Unsystematic week retrospective
A few weeks ago, I agreed to try not having systems for a week. Which is to say, to not have lists, or calendars, or rules, or weekly work goals, or a beeminder for tracking success at weekly work goals, or twenty other beeminders, or morning and evening routines, or sunday self-improvement system, or weekly review, or my work chair, or scavenger hunts, or my reflection in Workflowy when things go wrong system, or permission to play tiny measured doses of Civilization IV only under a range of well-specified circumstances.
I was allowed to keep ethics, but only the whimsical personal-judgment-in-the-moment kind. I wasn’t allowed to support decision making with lists of considerations. Or lists of ways to support decision making. I wasn’t even supposed to think too carefully about what the rules of being unsystematic should be. It was pretty wild.
Anyway, I did it. Or some version of it—minus systems, there are perhaps still many attitudes you might take to deciding what to do. I took it to be ‘do what you feel like, but you are allowed to feel guilty for not doing stuff’, but then I didn’t really feel guilty for not doing stuff.
Anyway, now I know something about what Katja minus systems is like (n = 1 week). Here are the more surprising or informative aspects:
I spent less time on my computer than I have in three months (before which I don’t have records). This is kind of weird, because I usually seem to be some sort of computer addict.
The time I did spend was ’11% less productive than normal’ according to RescueTime. I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t worse.
I did very little work (this goes under ‘informative’ not ‘surprising’)
I played Civ IV a couple of hours less than normal: 8h, down from 10h average. This goes under ‘so surprising I’ll have to rethink my conception of my own motivations’. I thought I was clearly borderline addicted to Civ IV, and that I usually do a whole bunch of things to get to play it for five minute increments. But apparently if I can just play it whenever, I’m less interested. In even weirder news, the next week, when I went back to having systems, I think I played for less than a minute, which is basically unheard of.
I spent about nine hours walking around, some of it with friends - I think this is high, but I’m not sure by how much
I rode my bike around and danced in my room a bunch. This is interesting because I usually think that I like those things, but don’t do them. In my usual system, they should be incentivized though. So it is weird that I do them at the time that the incentive is removed.
I looked at Facebook about twice as much as the week before, and more than last time I wasn’t intentionally limiting Facebook-looking. This seems not surprising.
I watched half an hour of TV. This seems surprisingly low.
I think I may have spent about a million hours staring into space in various capacities, but it might have also been about half an hour.
Toward the end I froke up (fake-broke up, with commitment to reunite in coming weeks) with my boyfriend S, and temporarily moved to another house, to see how we like not dating.
I seem to have a newfound desire to go to a festival or something, and be dirty and laid back and for there to be lights and laughter and music or something. I think this kind of image would usually seem too dangerous and contaminatory.
(Note that nearly all of this is brought to you by passive systems that I didn’t destroy, and if I were really unsystematic I would probably have only the mildest idea how it was different to usual.)
I don’t know to what extent unsystematic week was related to these things. My guess is that it was pretty related, but the week was weird in other ways. For instance, I froke up with my boyfriend of almost two years, and temporarily moved house. But every week is weird.
Overall this seemed informative about my motivations, but destructive of productivity. I probably hope to continue having lots of systems, but perhaps change some of them in light of this. In other news, I think it has been kind of hard to get back in the swing of so many systems.