Brain Candy and Making the Easy Things Harder.

Make the easy things harder.

I have been rereading Atomic Habits by James Clear. It is dense with valuable insights to help me live a more productive and happy life by hacking my good or bad habits. For example, I put my phone in the bedroom in the morning while I work at my desk. If it's not in front of me, I won't pick it up and get distracted from what I am doing at my desk. That's making easy things hard. I am facing up to the fact that everything on my phone is high-fructose brain candy.

I will also try out a new habit I was reading about in Atomic Habits of using my old phone as a tablet to read and only using my regular phone for apps and communication. If you are a Star Trek nerd, you will recall how the characters use their tablets for just one task. They may have 3 or 4 tablets with different functions on each. I think this will help me stay on task with my reading and help keep me away from doom scrolling and social media. A smartphone is dangerous for getting me off duty, so I want to narrow the focus by limiting my tasks to the device.

Make the hard things more accessible.

One fantastic suggestion from James Clear is to set up habits you can do in 2 minutes. You are likelier to stick to a two-minute pattern over the long term than a habit that takes twenty minutes. Once you have made two minute habit your routine, that's when to ramp up the activity to the entire effort. The hard part was committing to the practice, but since it was only a tiny commitment, that made the starting step easier.

McGyver Projects

My husband was talking to people at work about fixing things. Everyone was sad that stuff was made to throw away. He perked up and proudly announced that I fix things. He went on telling me when he got home how I should set up a fix it clinic in are parking stall facing the street on the weekend. He says I have a McGyver gene. The last project I worked on was sewing in a 32" zipper into his fancy gym bag. Initially, I took it to the shoe repair shop where they have a machine that can sew that but this bag was too hard to sew by machine. It would need to be done by hand they guy told me and he would charge about $80 bucks. Foolishly I reported back to my husband the bad news, and added "I could do that." That is how you get stuck with the reputation of the family tinker. KT-inker is us is my new company name. My next task is to talk my husband into getting me a 3-D printer for making parts to replace broken spacely sprockets in appliances.