Behaviours & Time
Some thoughts on behavioural analysis, and time management.
English below | Click here for Turkish.
Hi there dear reader, if it’s your first time coming across my blog, I’d highly advise reading my introduction first. You can read this post after making sure that my style suits you.
You can access the introduction here.
Love, Erhan.
This is a 2 part writing, this is part 1. I suggest you to read part 2 after this. I’m planning to share the second part soon.
In this part we’ll first analyze our behaviours and then we’ll talk about how to manage our time.
We all have had times when we complained about not having enough time. Days end quick with school, work and chores without being able to spend enough quality time with things we love and with people close to us, sometimes even with ourselves. I believe that’s 100% on us, maybe I didn’t believe it that much before, but now I really do. In this post I’m going to try to make you believe in this as well.
Behaviours
If we’d like to get our lives in order, first we have to analyze the behaviours that are controlling us. Behaviours are split into two from what I’ve learned via Atomic Habits. Conscious ones and unconscious ones (I know that’s kind of a strict split, that’s just for the sake of the argument.). Don’t think of involuntary behaviours as unconscious ones, those are not the topic of our talk. The word unconscious here does not have a bad connotation. It just means that we’re doing it autonomously.
Habits are behaviours we do repeatedly, however big or small. A huge chunk of those are done unconsciously, always a part of our routine. Habits can be good or bad. As we do most of them unconsciously it’s not easy to figure out which category they fall into.
Well why do we need to do things unconsciously? Because our brain can only focus on finite things at a time, therefore it tries to reduce its load by transferring things to unconscious mind.
However, while we’ve been doing this for the whole of our lives we’ve gained a lot of good, bad and neutral habits. If we’re pursuing a future where we have gotten rid of the bad habits and gained newer good ones we need to spot the older ones first. That’s why our priority is to determine all of our all current habits and categorize them. You may wonder what’s a neutral habit, well we can give waking up and putting on clothes every day as examples for that.
After categorizing all of our habits, our next action would be to make the unconscious conscious. As Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology says:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
That’s how we’re going to get back the ropes for our life! Our next action would be preserving the good habits while adding more to them and getting rid of the bad ones. This is when the book Atomic Habits comes into play. For both of the goals mentioned now, this book gives you methods to follow, and explains them deeply. Now let’s talk about 1 method for each side.
Our first method for good side is making it obvious. Do you want to read a book every night before sleep? Then the best place to put the book is next to your pillow. Every day when you go to your bed for sleeping you’ll see the book next to your pillow and remember to read first.
And a method for the bad side is, as you can guess, making it invisible. Does your hand go to your phone each time you focus on something? Well don’t put it to your table then. If you can’t see it then your habit won’t get triggered. This is true for every thing, person, environment that reminds us bad habits. Keep them away and out of sight.
Out of respect to this masterpiece I won’t get into anymore detail and direct you to the book itself. There is also 30 days email course with 11 lessons that exists on the personal website of the author for free, you may sign up for that too!
You’re welcome to learn the methods I mentioned and all the other ones from the book. Integrate them to your life, after that let’s discuss the effectiveness of them together. Let’s talk with the results in our hands. I personally have been trying to integrate the things I learned from the book to my life for the last month, I’m already getting fantastic results even thought I’m at the very start of this journey.
I’m trying to be conscious every second of my life now, living every moment slowly to the fullest. Who knew living slowly would help me create more free time in my life? My life definitely got brighter and more meaningful. I’m actually enjoying all the ups and downs now!
When we live consciously we’re the only rulers of our lives instead of letting our habits rule us. Now that we’ve taken control of the unconscious habits, we’re fully in control of our time.
I’ve been known to frequently complain about 24 hours not being enough to people close to me. If this is not enough even for an organized life, can you imagine how it is with a disorganized one? 24 is all we get, we have to make do with it.
Now let’s face a fact that we need to accept. We don’t have enough time for every thing, person or environment.
Time
Did you know that 500+ hours of content is uploaded to Youtube every single minute? How do we plan on watching them all? We can’t, we don’t need to either. Same goes for series, movies, games and books. These fall into self-entertainment and self-education category.
This is where prioritizing comes into play. I only have single course that I haven’t managed to pass in the university. It’s Operating Systems. Now I’m going to give a topic from that course as an example, how ironic.
The topic is Scheduling. Scheduling is when CPU schedules its threads using a certain algorithm and makes them active according to a schedule. (Processes runs inside threads. For the purpose of this post we’ll think that CPU schedules processes, not threads.)
There is more than one way to do this scheduling. Aren’t we all also schedule things in our life? Aren’t we managing an Operating System of our own?
Let’s talk about 2 scheduling algorithms. First Come First Serve, as the name suggests, first process gets served first, then the next one and so on. So this algorithm tells us to give time to processes in the order they come in. What if there is a more urgent thing we need to do while we’re doing something else? Is it right to put it to end of our to-do list?
As you’d agree, that’s not a good algorithm for us. Now let’s talk about a more decent algorithm, which we probably also use without realising anyways.
That’s Priority Scheduling. You give each process a priority level, then give them time accordingly. You re-evaluate your schedule constantly with the new things or new priority levels. Now that’s a good way to go. Until now we talked about processes as a synonym for the things we want/need to do.
To be able to use this algorithm, first we need to decide on a priority level for the things, people and environments in our life. We all should take some time to think on that. In the second part of this post, I will talk about a method that we can use for prioritizing and we’ll dive deeper.
Time is our most valuable asset. We have to learn how to use it wisely.
Erhan
