Me and My Life
I was going to write this last night, but I opted for bed cause I was feeling sleepy. I still feel sleepy now, though…so I hope this will be as short as possible.
Ever since I started reading the book — Essentialism. I have been going through a radical mind shift. I choose to say radical because it is unlike everything I knew. Reading Deep Work by Cal Newport added to this new shift. You can say my mind is going through some serious upgrades, or it’s been formatted. I’ll opt for the later.
Let’s go into details.
My activity on social media has reduced to the barest minimum. I disabled data background access to WhatsApp on mobile. I no longer receive WhatsApp messages whenever I am not online. This makes a lot of sense as I get to control the number of ongoing chats I have. My response to messages happen only when I open WhatsApp — no one controls when I come online but me.
For Facebook and Twitter, I open those whenever I have something important to check out. The mobile applications have been uninstalled.
Thus far my life has not crashed, rather I have made significant progress…how?
All the minutes and hours I would have used for the above activities are channelled into more important things. Such as; reading, working and building the important relationships.
I am on the path to simplifying my life to just the essential things, activities, relationships etc. Does this mean I don’t have time to have fun, not at all! It’s actually the opposite.
I’m not bombarded with irrelevant news that does not add a penny to my life. I stand outside of the noise that happens on social media. How about the happenings around me?
I pick the activities I get involved in. This includes the calls and text messages I respond to. Calls and text messages that come in when I am deep in work are allowed to slide. By work, I mean any activity. I have denounced the notion that multi-tasking is a productive activity. Research has shown that it does more harm than good. So I endeavour to attend to one thing at a time.
Doing the things listed above has not been any easy. I’ve had my shortcoming as I make progress towards my goal. Yet, I have come to believe that it is worth it. I’ll do my best to document my progress in living a life that focuses on just the essential things of life.
