A week ago, I set myself a small challenge.
Off-Topic - My Week of Sanity and Not Binging: A Different Way of Touching Grass
One week later, I've been keeping tabs on what I've been doing each day. So what have I learned over the last week? One thing I knew going in is that I'm not status-addicted enough to have come out the other side with a life-changing new outlook on the world, but I've certainly started some good habits I would do well to carry forward.
The primary thing I benefited from over the last week was asking myself to set priorities. Simply pushing off my usual time-wasting habit until after everything else was done resulted in me doing things that were harder or less entertaining in the moment but were more gratifying in the long run (for example, rather than simply watching a couple of gameplay videos I decided that, since the games in question were free, I might as well just play them myself). It got me thinking more about what I was doing, and when, and why I wanted to do it.
I didn't follow the rules 100% all the time, mainly because I still found myself dragged towards comment sections. However, rather than mindlessly scrolling through comments as a way of bombarding myself with more stimulation, the fact that it was actively working against the challenge meant that I only did it when I was looking for specific information. Even when I found myself scrolling through a reply chain where someone was making very incorrect arguments about the GPL 3.0 license it started because I was looking for clarification on something and continued mainly because I was curious how it would be refuted. While that was definitely a violation of the rules as established, it was at least a conscious one.
Overall, there are things I intend to return to (watching videos from channels not already in my subscriptions, mostly because I sometimes simply forget to subscribe to channels) and things I fully intend to keep doing (spend less time scrolling comments, idly scroll social media less, be more conscious of whether there's something else I need to be doing). This wasn't a life-changing experience and it won't change my habits completely, as shown by the fact that I found myself consciously skirting the edge of the rules most of the week, but it was definitely a good exercise. Call it an opportunity for myself to wake up and handle my priorities better.
If nothing else, I hope to use this momentum to make myself work on my projects more. Getting my new Obsidian plugin working was quite a lot of fun.
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