I lost my job a few months ago and so I’ve had an inordinate amount of free time and it made me realize the same thing. Even with essentially infinite time I can’t get everything that needs to be done, done.
It’s impossible because we are social animals. We are evolved to live in tribes and extended families. We are trying to achieve things alone that our ancestors achieved in groups of up to 100 people. Rugged individualism is killing all of us.
Do at least two at once
Have enough space
Use company time to do all of them
Nothing about the American lifestyle helps with any of this.
I like cooking a hands-off kind of dinner that takes a while, so I have time to clean or whatever while I wait. If I have to schedule appointments, that happens while I’m on the clock. I wish exercise wasn’t such a focused task. Feels like forever just doing one tedious thing.
Exercise should happen during commute, social time, any time you’re sitting and not doing anything important, a real job that requires you actually do things.
Social also overlaps nicely with food.
Literally every week, at least one of these things gets sacrificed and then I try to make up for it next week.
Apart from what @hayvan@feddit.nl said, it’s also important to understand how a human brain works.
Massively oversimplifying, you have a “primate” brain, good at complex and novel things like logic, casuality, motivation etc; and a “reptile” brain, good at just keeping you alive by repeating the same thing over and over. Crucially, the primate brain takes up a lot of energy and other resources when it works, so your reptile brain will shut it down wherever possible. The trick is to use your primate brain to form habits by repetition, which the reptile brain will pick up, because that’s literally the only thing it’s good at.
To form a (good) habit, you need three things: first, motivation. You need to understand why doing some action is good for you. Second, a trigger - some concrete event that “breaks the flow” of your life, e.g waking up, coming home from work, or just a loud alarm you set on your phone; this is needed for your reptile brain to wake up your primate brain so that it could use the motivation you have to force your body to do something. Third (and this is the hard part) repetition. If you force yourself to do the action every time a trigger occurs, your reptile brain will eventually start catching on. Remember, it is wired to simply repeat what you have been doing before, because you’ve survived up until now so it must be a good thing to do. This can take different amounts of repititions depending on various facrors, somewhere between dozens and hundreds. After that, you will start doing the action almost automatically when the trigger happens.
E.g. I exercise when I take a break from work in the middle of the day. To do that, I forced myself to do exercise whenever I took a break for like a month. Now I get this natural urge to do push-ups when I stand up from my table :)
im not
Most people don’t. Social media makes it seem like they do, but most people’s lives are at least somewhat messy.
I do all those things on my own. I make a list of tasks I need to do every day or so and I cross them off as I complete them. Lift weights 4 times a week. Prepare meals on the off days and eat the leftovers on workout days. Groceries, laundry, clean, on the weekends. When everything’s done or I have downtime in between tasks I play video games or whatever sounds fun. Go to bed at 10, read for an hour or so, sleep until 5-7am and do it all again. I talk to my friends on discord and in our group chat throughout the day and every week or two we get together at a bar or someones house. Overall pretty manageable other than when my job stresses me out so bad my mental health goes to shit but that’s only a day or two every few weeks.
You people can’t do anything
