How to be happily unproductive

I’ve noticed that I don’t do all that much with my free time. I do mindless things like browse the internet and watch videos. I always link free time with relaxation so I disassociate myself from anything I perceive as work.

I’ve also noticed that this trend leads to more frustration that it’s meant to. I feel better when I’m making progress with work. However, it seems odd to exclaim I enjoy working instead of relaxing but that’s exactly what happens. Doing nothing constructive can be extremely boring and even tiring but I almost feel obligated to continue doing nothing with my free time because I don’t want it to become like work.

Being in the flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has produced some great research on what makes people happy. He noticed that a surprising number of people are actually happier at work than during their free time despite saying they enjoyed their free time more. In light of this, the solution for some is to either fill up their free time with more work or do nothing about it. Neither are ideal. One just leads to burnout and a build up of resentment towards it. The other doesn’t help change your position in any way.

Csikszentmihalyi says that being in a state of flow is what makes people happy. There are a few factors present when someone is in the flow.

They’re completely focused on one activity
They feel in control of what they’re doing
It’s intrinsically rewarding
They essentially lose their sense of time

All these factors point to a situation where you’re so focused on an activity you enjoy that you don’t have time to be frustrated with yourself. You feel relaxed because you’re living in the present and very mindful of what you’re doing.

Best of all: you’re happy.

How to be in the flow

While you’ve probably experienced this feeling before, you might not know why it happens.

This chart shows what it takes for someone to be in the state of flow.

The difficulty level of the activity should match our perceived skill set. This means it shouldn’t be so difficult that you feel like throwing a chair through your window. Nor should it be so easy that you could fall asleep at a moments notice.

People usually feel happier while actually doing something (even if it’s at work or while studying) because of a constructive environment. You’re more likely to be completely focused on a project you want to work on, than sifting through pictures of birds with arms.

Why free time can make us unhappy

The reason why people can feel frustrated or unhappy with their free time is mainly because they don’t do anything with it. If you spend all day refreshing YouTube, then you’l probably feel extremely unfulfilled. Boredom will rise at an alarming rate, time will disappear and ‘damn, where did the time go?’ will be exclaimed.

Being happily unproductive

If you don’t feel like you enjoy your free time or have even found it draining (like I have!), here’s a list of a few things you could start doing:

Learn a new skill – There’s so much out there that can help you learn things for free or a small price. Online courses offered by websites such as Coursera, edX, Codecademy and Duolingo are fun and engaging. You don’t need to put pressure on yourself to complete them by a certain date.

Read a book – If you have a list of books that you’ve been meaning to get started with, actually do it. If not, there are over 800 new books published each day in the US. You’ll find something to read! Losing yourself in a good book is a perfect example of what it feels like to be in the flow.

Create something – At least try. It’s easy to dismiss this option because you’re ‘not a creative person’ but creativity is something that can be developed as well as anything else. Write, draw, make music or even build something! It doesn’t need to be a best seller but spend a small time creating something and you’ll probably find it fun and try again.

Have a hobby – That can be anything from maintaining a blog or learning something new to marking origami turtles. If you have no idea what you could do, try a variety of things and you’ll find something you’ll want to pursue more. (Try origami, it’s a lot of fun)

Do some gaming – This isn’t an excuse to game unconditionally for hours and hours on end but the reason why we can play games for so long is because of flow!

Enjoy your free time

After reading this, you might have realised that you don’t actually care for much of what you do in your free time. Switching through TV channels in an attempt to find something interesting is boring. Instead, do something interesting.

You don’t want it to be be mentally draining or become like work but doing next to nothing might not help you feel that relaxed either.

If you want to find out more about flow and where I got my information from, I’d recommend watching Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk on the topic and reading his book called ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’.

***

Another thing you can do, if you found this post helpful, is share it. You can follow the blog too. It’ll put you in the zone if you do. (It won’t. Sorry)

1. The ‘800 books a day’ statistic was simply found by dividing the number of books published a year in the US by 365.

2. The image came from news.cnet.com

3. Birds with arms is exactly what it sounds like.

4. I can’t say Csikszentmihalyi’s name. I just stare at it. Should I feel bad? Csikszentmihalyi if you ever read this post, hi and sorry I can’t say your name.

