Long Story Short, The Kicking of the TV Habit
Last time, every weekday I'll be stuck at home watching a 9PM show. I would forget the details of the episode in a while, except the storyline was intriguing and made me tune in to the next episode...and the cycle goes on. Every day, I would sit on the couch watching. The shows and conmercials gave me no value. For the commercials (i.e. the stuff that fills 20 minutes of the 60 minutes show-time) I would just walk around. I would never go and do something else somewhere else (e.g. go to my desk to pack my bag for the next day) for fear of missing a single minute of the show.
So every day, 20 minutes is so clearly wasted by walking around. Looking closely, however, I realised that I was wasting MORE THAN ONE HOUR every weekday!
What I meant was, I realised that I would
stop something I was doing before to wait for the show to start (around 5 min here). Then, the
show itself (1h) gave me no value add. Next, I would always watch the
trailer. I had to wait after a couple of advertisements for the trailer to start to air. This would take around 3 minutes.
So, everyday, an hour is wasted. Every week, 5 WHOLE HOURS is wasted! Imagine what I could do with the time.
Before I officially started the habit, I gave myself a few days' grace to not wath TV. (To let me test the waters)
- On the first day grace, I re-defined my mission purpose. (That's my handwriting when my eye's closed. I find I go deeper in and give more...well...deeper answers.
)
- On the second day, I came up with the list of habits I want to cultivate through 2012.
- On the third day, the last day of the 'testing the waters' part, I came up with main goals I want to achieve as well as the steps needed to take them.
Something I Did
Today morning, I downloaded an app from the Android market and wrote down my mission purpose. I edited the words a bit so that I could act on them immediately.
I put the widget on my front page (one of the only 2 pages I have on my phone) so that whenever I turned on my phone I could see the note, and thus get inspired and motivated, as well as reminded.
You can
view a screen shot of it. Oh, and if you're wondering, the widget below is one of
Any.DO's ones. I use the to-do list a lot!
(01-06-2012 04:56 AM)Matt Wrote: Hey, Amanda. it's great that you are focused on doing well in school and finding things you like about your teachers. I'm sure doing well in school will help you with your blog. This new found motivation should give you new insights into organization and productivity that would make great blog posts.
Good idea cutting out TV. When I was your age I'm sure I watched TV for hours each day. I don't think I cut it out of my life until I was about 22.
Hi Matt!
I don't really try to find bad things about my teachers, simply because I won't have the guts to say it and the teachers won't even change (so what for?) E.g. if a teacher is boring I don't say to her that she's boring so she can't change.
Anyway I agree with the blog post ideas. Organisation, productivity, time management, perseverance, etc. all counts, especially if the curriculum is very tough... I have another 'dream' I wanna talk about next week, going more detailed to this next week. Something about blogging.
Regarding TV, read the above post. It goes more into detail.
Even then, I only watched an hour a day, but it still sucks up valuable time.
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. I guess I went a little overboard with that - taking credit for others' work. I've edited the ESPER posts already, but not the purpose one yet. I'll be working on that later. And nope, I only did that for ESPER and the purpose series.