Digging out of a slump

A month ago I left my job. I thought this was going to give me unprecedented time to write. But this is the first blog post I’ve written since then. My only post in February was an excerpt from my weight loss book that I had written earlier.

Sometimes in life we fall down, go astray, and make mistakes. Nobody is perfect. And part of self-improvement is examining things we’ve done wrong. The important thing here is to avoid doing this out of guilt, self-hatred, or to punish ourselves. Rather, it’s so we can learn how to better handle similar situations in the future.

So what happened?

Well, I spent the last month in rural Tennessee, in the house my wife inherited from her brother who passed away last year. Cleaning out the house has been a slow process, as her brother had a lot of hobbies that involved collecting lots of stuff, and we aren’t quite sure what to do with all of it. Meanwhile my wife was working long hours at her job. Even when she stopped working for the night, there was little to do to relax, so we mostly watched random YouTube videos or did logic puzzles together.

Being in a house filled with a dead man’s stuff, away from all my friends, with nothing fun to do and nowhere outside the house to go, triggered my depression big time. I ended up spending the days killing time online with Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Reddit, and playing dumb pointless games on my phone.

But with all this empty time, why didn’t I spend it writing, or working on marketing my blog or book, or studying computer programming, or any of the other things I wanted to do but didn’t have time while I was working? And in terms of leisure time, I had brought along a map puzzle game that I was excited about, but I played the pointless time-killers instead, and ended up missing the deadline for the map game I cared about.

Why did I do that? The easy answer is to just blame the depression. And that probably was the root cause. But that’s kind of a cop out answer. More importantly, just chalking up my missteps to my depression deprives me of the opportunity to learn from them.

Looking back, I think there were two things I should have done differently:

First, I allowed myself to fall prey to social media e-mail digests.

There’s a concept I call insidious mediocrity. That’s when a form of entertainment is just good enough to hold your attention, but not good enough for you to take any joy or pleasure out of consuming it. So you’ll end up spending a lot of time on it, and it’s not until you finish that you realize the time was wasted on something you didn’t enjoy. You would have been better off if the thing was worse, because then you would have stopped right away. (Or, of course, if it was better, because then the time you spent on it would have been worthwhile.)

I would get the digests for Twitter, Quora, and Reddit, and click through on the subjects that seemed like they might be interesting. Then I’d read them, read the comments, maybe scroll down to read some related posts, and before I knew it, two or three hours had passed from me “checking my e-mail.”

It was extremely rare that I would find something that was actually interesting or enjoyable. In fact, quite a bit of the content was political posts insulting and hating on the other side, which is the sort of garbage I usually try to avoid and think reading makes me actively worse off as a person. But somehow I was reading this junk every day.

Now that I’m out of that depressing house and thinking more clearly, I see the obvious solution to this: Simply delete the digests without looking at them. Or better yet, unsubscribe from them entirely.

The next problem is that I need to give myself more structure. I’m used to going into work, where I have to be there at a certain time, and leave around a certain time. While I’m there, external forces are imposing deadlines on me. Payrolls and vendors need to be paid, financial statements need to be closed, incoming e-mails need to be responded to, and whatever crisis of the day needs to be handled. I generally know what my priorities are and what specific things I need to be doing at any given moment to accomplish those priorities. I was at a high enough level that I rarely had a boss assigning me specific work, but I was able to figure out the work I needed to do on my own.

I have tons of experience managing my time in the context of an accounting job. But I don’t have the same experience managing my time in this period of writing, doing the business of writing, and learning new skills. I can’t expect it to come as easily. I’ve always been able to just wing it when it comes to accounting time-management, but clearly that doesn’t work with writing/business of writing/learning, and I need a more formal system.

I do have my ten-minute regime where I write down my goals for the day. That’s a start, but I don’t think it’s enough. I think that I need to set up a formal schedule, with specific time blocks assigned to specific tasks. As Gretchen Rubin, one of my favorite self-help authors says, “Something that can be done at any time is often done at no time.” So I need to make sure the tasks I want to get accomplished have specific times, and are not “any time” tasks.

Today I wrote up a daily schedule, listing what time blocks I would spend doing what kinds of tasks. Hopefully this will keep me on track, and prevent me from falling back into a cycle of depression leading me to waste my days, which makes me more depressed because I’m not accomplishing anything.

And the good news for you, as readers of my blog, is that now I have regular time scheduled for blogging. Whereas before I was only writing when I felt like it and wasn’t doing anything else. So you should start seeing much more regular content being posted in this blog.