Stop doing so much

Ambition is good because it means that we want to actively improve ourselves and achieve great things.

There’s nothing wrong with this. However, there is a problem with trying to do too much at once.

Is it possible to be too motivated?

Some self improvement efforts start from struggles with depression and apathy. Others may start from moments of bliss and happiness.

In the context of self improvement, extreme happiness and motivation leads to far too much enthusiasm for a better future. This actually results in a loss of focus and nothing actually being completed.

This issue tends to get ignored more than complete apathy to improvement because it’s mistakenly viewed as a desirable trait. The person who wants to do everything is better than the person who wants to do nothing.

Start small

A symptom of this extreme motivation is often having a laundry list of goals that must be completed because they will make you a better person. For me, it was trying to develop in all sorts of areas like art, fitness, writing and education. Not only did I not complete everything I wanted to but I ended the summer with half finished projects. Many that I never ended up touching. If i remember correctly, I only finished one online course.

I didn’t complete anything worthwhile because I didn’t focus my efforts on a single project.

My biggest strides in self development have come from adopting habits so small I couldn’t say no to them. I would focus my efforts on them for a while. When they became routine, I moved onto something else. This stopped me from becoming overloaded with lifestyle changes and never making any substantial progress.

For example, choosing to make my bed everyday was a small enough for me to begin and continue without any strain. This would later develop to keeping my desk and room more organised without thinking about it.

Meditating everyday for five minutes a day was not difficult to start. It later developed to meditating 10 – 15 minutes daily.

Drinking an extra cup of water everyday was a small addition and quickly led me only drinking water throughout the day.

Small steps are easier than big leaps

You don’t need to read 10 books in a week or paint Starry Night in a day in order to be make valuable progress with reading or art.

Focus on one area of your life and break it down into small sections. You’ll put more energy into the project or habit which will make you more likely to succeed. If it’s something you have in mind for the long term, focus on the beginning until it becomes a ‘non-focus’. That being, you no longer need to put as much energy into remaining consistent (which is a habit!) Then you can focus on the tougher parts of the project or goal. Or a completely different one.

If you sprint at the beginning of a marathon while juggling bricks, you’ll be the exhausted runner with a sore foot after ten minutes.

Start small and you’ll end big.

The Importance of a Good Attitude

The attitude of ‘this could be better’ plays a part in many areas of our lives. We are always trying to find ways to improve ourselves, whether it is our writing, fitness or just general well-being. This is motivation can stem from being disappointed with how we currently are or the need to achieve something else we want.

We then find different ways to improve ourselves by reading about how to instill good habits, become happier, wake up earlier and so on. Our efforts might not go the way we plan first time round or even the second. But we promise ourselves that we won’t make the same mistakes. However, our disappointment and frustration only continues to grow. If you exercised regularly a year ago, you already would have lost the weight, right? This disappointment will only fuel your current effort and make you even more determined than before.

Not really.

It’s important to understand just how powerful your attitude can be when approaching any form of self-improvement. A lot of self-improvement journeys start from moments of sadness and disappointment but we seldom look back and give ourselves credit for the good things we have done.

At what point does it change from wanting to improve things to simply focusing on the negative?

Forgive yourself.

Always saying ‘this could have been better’ can be more harmful than beneficial.

This isn’t the same as simply trying to forget about any goals you failed to achieve in the past. It requires honesty and willingness to let go of self-imposed burdens. Deciding to forgive myself for not reading much more when I was younger or not being more proactive with my education was tough. It meant that I had to admit that using disappointment and frustration as a basis for my attitude was only leading me towards more frustration. It meant I needed to stop dwelling on what I hadn’t achieved but on what I am going to do.

But ultimately, it meant that I freed myself from cycles of self-criticism of a past that I couldn’t change. My attitude towards self-improvement, and more importantly myself, started shifting from focusing simply on what I hadn’t achieved, to the progress I have made and the progress I will continue to make.

