No. 47: Setting Priorities and Meeting Goals

Hey everyone,

Back in high school a few of my friends and I once jokingly asked ourselves which one of us would die first, and I think everyone else pointed at me. A few years later during college I found out that one of them had gotten kidnapped and subsequently murdered after attending a party, so now it’s not so funny. Her death was the first in my immediate social circle, and it made me think a lot about my own mortality but I don’t think it really sunk in until I graduated and started working. Since then only a handful of others have left and I feel really fortunate to have almost all of my friends with me right now. During one of my readings of Norman Davies’ history of Europe, I learned that people had to deal with death a lot more often and that it wasn’t uncommon for only 2 out of 10 of your kids to survive to adulthood. I imagine that you’d have to value your time more seriously when you have to live your life with the ever-present specter of death lurking around the corner. I think a lot of kids these days don’t take their lives seriously because many of them won’t see their first death until their mid 20’s, and it’s not until then that they realize there’s a very real possibility of not being able to accomplish their dreams before they die. In this case I can’t help but think about all those hours I wasted sitting in front of the television, playing video games, or reading my Facebook news feed. Sometimes, when I go home I’ll immediately log on to Facebook or the read the news when I should be studying instead, only to realize three hours later that I’ve wasted my time and have to go to bed. Then, in an effort to frantically catch up with my studies, I’ll stay up late and be tired the next day since I didn’t get enough sleep the night before. I’m already in my mid 20s and I’m not a kid anymore, and I’ve realized that I can’t afford to waste time like this anymore and I have to set my priorities straight. I hope by documenting this here, I can create a more organized framework for my goals and be able to meet them more effectively.

About 4 years ago, I tried to limit my TV watching after going overboard with free media from my university. Each day, I kept track of the number of hours of TV I watched but I didn’t really get consistent at avoiding television until last year. Actually a more accurate statement would be that I did enjoy some long stretches of time without much TV but I would always go back to watching a lot of television over a long period of time, but this past year and a half has been my most consistent period. The image below shows some data and a couple of charts keeping track of my television time:

TV Log

You can see from the second chart that the cumulative average in terms of hours of TV watched has steadily decreased since October 2010. Last year, I totaled 68 hours of TV, compared to 986 hours for the average American. So, the average American watches about 15 times as much television as I do. That’s so much time that you could otherwise spend with your family, read books, exercise, or whatever. I don’t have a TV so it’s nice not having to pay a cable bill, though I do watch a couple shows on Hulu each week. Anyway, the file contains a lot of other data about myself, from the number of hours I can hold perfect posture, the number of hours I study each day, the number of hours I sleep each day, the amount of fruits and vegetables I eat, etc. I convert data from each of these individual logs to a point system and aggregate them into a discipline “index” which gives me an overall picture of how disciplined I am:

Discipline Index

You can see from the chart that I haven’t been all that consistent over the last year and a half and that there’s a big drop from January to March of last year. That was when I was interviewing for jobs and also when I caught a nasty flu which meant I couldn’t do much of anything at that time. While this approach gives me a good reference, I haven’t been good at making or keeping goals, so this year I plan to do just that. One of the things I tried to do starting late last year was to improve one aspect about myself each month. For each day within that month, if I met my goal, I would add a point to the index. I first started out trying to sleep at least 7 hours a day, and that went well for the first month, but when I tried to limit the amount of news I read during the next month I kind of stopped trying and lost track of myself. This month, I aim to record data consistently each day because sometimes I forget to record data for a few days at a time, so by doing it every day I can record my data more accurately.

On the bright side, I’ve kept up with my New Year’s resolution so far into February. It feels a lot longer than one month but I’m glad I stuck to it so far. Next week I’ll write about the same thing, and about some more detailed goals concerning mathematics.