I’m infuriated thinking back to all the time I’ve spent aimlessly scrolling on Facebook’s news feed, or any social media feed for that matter. These are completely impulsive time wasting activities that give us instant gratification and nothing more. In fact one could argue in our ego driven world, it makes you worse off constantly comparing yourself to snapshots of someone’s ‘best self’. I will write more at length ways I try to limit spending time on social media, but I want to write about the other side of this, how could I better be spending my time?
Ideally, I want to behave like every action and activity I partake in has a defined purpose towards helping me grow into my ideal self. Hence our title: Living Like Every Activity Has A Purpose.
For example, at night I watch Narcos on Netflix in Spanish with English subtitles on because I want to improve my ability to hear and understand Spanish. While this activity alone is leisure in nature, it’s still helping me get towards a goal. Netflix needs product category filtering that correlate to my current goals rather than by genre!
Even better would be only checking my phone when I have a results driven activity I need to complete (i.e. directions, making plans, Google translating). Instead it’s swiping down the Insta feed we go! To be frank, I don’t even enjoy seeing what’s going on in people’s lives for the most part, it’s just a habit I can’t kick!
But, for all the activities I engage with while traveling through Costa Rica, I want them to be planned out and tied to a specific goal. Often times a lack of planning leads to this poor decision making. Knowing ahead of time, in all of my interests, what I want to accomplish next helps immensely to link an activity with a purpose.
To use a Video Game analogy, I’ve spent too long on mundane side quests and now it’s time to get back to the main storyline.
Here’s some top of current activities I’m engaged in and how I believe they tie in with my growth trip:
Meditation – Morning mindfulness helps me to clearly plan the day and visualize what and who is important to me. Headspace app tracks my progress automatically leaving one less thing for me to manually calculate and track.
Running – For me this has always had a mentally calming effect to run and explore a city. But it’s main goal is health and to keep me fit.
Diet – A low carb diet is harder to achieve for me when traveling since most ‘cheap eats’ are carb dense or fried (Mmmh empanadas). So I am experimenting with continuing the low carb diet when I can and incorporating a 16-8 fast this week. Where I have an 8 hour window to eat my meals and then 16 hours to fast. So if I complete dinner at 8pm and eat again at noon the next day. In San Jose Costa Rica, after my daily mindfulness and workout, there is an awesome buffet breakfast, so while here I’m shifting the 8 hour eating window to begin at 8 am. But that means I am done eating at 4pm! So I will experiment for 2 days with how successful this is and alter depending on how I feel.
Music – Solamente Latino playlists en Spotify! A huge way people learn english is by listening to American music & watching shows and movies. So inversely this must work the other way around. So I’m exclusively listening to Viva Latino! on Spotify!
Travel – And by this I simply mean exploring cities, sites, and places. This breaks the routine of work up and since I am solo traveling, allows myself time to think from a macro perspective about my wants, needs, and goals… And equally, allows me to see life from other’s shoes. This ties to my overall sense of wellness and growth. Since growth is a non-tangible future state, we can assess it’s daily progress by how our body and mind feel.
Series/Movies – As mentioned above, if I want to watch any TV it will be in Spanish to improve my ear for hearing Spanish. This ties
Social – If I still prioritized partying and mingling this activity will always be at odds with my growth goals. But cold turkey quit the social scene isn’t an option either because then there’s a sense of missing out which could tie to loneliness. A more realistic answer is to temper my nights. Rather than party ’til the sun comes out, have a hard cut off of 2am so that I’m up at 9… err 10am and Saturday isn’t impacted by Friday’s decisions. No more zero days!!
Back at home I loved playing video games but on the road that isn’t an available distraction. This is an interesting hobby to discuss though. If I eliminated video games because they aren’t tied to a goal I would be bored and then binge on games destroying my productivity. So it brings up the important point of balance, of moderation. We already know this, but I’ll state it anyway: It’s preferable for our productivity to indulge in things we enjoy to create equilibrium in our lives. But we have to temper how much of our time we spend here, because at a certain point it does erode our productivity and change to having a negative life effect.
So if I wanted to continue playing video games and wanted it to tie-in and impact my growth goals here would be one possible solution:
Wake up at 6am and play 90 minutes of Video Games twice a week. This helps instill the habit of waking up early and also provides me satisfaction in enjoying something that stimulates my creativity.
Not every hobby of ours is productive, so as I showed above, it’s important to find ways to tie them to our goals and moderate their usage.
Leave a comment with some hobbies you indulge in and ways you could tie them to current goals.