Why is this so useful?

It doesn’t prevent you from looking for areas of improvement.
You’ll dwell on past misfortunes much less which means you put more energy towards future goals.
You enjoy the progress you make instead of worrying about the things you haven’t yet done.

Allowing yourself to appreciate your current progress and putting aside the anger you had for your previous actions will result in a more positive approach to your work.

Your attitude towards yourself and work also affects how likely you are to complete goals. Here are a few things you should remember when trying to complete something:

1. Perfection is impossible

Whether we admit it or not, we always want our best work to be the first piece of work we produce. It leads to constant worrying about whether our work will be good enough and we may even doubt our ability to get it done at all.

We seem to forget that work is actually worked on. Not produced and framed straight away. If I could write the perfect book without having to edit it, I would have written it yesterday. But I can’t do that and neither can any of the famous authors you read.

They begin and later improve on it.

2. Improvement is slow

A large reason why people give up on goals (especially New Year’s resolutions) is because they expect to see visible change instantly. When we don’t see the change we expect straight away we become demotivated and give up.

However, we shouldn’t expect fireworks to straight away. Musicians practice regularly, writers write regularly and runners run regularly. See the pattern? If you ask a person about how they lost weight, they won’t say it happened in a day. If you ask an author how many times they edited their work before they experienced some success, they won’t say only once.

Realising this helped me understand why consistency is the key to getting things done.

3. You’re better than you give yourself credit for

Doubt is normal but it shouldn’t stop us from trying to work towards goals we want. Having a realistic outlook on things is good but that should not equate to always telling yourself that you’re worse than you actually are. This eventually leads us to the point where we believe that there’s no use is starting something. Usually because we don’t think we are intelligent enough, as hard working as we used to be or have the necessary self-discipline.

We essentially say to ourselves that we can’t run the race before we even get out of bed. Try letting yourself believe that you’re capable of completing what you want and see what happens. After all, you’ve probably downplayed your ability for much longer than you’ve praised your work.

Looking at the how influential my attitude towards myself and my work is has increased how much I enjoy it. Self-criticism should never result in self-loathing or continuous disappointment. It should only serve to improve the work that you’re doing.

Try changing your attitude towards yourself and your work. There’s little value always being negative about your progress or character.

My first month of meditation

I’ve been meditating for a month now. It was one of my projects for this whole self development idea and so far I’m glad I started doing it.

At first I thought meditation was silly. It was only reserved for monks and the like. I wouldn’t really benefit from it in the slightest but I could never find much negativity about the practice. It would help with all sorts of things from being more focused to feeling more relaxed throughout the day. I knew I wanted to try it but struggled to put down the crude misconceptions I had about it.

The first 2 weeks were tough. I set my timer for five minutes but I couldn’t even clear my mind for few seconds. I would be thinking about a variety of things. The thoughts ranged from why I wanted to meditate to what I wanted to eat for breakfast. This happened while I continuously told myself to shut up.

Then it got a bit easier. I changed the timer to 10 minutes and focusing on my breathing wasn’t as difficult but the moments of quiet and focus were still rare. However, I did notice that I felt calmer afterwards. Not that I was always stressed in the mornings but I appreciated the silence much more than I had before.

I continuously told myself that it was too difficult because I couldn’t stop thinking about all sorts of things while I kept on saying ‘shut up and be quiet’. It became easier eventually. I had brief moments of peace and quiet when I stopped thinking about useless things and cleared my mind. It was similar to the feeling of finally getting into a good rhythm while running.

Do I recommend you start meditating? Yes. You probably have the time for at least 5 minutes. It might be a bit difficult (in fact, it still is for me) but the benefits are worthwhile and I expect the experience to only improve.

You’re allowed to have problems (and so are other people)

How many times have to told yourself ‘at least I’m not starving’ or something similar while trying to address a problem? Or heard someone else give you that advice? My problems aren’t as bad as others, so I have no reason to complain. It’s a basic attempt to put our problems into perspective. If we feel that our problems are pointless or unimportant then the following complaints are also meaningless.

