Day 179: best of both worlds & quitting social media

Using the title of one of my fav podcast, I really like my current work arrangement. I can choose where to do, home or office. Yesterday I chose home because I didn’t have to focus too much in the morning, most of to-dos were transactional or shallow. Staying at home has the advantage of letting husband to go to play golf (his fav hobby and really makes him happy), peek into girls’ distance learning. I love how Lizzy set up her studying station (this is 9am, by 12pm, it was a total mess but still very cute).

between emails, i made vegan pancakes (banana, honey, oatmeal, corn flour, flour, almond milk and chia seeds).

After three days of not having lunch with the family, I missed it, so it was nice to have a family lunch. Very simple meal of pasta and cucumber salad for the girls.

and veggie centered for the adults too.

While kids were still doing school work, hubby and I took a nap… another benefits of working from home. 🙂 Then I got a busier afternoon with work and a new fun task that I named as covered mission. 🙂

Evening routine: reading + drawing

or a telescope

Continuing the series of main takeaways from Deep Work

#3 QUIT SOCIAL MEDIA

I’ve already done that with my phone during my month of mindfulness. But the book gave a new perspective to it.

Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits.

First step is to identify the main high level goals in both your professional and your personal life. Example of personal life include parenting well and running and organised household. In the professional sphere, the details depend on what you do for a living. For me, that’s doing impactful work to influence policymakers to do good for the people; brings value and inspire my peers.

Once you’ve identified these gorillas, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal, be as specific as possible.

Then consider the network tools you current use. For each such tools, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activities.

Keep this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweighs the negative impacts.

Once I go through the mental exercise of evaluating social media (facebook, instagram, the only two that I had that I wasn’t sure I should keep), eliminating them in my phone become obvious. I’m not saying that they don’t add any value to my life, I do enjoy catching a good article in FB, learn about a new shop that sells vegan food in my area, or new journal ideas in instagram. But the negative impacts on my mind (distracting and not mindful), and the opportunity cost of doing something else that bring more joy (reading, crafting, watching the girls doing their things) makes it clear that the little positive impact is not enough reason to keep them. I didn’t close my IG and FB accounts, I can still access them on my computer, but I rarely do. When I do, I suddenly get bored very quickly and close it within 5 min.