The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Notes -
Is continually deferring gratification a good idea?
I've got a lot of long, boring tasks to do. I've got some less long and more interesting activities I'd like to pursue.
Doing the boring tasks first will create the time and space to fully pursue the interesting activities free from the shadow of procrastination. Diving straight into the interesting activities would mean trying to squeeze them in around the boring tasks, and even if the boring tasks get ignored completely their incompletion will still have an effect on the fun pursuits. Toy example: you can't easily cook a delicious cake in a messy kitchen, and even if you did it would be more laborious and the result is having to eat the cake in what is now an even messier kitchen.
On the one hand the more I defer the gratification the more appealing the gratification becomes (a delicious cake in a pristine kitchen with friends and family and song and laughter). On the other hand the more I defer the gratification the more all I see is additional messy kitchens to be cleaned.
I suppose the sensible thing to do is to look back, reflect on and take some gratfication from what I've achieved already.
My rule of thumb, which has to be adjusted amd prioritized to some degree, is Do what you need to do before you do what you want to do.
As you might imagine, this possibly wouldn't work well for obsessive-compulsive types (I do not use that term with any accuracy), who might see an ever-expanding and never-ending list in their minds of things that need doing. But it generally keeps entropy at bay, keeps my sense of time efficiency fairly positive, and keeps my wife from having to do every goddam thing around the house. I also like to think modeling such behavior will be good for my sons, for whom lethargy and idleness sometimes seem to come naturally.
A suggestion that may seem unrelated: Get a plant, preferably a flowering or fruit- (or vegetable-) bearing plant. Look up how to tend it properly, including soil pH, pruning, watering, etc. Then start taking care of it. The process of continual vigilance, patience, and reward when it does bloom/bear fruit is I think instructive.
I pair up
with
precisely to avoid the list of chores expanding every time I get two-thirds of the way down the list. It is vital to define chores narrowly enough that one can actually finish today's and have a little time left over.
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I share your rule. It's only that I feel like I'm passing a point where I'm losing sight of what it was I wanted to do.
Propagating more plants is about halfway down my list. In fact I'm mere days away from discovering whether the seeds that I collected from my garden last year are going to come out with pink, white or blue flowers (come ooooon pink!). On the other hand maintaining and improving the (poorly planned) garden is one (slash many) of the tasks towards the top of the list - and those particular tasks have a tendency to cycle back and regenerate in short order.
I've found taking before and after photos of projects or documenting in other ways to be a good way of keeping some perspective on progress and avoid the feeling of being stuck in a perpetual "work in progress" stage.
Anyway, I texted a friend who I've been putting off catching up with until the weather improved. Drinking beer on a boat will be a nice change. Can't help feeling that it doesn't actually advance matters though. Ehh, trade offs. It's not like I was going to fix everything in one night.
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