I agree with this approach a fair amount of the time. A number of things that we complain about aren’t worth our time or energy and just leave us more frustrated than relieved. However, it can be useless and even detrimental at times. It can often leave us with a poorer sense of perspective afterwards.

When we first decide to say to ourselves that someone else has it worse, we make our initial problem appear trivial. It can be effective at first but as the problems become more serious, taking this approach illegitimizes it, ignores it, and ultimately fails to provide any solution. This is a problem that I face because the attitude is quite difficult to end. Mainly because I thought that focusing on my own problems was extremely selfish. Other people have it worse and my problems aren’t worth any attention.

You’re allowed to have problems.

The idea that we can’t focus on problems because others inevitably have it worse essentially means that only the most unfortunate have legitimate problems.

The problem with this approach to problems is that it doesn’t solve anything. If we don’t help ourselves, then we’ll never be in a position to help other people. Moreover, simply saying that other people are less fortunate than us, doesn’t actually help the people are less fortunate. It isn’t a bad thing to help yourself. It isn’t selfish. It isn’t rude. It’s necessary. If you never try to climb out of a pit of despair, then you’ll never be in the position to help other people out of theirs. Your problems are important – don’t think otherwise.

On the other side of things, it is possible that we can be too self centered. From what I’ve seen, a lot of people don’t actually notice it’s happening because they’re just trying to add to the conversation. Most examples go in the format of:

“I have a problem with X”

“I have that problem and a problem with Y”

The second person shifts the attention back onto themselves by saying their problem is much worse. It gives the impression that their problems aren’t worth focusing on which is extremely unhelpful. “I’m the most unfortunate person here, focus on me instead!”

What does it mean to be open-minded?

During conversations about a controversial topics like politics, religion and science, you’ll probably hear the phrase ‘you’ve got to be more open minded!’ Those are the contexts I usually hear the phrase and often times it is used as way to escape an argument that isn’t going in your favour. It’s based on a misunderstanding of what it actually means to be ‘open-minded’.

Open-mindedness is the willingness to consider new ideas.

Open-mindedness is not accepting information and ideas uncritically.

When discussing the theory of evolution, I have been told I’m close-minded because I don’t accept the alternate theories. The story is the same with belief in ghosts and horoscopes. When you come across a new idea or argument, your aim should be to evaluate whether or not the supporting evidence is strong enough for it to be regarded as truth. Especially if the idea is being presented as fact.

For example, this sometimes happens with alternative medicine. If someone recommends something like homeopathy to help solve a problem, it’s not bad to be skeptical towards at first. Nor is it wrong to oppose it in someway because you’ve researched it and come to the conclusion that it is either useless or harmful. Requesting evidence does not make you close-minded.

It is also important to understand the difference between dismissing an idea and not believing in one. This is how caricatures of peoples arguments form which leads to them shouting ‘you’re just being close-minded!’ If I say ‘I do not believe in unicorns’ it does not mean ‘Unicorns can’t exist’ or ‘you’re stupid for believing in unicorns’ or ‘unicorns are ugly’. It just means I haven’t been convinced they exist. By misrepresenting their position, they’re rehearsing their own prejudices on the person without consideration of their opinion. Which is quite the opposite of being open minded.

With all of this being said, we don’t need evidence for everything that we’re told. Always demanding evidence when a friend tells you a story is an easy way to lose a friend. It’s when someone is trying to make to accept something as fact or make you do something you doubt that you should be more alert and willing to ask them to support what they’re saying in some way. It helps us determine what is true or false in important situations.

Being open minded is not merely about believing in things. That would be too easy and make you far too gullible. There isn’t much value in believing any story or adopting a belief just because it sounds interesting. It is the willingness to consider ideas, assess them for what they are and determine whether or not you accept them.

However, it is difficult. No one enjoys finding out what they believe might be wrong. No one enjoys having their world view shaken and disturbed but sometimes it happens. It leaves us vulnerable. Which is why many people ignore things that contradict an opinion dear to them and take solace in a closed mind.

