Homework for life
In the book Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks talks about a “journaling” method that struck me as particularly insightful. He calls it “Homework for life.” The idea is that each day, you ask yourself, “If I had to tell a 5-minute story about something interesting that happened to me today, what would it be about?” Then, you write down a few words or a sentence in an spreadsheet. By doing this every day, Dicks says, you start to pay more attention to your life. The point isn’t just the journaling. It’s the muscle to watch out for storyworthy moments. And by building that muscle, you become more present and aware in your everyday life — something I could definitely use.
Removing Safari From my iPhone
One of the suggestions of the book I’ve been reading, Make Time, is to remove both your email account AND your web browser from your smart phone. On an iPhone, you can’t totally remove Safari, but you can disable it (making the icon disappear even from Search) using the Screen Time Settings. I’ve done this as an experiment. The main result is making me realize just how often I pick up my phone to search for some random thing that popped into my head. I think I’d like to train myself out of that impulse. I don’t want internet randomness to detract from whatever I’m doing at the moment.
If you want to do the same on an iPhone, here are the instructions I followed (iPhone section).
Downside of Daily Highlights
Continuing to follow the advice of Make Time, I’ve been creating daily highlights. However, the one I picked for today was uninspiring. I think my productivity for the day (even on unrelated things) was much lower because I just wasn’t looking forward to the thing I’d decided to make my highlight for the day. I suppose that’s why “the thing you’ve been putting off because it isn’t urgent and it’s boring” isn’t a recommended category for daily highlights. A lesson for next week!
I also intend to try out some of the strategies from the book for sticking to daily highlights next week. The ones from the book that seem most interesting to me:
Creating daily highlights
So far this week, I’ve tried following the advice of Make Time and created daily highlights that I make sure are accomplished each day. Think of my schedule as centered around these highlights has helped me feel accomplished at the end of each day. At the end of the day, I can at the very least point at my highlight and say, “I did that!”
Daily Highlights
I just started reading Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. So far, the idea of setting daily highlight (distinct from a to-do item or goal) feels both simple and revolutionary. The idea is to have one thing that takes between 60 and 90 minutes (that could be composed of to-dos or lead toward a goal) and commit to accomplishing that thing. You doggedly protect its time on your calendar and/or your focus for that thing. The book recommends that the daily highlight fit one of these three categories:
Readwise
I want to quit doom scrolling. But I can’t quit cold turkey. My particular doom scrolling addiction is around Vox, The New York Times, and 9gag. Sometimes I want the distractions of reading something random, so I am trying to replace those sites with Readwise. This app randomly shows you highlights and notes from books and articles you’ve read.