Day Ten: Industry

INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

This is the sixth of Benjamin Franklin's areas of self improvement as well as the subject of today's post.

In this age of facebook, obsessive e-mail checking, and countless other distractions begging to be engaged, it is truly difficult to always remain industrious. I know I actively struggle with my time-wasting habits each and every day.  Just today, I wasted two hours watching a movie after I got home from school.

Its not that I didn't enjoy the movie, but I didn't gain from it; I'm no better than I was before the movie. I didn't learn from it, my attitudes about anything of merit were unaffected by it, it was a simple comedy. The fact is, at the very least there were more engaging movies that I could watch. For example, I could be whittling away at the 100 best movies instead of throwing time away.

Of course, I can't wake up tomorrow and suddenly be a billion times more productive with incredible laser focus. I'm not as naive as most new-years-resolutioners in that I recognize the incredible will-power it takes to give up cold turkey on a host of time-consuming habits. What I should do, is work on exercising my 'industriousness' muscle; incrementally improving my focus until perhaps some day in the distant future I can have the laser-beam focus I dream of. Indeed, as I was writing the previous sentence I lazily browsed a news site in order to avoid the intellectual challenge of writing.

My new found obsession with metrics has lead me to install rescue time, a program that can log time spent on wasteful sites, which even gives you a productivity rating. The idea is that I will fill guilty for visiting the guilty pleasure websites because they will bring down my rating.

A simple way to slightly increase industriousness is by cheating and finding escapes from my main work that I can still consider at least marginally productive. For example, as a break from research, instead of watching a trivial movie, I can watch a TED talk; if you haven't yet stumbled across these wonderful thought-provoking talks given by incredibly smart people, you are missing out.

While not incredibly productive, a TED talk is at least mentally stimulating and is not strictly throw-away. Likewise, I can work on side projects, or attempt to write music, or read a good book, instead of watching TV or lazily browsing blogs. These activities are at least fun, and have some kind of value; my mind gets exercise which may actually bring fresh insight into my work.

The end goal is to do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, without having to so actively fight the temptation to zone out and surf.

Thus, tomorrow I will concentrate on this facet and attempt to clock in an uber-industrious day; although I don't expect to be able to continue such an ambitious task beyond a day (and I may even fail at a day), it is the start of actively trying to improve industriousness.