An open mind without a filter will attract a lot of rubbish. Properly assessing what you come across and being willing to consider new ideas is an invaluable skill we should all aim to improve.

Do you think you’re open minded?

Hatred is a Harmful Emotion

When you were younger, your parents may have told you “Never say you hate someone! It’s a strong word!” After that you apologise, run upstairs and express your dislike for this person in your room.

As you grow older, that may translate to hating people that have been mean to you, various celebrities who don’t ‘deserve their fame’ and politicians you hear about on the news. It may seem absurd to think that people actually hate these people but you’d be just as surprised as me. The same goes for disliking people for small, pointless things.

Hatred is an unnecessary source of frustration, anger and even disappointment. It’s something that we would be better off without and on a path to being happier and more content with ourselves. When we hate someone, we are taking time out of our day to worsen our own well being by expressing the intense dislike that we have of that person.

By expressing your hatred of someone you’re giving them permission to occupy your thoughts and make you focus on a negative part of your life.

Are they worth it?

Getting rid of hatred is something that’s helped me direct my attention towards becoming more positive. Instead of saying how much I dislike one person for a certain action, I’d just forget about them. If someone asks me about what I think about them, my answer tends to be neutral and short.

They don’t deserve to occupy my thoughts and prevent me from enjoying the positive parts of my life.

The same is applicable to the dislike we have of popular celebrities. The chances are that they did nothing to you and you simply dislike their fans. No one is forcing you to watch their shows or listen to their music. Or focus on their fans for that matter.

How to stop focusing on negative emotions

Ask yourself two questions:

Why do I hate/dislike this person?
Is it worth my time and energy?

Most of the time, you don’t need to hate them and if you do hate them, they probably aren’t worth the attention you currently give them. Solution? Stop wasting your time and focus on other things. You’ll feel much calmer overall.

Holding onto anger, hatred and resentment for other people hurts yourself more than the other person.

However, if you find yourself getting angry at One Direction on TV – go for a walk.

***

I know that I ended this post saying that holding onto anger is bad but I don’t think screaming into pillows and squeezing stress balls isn’t the best way to handle it either. I’ll focus on that in another post!

I’d be interested in hearing your opinions about this. Getting rid of these negative feelings towards others is a small thing that’s helped me. Do you find yourself disliking or even hating other people?

An introduction: Why I’m here.

I woke up late. Again. This time by one hour instead of three but it still used up the majority of my morning and I had work to get done. Obviously, this meant that I couldn’t go the gym that morning (or anytime that day) because I didn’t want to be tired all day since that would simply stop me from doing anything productive. I’ll go tomorrow. I promise.

I wrote a list of goals that I wanted to achieve by the end of the week and took a short while to remember why I’m doing this: I want to become better. While I wasn’t in the worst position in the world, I wasn’t satisfied. In fact, I was very disappointed. I found myself continuously focusing on the negative instead of celebrating the positive – possibly because I couldn’t find much. But don’t worry, I’ll try changing that today. I promise.

I promise.

This was me a few months ago and not much has changed since then. Many broken promises and failed goals later. Rather than spending my time reading about how to improve myself, I have decided to make an example of myself instead. This way I’ll have a way to keep a log of my progress as a person. But more importantly, I’ll hopefully help people that either feel like they see themselves in my position or simply want a way to become a better version of themselves.

How will I do this?

Slowly. Overnight success can take years.

My posts will show things that I’ve learnt and positive pieces I wish to share. For example, you’ll read reviews of books I’ve read, explanations of things I’ve been learning and my opinions on topics I want to write about. Maybe some poorly written stories too.

This is subject to change though. It’s a personal blog after all but you’ll see how it develops along with me.

Maybe it’ll be entertaining too.

If you liked this post, share it with others!

If you liked this post, share it with others!

If you liked this post, share it with others!

If you liked this post, share it with others!

If you liked this post, share it with others!

If you liked this post, share it with others!

If you liked this post, share it with others!

If you liked this post, share it with others!