Some advice my dad gave me which has proven invaluable over the years: Always carry a pen.
Back in college I was discussing a situation I was in with a friend. He said to me: “And then what?”
This has turned out to be a helpful meme in getting out of the “now” of thinking about a situation so that the long term becomes the focus.
When I see something bad/unpleasant happen, e.g. an accident, I quickly turn away and start looking closely at stuff somewhere else. “Analyzing” what I’m looking at. It helps to prevent that scene from becoming etched into my brain.
Memorizing by exponentially increasing time. Think of the thing you’re trying to memorize. Wait a minute. Think of it again. Wait a couple minutes. Think again. Keep stretching out the time period until you’re into days. (Actually nights are most helpful for consolidating memory.)
Note that this is the opposite of the notoriously bad “cramming” method my students would use. Nothing I could say would persuade one of them to stop that nonsense.
While I’m on it about good study habits: Don’t take notes! Pay attention to the lecture. 95% of your notes are going to useless stuff you don’t understand.
I was a researcher (sort of still am). It’s all about trying lots and lots of things. Almost nothing is going to be right on the first try. Try A, try B, try C, …
Good advice. And I’ll add, a pocket knife. I use mine every single day for something.
Of course, traveling has made this more difficult.
People react better to you if you’ve recently had a haircut.
I never do anything unless I can think of three good reasons to do it.
Similarly, whenever I have a problem, I always think of three solutions before solving it. Most people got obsessed with one solution, even if it doesn’t work. I once passed a group of people who left the car keys in the ignition with the engine turned on, and one window opened just a little. They were trying to open the door with a hanger. I said “Wouldn’t it make more sense to use a branch to press the window key, opening it and open the door from the inside?”
30 seconds later they were in the car.
Or in my case, a perfectly acceptable manuscript. I need to learn this lesson in a bad way.
If I have one guiding principle it’s this one. I grew up surrounded by people who refused to admit catastrophic fuckups, and I was impressed by the pain and suffering that refusal inflicted on everyone around them. I said to myself, I am never gonna be that person. My only real drawback is I tend to take responsibility for things that aren’t my responsibility, and I tend to overestimate the magnitude of my own fuckups. But I’d rather be that way than the way my parents were.
This isn’t exactly a contradiction of your truth, more like an attempt to build off of it.
One thing I’m learning these days is that boredom is entirely indispensable. It started with an article about Neil Gaiman and his assertion that boredom is the mother of creation. Us artsy types need times for our brain to be idle, whether it’s washing the dishes or sitting and staring off into space. That’s how ideas happen.
This coincided with the realization that our culture as it is currently conceived is entirely constructed around an intolerance for boredom. We read while we’re waiting in line, we text our friends when our dinner date runs to the powder room, we absolutely cannot stand stillness. At least for me, there’s an existential dread to sitting and facing myself without distraction. Our culture is, in many ways, a consumption culture, an enemy of creation.
So I’m working on making myself more bored. I deleted both of my Facebook accounts. I stopped using Messenger. I’ve limited my e-mail to twice a day. I get a maximum of two hours a day to waste time on the internet. (A lot of distraction is electronics related – but not all of it. That’s just my poison.)
While my life is overall pretty good, I can feel some gaps in meaning. So right now I’m just trying to make myself bored. Then when I’m sitting there, idly, I can take some time to really think about what I really want to do with the time I have.
This approach is working. The more bullshit I cut out of my life, the more I clearly see what matters to me. Boredom is not the enemy. Distraction is the enemy.
It seems the older I get, the more I’m learning that I’m some kind of neurological anomaly (I was recently diagnosed with ADD, layer that on top of being a left-handed epileptic with depression and PTSD, I’m just a lucky girl.)
It’s led me to generalize thusly: My brain is not your brain.
‘‘A place for everything’’ is a great rule of thumb if you’re capable of remembering to put stuff away half the time. I’m not.
Without notes in lectures, I would have been utterly lost in college. I would drift in and out of focus and immediately forget everything I had learned. I only ever learn stuff by writing it down, or in some cases by trying to explain what I learned by telling Sr. Weasel about it at the end of the day. The things I’m writing in this post are things I wouldn’t understand are important unless I wrote them down and told my brain to remember them thusly.
I’m a productivity geek who’s been trying to use methods built for people with brains different than my own. ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ is a great organizational system for people who are not me. It overwhelms me and I spend the entire day trying to optimize the system instead of getting work done. I get lost in the minutiae.
Then, after my ADD diagnosis at the age of 34, I took this little quiz about executive function strengths and weaknesses. Weaknesses? Working memory, planning and task initiation. Strengths? Meta-cognition, goal-driven achievement, and flexibility.
I can see all of that when I look back on my history, my particular struggles, and my greatest achievements. So that is what I have been using to transform my life.
Planning & Working Memory: I threw out all the fancy time management apps that overwhelm me with their multitude of options and configurations. Every morning, over breakfast (which is the same every day, because who wants to waste valuable decision-making power on breakfast?) I spend the first part of my day writing 5 or 6 to-dos down on a single sheet of lined paper – I write down the reason it has to get done, i.e. ‘‘finish that grant today so you’re not a screaming ball of anxiety tomorrow.’’ Then I write what I’m going to have for lunch and dinner because if I don’t, I’ll forget to eat.
Task initiation: I’ve gotten rid of vast quantities of my stuff so that I have less to keep track of. The goal is to be able to de-clutter any room in 3 minutes. I can’t tolerate committing to do a household chore for more than 3 minutes, so that’s what I do. After I finish eating a meal in the kitchen, I set the timer for three minutes, do the dishes, and I usually finish anyway.
Goal-driven achievement. My habits have become driven by long-term reward – for every book I read, I earn $6 toward a new Kindle. For every week I don’t eat any fast food, I get $25 toward a purse I’m saving for.
I no longer feel my brain is a weakness, working against me. I’ve learned to make it work for me. This past week, I spent 40 hours revising my novel, with an average of 20 hours a week this month. I’m set to have a submissable manuscript by February. My house is clean. I’m accomplishing so much I’m getting bored, which is the end-goal because boredom yeilds creation.
My brain is not your brain.
Yeah, and when anyone says they want fast and cheap, never mind the quality, they’re a bloody liar or an idiot, or both.
Interesting - I think I understand what you mean (although it doesn’t happen that way for me) - and I think what you’re doing is somewhat akin to meditation - clear away the garbage to make space for thinking.
In my world, ideas happen when I don’t have time to deal with them - often because of the chance collision of two different things that are happening around me. I have to put them on the list, or I will forget them.
This reminds me of one of mine.
‘If you <action> then you will find that <result>’ is a thing that people say when they really mean ‘When I <actioned> then I found that <result>’. These things are not the same! Learn to tell the difference, and think critically about your own situation.
“If you jump off that building you will break every bone in your body.” “If you stay with that guy who hit you, he’ll do it again” - yeah, those ones are pretty solid.
But: “If you give your child a time out she’ll do what you say”. “If you take notes you’ll remember it better.” “If you just be yourself you’ll find someone to love you”. “If you do what you love you’ll eventually be successful” - not quite so set in stone.
I specifically wish I’d had the guts to skip every lecture at University (this is in sciences - don’t think it would work so well in the humanities) and just spent the time in the library with the textbook and a notepad. Ears are my most useless channel of incoming information. But, y’know, going to lectures is How It’s Done, so … :smack: