Aside from the camera on my phone and the alarm clock, the app I use the most -- by far -- is my timer. I have it set for 10 minutes, and I use that baby almost every day during the school year.
I use the timer as a calm-down-and-transition timer. Often, just before I leave the office to head for home, I'll do a quick clean up of the office and then do a 10-minute mediation. This little package of time, wrapped up with a bow, helps a lot with getting my head from spinning around with all the seemingly urgent things. It gives me a way to appreciate the here-and-now of the outdoors, and to appreciate the coziness of my house once I get there.
I also use the timer to motivate me to start those dreaded tasks. A referee report? A memo? There are big, nebulous tasks that I know will take a bunch of work and time, and just getting started on them is tricky. So I break these up into nibble-sized chunks. I write in my to-do list, "Ref report; 10 min & pf" (the "& pf" is short-hand for "and plan forward"). When I get to that item in my to-do list, I pull out my timer and start it.
Then I start working on refereeing. Maybe I need to read the paper. Maybe I need to locate a related article. Maybe I need to take notes, or start a LaTeX file. Whatever it is, I spend ten minutes doing just that, and nothing else. Usually by the time the timer beeps at me, I'm on a roll and have found something that makes me want to keep going . . . and that's exactly why I quit, right then.
Even though it's tempting to keep going until I hit a snag, stopping while I'm excited means that starting the project the next day is something I'm going to look forward to: "oh, right, I just had to fix those spelling mistakes and point out the references to Smith's work!". (Or whatever). So, when the timer beeps, I stop working on that project. I write "Ref report; 10 min & pf" on tomorrow's to-do list, and check it off of today's list. The next day, I'm all ready to jump in to the spelling/Smith references. Eventually, I get to the point where I don't need to limit myself to 10 minutes, and then the report is done. Joy!
This summer, I've started something new that I'm kind of loving. There's this long list of "someday" goals I've been carting around in my planner: I really ought to get back to playing banjo. I really should spend more time training Prewash, because she loves learning new tricks. I really should do more upper-body work. I really should spend more time with friends, instead of futzing around by myself. Etc, etc, etc.
Well, with the kids out of the house and my summer schedule relatively wide open, I theoretically have time to tackle each one of these "should"s. And at some point in early May, I had an inspiration: Why not just bundle them all together, and spend 10 minutes on each? So I decided on an order that made sense to me: starting with dog training is an easy, fun way to get started; doing a workout right before a stint of meditation is friggin' awesome, . . . that kind of thinking. And so here's what my Hour of Power has looked like this summer.
I use the timer as a calm-down-and-transition timer. Often, just before I leave the office to head for home, I'll do a quick clean up of the office and then do a 10-minute mediation. This little package of time, wrapped up with a bow, helps a lot with getting my head from spinning around with all the seemingly urgent things. It gives me a way to appreciate the here-and-now of the outdoors, and to appreciate the coziness of my house once I get there.
I also use the timer to motivate me to start those dreaded tasks. A referee report? A memo? There are big, nebulous tasks that I know will take a bunch of work and time, and just getting started on them is tricky. So I break these up into nibble-sized chunks. I write in my to-do list, "Ref report; 10 min & pf" (the "& pf" is short-hand for "and plan forward"). When I get to that item in my to-do list, I pull out my timer and start it.
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Not my phone's timer. I can't use my phone to take a picture of my phone, apparently. |
Even though it's tempting to keep going until I hit a snag, stopping while I'm excited means that starting the project the next day is something I'm going to look forward to: "oh, right, I just had to fix those spelling mistakes and point out the references to Smith's work!". (Or whatever). So, when the timer beeps, I stop working on that project. I write "Ref report; 10 min & pf" on tomorrow's to-do list, and check it off of today's list. The next day, I'm all ready to jump in to the spelling/Smith references. Eventually, I get to the point where I don't need to limit myself to 10 minutes, and then the report is done. Joy!
This summer, I've started something new that I'm kind of loving. There's this long list of "someday" goals I've been carting around in my planner: I really ought to get back to playing banjo. I really should spend more time training Prewash, because she loves learning new tricks. I really should do more upper-body work. I really should spend more time with friends, instead of futzing around by myself. Etc, etc, etc.
Well, with the kids out of the house and my summer schedule relatively wide open, I theoretically have time to tackle each one of these "should"s. And at some point in early May, I had an inspiration: Why not just bundle them all together, and spend 10 minutes on each? So I decided on an order that made sense to me: starting with dog training is an easy, fun way to get started; doing a workout right before a stint of meditation is friggin' awesome, . . . that kind of thinking. And so here's what my Hour of Power has looked like this summer.
- Take my evening meds (which I'm supposed to take about an hour before dinner)
- Training and treats with Prewash (this lasts 10 treats, not 10 minutes)
- Write to/invite a friend to something, spending 10 minutes max
- Ten minutes of cleaning something in the house
- Ten minutes of playing banjo
- Ten minutes of strength/stretching workout
- Ten minutes of mediation
- One piece of chocolate: the reward.
I put the "invite a friend" thing in the middle because it's psychologically the hardest thing for me. I really like the idea of reaching out to people, but the combination of thinking about my schedule and reaching out to a, y'know, person is a bit daunting. I think that's the thing that's made the biggest happiness difference from this Hour of Power, though.
I also want to say that a single piece of chocolate after ten minutes of meditation is intense. It's so annoyingly sweet and filling. Eating this one piece has helped me reduce the amount of sugar that I mindlessly eat at other times of day, paradoxically.
There's part of me that wants to say, "I wish I'd started doing this long ago", but I think that really the only reason I can do it now is lack of distractions during the rest of the day. This is the first summer in a long time when I don't have to think about taking care of my kids or grading papers or responding to urgent deadlines. The once or twice I've had a loaner kid this summer (that is, when I babysat for a friend), I reverted to sitting in a corner and reading a book in the evening, and didn't bother powering for an hour.
Having said that, I am really appreciating this routine as a way to kick-start a whole bunch of healthy habits all at once.
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