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I like quantifying things.
This probably comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me. It's up there with "I like to read" and "I like coffee" as a general statement of preference. But what I'm slowly, slowly learning--and believe me, I wish I'd learned this at 13 instead of 30--is that if I expect to get any damn thing done, I'd better have a way to measure it.
Because if I can't measure how I'm doing at something, how am I supposed to motivate myself?
(This is, perhaps, my fundamental problem with doing chores. If I measure it by "things getting clean," well, cleaning things just sets them up to get dirty again, endlessly. This is the exact opposite of motivating: I'm supposed to accomplish something so that it can be returned to its failure mode state? Bah!)
Anyway. I did at least figure out a few years back that long stretches of time with nothing like a schedule made me depressed. Cue: return to school, and an actual goal I can work towards. And then some time last year I discovered that if I use a Fitbit, which tracks my steps and my calories and gives me a full website full of charts and metrics and numbers, I get a hell of a lot more exercising done. I found out about the wonderful world of rock climbing, where they put numbers on the routes, and I can keep tracking of going X times a week and see if I'm making progress on the rating chart...
...all of which means that it drives me batty when they don't put labels on the routes at the climbing gym. When I point this out, I get a lot of cheery "Oh, it encourages you to try new routes and push yourself!" You know what? If I want to try new routes and push myself, I will do that myself. But when the gym is busy and I have to wait in line to get on a route, I'd like to know if I'll actually get to climb it, or fall off two holds in and have to wait five minutes to try another. And how the hell am I supposed to tell if I'm getting any better if I don't know how hard the routes are? I can't rate them myself! I'm only barely on V1s! I still don't know if the two unmarked routes I flashed today were 0s or 1s, and to me, it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
But I digress.
Anyway. I finally joined Goodreads, and immediately wondered why the hell I hadn't sooner. (Answer: I thought it was something like LibraryThing, where I was supposed to accurately catalog every book I actually owned, and balked at the concept of spending that much time entering ISBNs.) Lovely little site for rating and reviewing books, with some nice tag features for marking books for a to-read list, as already read, as being in the process of read, and so forth.
...and approximately two days after signing up, I realized I was reading books a hell of a lot faster. Because, look! Every time I finish a book, it gets moved to another category, and I give it a star rating (and maybe a review), and then the little tracker telling me how many books I've read so far this year and how close I am to hitting my goal goes up, and I start getting recommendations as to other books I might want to read, and...
I'm just saying, even for things I like, apparently quantifying them makes it a lot easier for me to focus on them.
(I wonder if there's a GoodDrinks or CoffeeThing out there. I have been meaning to start drinking more tea, after all.)
This probably comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me. It's up there with "I like to read" and "I like coffee" as a general statement of preference. But what I'm slowly, slowly learning--and believe me, I wish I'd learned this at 13 instead of 30--is that if I expect to get any damn thing done, I'd better have a way to measure it.
Because if I can't measure how I'm doing at something, how am I supposed to motivate myself?
(This is, perhaps, my fundamental problem with doing chores. If I measure it by "things getting clean," well, cleaning things just sets them up to get dirty again, endlessly. This is the exact opposite of motivating: I'm supposed to accomplish something so that it can be returned to its failure mode state? Bah!)
Anyway. I did at least figure out a few years back that long stretches of time with nothing like a schedule made me depressed. Cue: return to school, and an actual goal I can work towards. And then some time last year I discovered that if I use a Fitbit, which tracks my steps and my calories and gives me a full website full of charts and metrics and numbers, I get a hell of a lot more exercising done. I found out about the wonderful world of rock climbing, where they put numbers on the routes, and I can keep tracking of going X times a week and see if I'm making progress on the rating chart...
...all of which means that it drives me batty when they don't put labels on the routes at the climbing gym. When I point this out, I get a lot of cheery "Oh, it encourages you to try new routes and push yourself!" You know what? If I want to try new routes and push myself, I will do that myself. But when the gym is busy and I have to wait in line to get on a route, I'd like to know if I'll actually get to climb it, or fall off two holds in and have to wait five minutes to try another. And how the hell am I supposed to tell if I'm getting any better if I don't know how hard the routes are? I can't rate them myself! I'm only barely on V1s! I still don't know if the two unmarked routes I flashed today were 0s or 1s, and to me, it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
But I digress.
Anyway. I finally joined Goodreads, and immediately wondered why the hell I hadn't sooner. (Answer: I thought it was something like LibraryThing, where I was supposed to accurately catalog every book I actually owned, and balked at the concept of spending that much time entering ISBNs.) Lovely little site for rating and reviewing books, with some nice tag features for marking books for a to-read list, as already read, as being in the process of read, and so forth.
...and approximately two days after signing up, I realized I was reading books a hell of a lot faster. Because, look! Every time I finish a book, it gets moved to another category, and I give it a star rating (and maybe a review), and then the little tracker telling me how many books I've read so far this year and how close I am to hitting my goal goes up, and I start getting recommendations as to other books I might want to read, and...
I'm just saying, even for things I like, apparently quantifying them makes it a lot easier for me to focus on them.
(I wonder if there's a GoodDrinks or CoffeeThing out there. I have been meaning to start drinking more tea, after all.)