivation to do things with people since I find myself pretty tired from hanging out with people all day long at work.
My favourite thing is the freedom in writing to let the story tell itself. If you sit in on the NanoMTL chat room you’d daily hear someone say “I have a block” and then someone else say “KILL A CHARACTER” with much viciousness. Both times I did Nano seriously, I was shocked at how the story ended up telling itself almost better than if I had painstakingly planned out every scene. I just planned broad stroke ideas. It did the rest. I love that. And no, I didn’t kill any characters (though in my first novel, I burned down an old folks home. Everyone that was healthy made it out safe because I couldn’t bear anyone actually dying.).
People have been asking me if they can read my novel. At this point, I’m probably going to say no – mostly because taking the time to read through it to make sure there are no major plot holes etc. will take time. Writing in 1667 word batches makes for a lot of forgetting what was said/done in the previous section! But I might be persuadable as long as people don’t expect anything close to literature.
I learned a few things from this giveaway. Like, for one, I don’t think the Rafflecopter app worked exactly like it was supposed to. In previous giveaways that I’ve used Rafflecopter, it would share the link to Facebook by it self. This one, it seems, is just trusting the user to actually do it. And in verifying some of the entries (ie Facebook shares) by going to your Facebook pages. Not everyone did. Ahem.
Also, following by email is a two-step process that I think only two people actually validated the second step. So that’s a helpful lesson.
I decided I’m not a scrooge and so I’m got to let every entry stand.
Sharon is generously giving readers of this blog 10% off from her Etsy shop until December 15 using the code “JessV10”. For those of you who live in Ottawa she’ll be at Urban Craft this Saturday (Dec 1st) in Ottawa at the GCTC from 10am to 2pm. For Montrealers, Sharon will be at Haut + Fort Holiday Design Market the weekends of Dec 6-9 & 13-16. Also, considering that today is the last day of November, might I remind you that if you buy this moustache journal, 10% of the proceeds go to support movember.com!
So without further ado, the winner is….
We’ll be getting in touch with you, Sid. Congrats on winning something for the first time!
First of all, I’m done my novel TWO DAYS EARLY. I have no idea how that happened. Anyways, I’ll post on that later. You’ve been hearing me talk all week about writing things down. Blah, blah, Jess, I get it. Here’s one last thing while I’m busy finishing this novel and trying to have a life. This article is from The Positivity Blog that I found while Googling about writing. You can go ahead and read the whole thing here.
Have anything else to add? What works for you? Leave your thoughts by clicking here.
As I was writing out the title I realized, this is odd, Jess. You’re a self-described technophile, yet you keep pushing writing with an actual pen and paper. What gives? This is true, but one thing I’ve been forced to accept about myself is there is something different about writing down on paper. Somehow my brain thinks it’s more legit. Part of me resents that because I want to live my life completely in technology (why I don’t know), but it’s just the way I am and so I’ve come to accept it. I write things down and then digitize them by taking pictures and sending them to Evernote. Somethings, though, just stay on paper.
Creativesomething.net has these great reasons why you should actually write things down. In the spirit of the journal giveaway week, I wanted to share them with you. See the whole article here.
Writing down your ideas makes them nearly impossible to forget.
Sure, you could rip out the page you write your idea on, or you could lose your idea notebook, but writing down your idea is a pretty certain guarantee that you won’t forget it later. Even if the idea seems pointless or stupid at the time you think it up, you may want to recall it later, and if you don’t write it down somewhere… you probably won’t ever remember.
Writing down your ideas makes them more than just ideas.
An idea is just a mental thought, until it is written (or typed) down. Writing down your ideas takes them from being just a thought, into being a real, feasible idea. In this way the creative ideas you have also become expandable; you will be able to physically see the idea, rather than just imagining it in your mind (seeing is believing). Being able to see your idea is the very first step in acting on that idea.
Writing down your ideas puts them all in one place.
If you find yourself bombarded with a lot of creative ideas often (or if you’re a creative professional), writing your ideas down in an “idea notebook” makes it easy to keep track of your ideas. An idea notebook means you always know where to look when you want to recall an idea (or when you need some creative inspiration). Don’t want to buy a notebook? Then try to collect all of your ideas on your computer or in a pile of scrap paper. Anything to put your ideas all into one, easy to find place.
Writing down your ideas makes it easier to think up new ones.
Once you are in the habit of writing your ideas down, you’ll quickly develop a knack for thinking up, and tracking, ideas. Before you know it you will have notebooks full of great ideas. The more you write the more you will have to write about.
Try and discover ways in your everyday activity to keep track of your ideas until you can get them together in one place and in one format.
I really buy into #1. There’s something about closing loops in my brain that just works when I write ideas down. But then I have to go back and review them in order to put them into action.
How about you? Do you need to write things down like to-do lists etc? What things have you kept on paper and what things have you moved digital? You can comment by clicking here.
