First of all, I would to thank everyone who left feedback on my first post. It tells me I should keep writing posts on everyday concepts that apply to all of us. Today, I discuss how the concept of momentum has affected my life.
Out of all the feedback I received on my previous post, Letao’s comment inspired me to try to sleep more in order to optimize my energy levels. I already eat well and exercise regularly, so those aren’t things that I could possibly add to my routine.
However, over the past 2 weeks, all I have been doing is getting roughly 3-4 hours of sleep, even on weekends. That’s not going to do much good especially with the sleep debt that I had already accumulated.
Why did I choose to sleep so little? The main reason is that I just have too many things that I want to be doing. I have a full-time job, an extremely serious relationship with my girlfriend, a Magic: the Gathering empire and various other goals. Heck, I sometimes do 2 podcasts a week!
When it comes time to sleep, I am sure I am not the only one among us that want to stay up just a little longer to finish work on something, but sometimes “a little longer” becomes “a lot longer”.
After a bit of reflection, I have decided that the key to all this is just to cut back on my goals. This reminds me of applying for university. At that point, there were a few career options open to me outside of software engineering, but ultimately I had to make a choice.
Moving forward, I am going to make sure that getting enough sleep is at the top of my priorities. However, downgrading my other activities will prove to be a challenge and now we are finally at the part of the post that ties in with the title: momentum.
Over the last year, I am the guy who has been drafting every Thursday, going to FNM every Friday and playing in a major local tournament every weekend. This has been my routine and once you get into a routine, momentum pushes you to keep a routine going.
Like you must have heard before, one of the hardest parts of a project is to start it. It’s similar to pushing a rock down a cliff. The toughest part is that initial push. Usually, this type of example is used to motivate people to get off their asses and start a project. I’m using it to show something else.
Once we start mindlessly following a routine, we sometimes forget to take a step back and see if there are better ways to be spending our time.
Now I am not suggesting that playing Magic is a bad thing. I am just saying that for me, I always had the option to cut back, but I never thought about it because I just followed my weekly routine.
What do you guys think? Are there certain things you do simply out of habit?
KYT
