Wake up. Start boiling water. Brush my teeth. Shave. Put dishes away. Prepare my Aeropress. Brew coffee. Sit down by my desk. Start writing my novel. Drink my coffee. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake bacon. Tell Siri to start timer for 15 minutes. Take vitamins. Plan my day in OmniFocus. Write down three big things to do today in pocket notebook. Study Anki flashcards. Cook breakfast. Eat breakfast. Wash dishes. Transcribe the Great Gatsby. Meditate. Dress for work. Start car. Make bed. Go to work. Listen to podcasts. Clock in.

Fix issues with one of our servers. Make coffee once I do. Walk to my office. Setup MacBook Air with power supply, lightning cable, and headphones. Check out another one of our servers. Research why an adapter can’t access the network. Try a few things. Fail. Walk to High School and try to diagnose why a printer won’t connect to the internet. Try a few things. Fail. Get stopped by the librarian. One of her printers disappeared from the network. She writes down a note about which one that is. Go back to my office. Install printer on server. Update the Printers Group Policy. Target it to just affect all the library computers. Try a few more things on problematic network adapter. Fixed it. Write down process and solution in notebook. Did it fix the printer that couldn’t connect to the internet? Investigate. No, it didn’t. Get an email from counselor. Her printer is printing pages with black streaks all over them. Walk to her room. Take printer apart. Clean it. Test it out. It works. Go talk to the elementary special ed teacher. Teach her how to print confidential documents. Rearrange her room to take a problematic PC back to my office. Try to help her with her spam in Gmail. Succeed. Walk back to the High School building. Make coffee. Walk back to office with PC in one hand, coffee in the other. It’s noon. I’m tired. Get back to my office. Research problematic printer some more. Can’t find anything. I quit. Watch some videos on YouTube. Read a little bit on my iPad. Get a call about an Infinite Campus issue. Investigate issue, but can’t figure out the problem. Will wait for tomorrow to investigate some more. Pack up my things. Clock out. Start car. Drive home. Listen to podcasts.

Two packages arrive. Primal Fuel. Death Over Decaf shirt. Grab blender. Pour coconut milk in it. Two scoops Primal Fuel. Two bananas. Strawberries. Blueberries. Raspberries. Scoop of almond butter. Blend. Put dishes away. Turn on burner. Turn off blender. Pour shake into two cups. Pop popcorn. Lie in bed. Watch the Walking Dead. Eat popcorn. Drink shakes. Take shirts off. Take pants off. Put workout shorts on. Play Max Out Cardio. Work out. Sweat. Sweat. Sweat. Drink lots of water. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Peel sweet potato. Cut sweet potato. Place inside oven. Tell Siri to start timer for 35 minutes. Shower. Dress. Plug in Foreman grill. Season steak. Cook steak. Wash dishes. Listen to podcasts. Watch the Good Wife. Timer goes off. Plate steak and sweet potatoes. Eat dinner. Finish the Good Wife. Read A Farewell to Arms. Open Good Habits and check off every habit I accomplished today. Clear my tasks from OmniFocus. Write three things I’m grateful for in Day One. Play some Arcade Fire. Start writing blog entry. Publish entry. Go to sleep.

Rinse. Repeat.

I read a lot this weekend. By a lot I mean a lot. Over the past month, I saved probably over 100 articles in Safari’s Reading List. I usually don’t save much of anything in there, but these were articles I used to get to during my daily reading, but because I started to get a bit more strict about where I spend my time, I hadn’t. I didn’t really plan to get through all of them this weekend, but once I started, I had to get to the end. I needed to get through them because I wanted to be better about this. I wanted next weekend to be free of this burden, in a sense, so I could spend my time doing things a bit more meaningful to me. Stuff like spending more time on my novel or learning something new or improving some aspect of my life I would love to improve. I read some great articles, some mediocre ones, and others I didn’t even bother because I wasn’t interested in them anymore. I think the reason I got through them all this week was because I used the Pomodoro technique again, and because I wedged in other tasks in between my reading sprints. At the moment, though, my head is woozy with the sight of these words because pretty much all I stared at in the past 48 hours.

It didn’t help that I started a new book today. I’m re-reading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. A bought the paperback copy of the book a few months ago during my shopping spree because I wanted to transcribe that book after I finished transcribing the Great Gatsby. If I keep the same momentum transcribing that book, I should be finished with it on Friday. My plan is to start transcribing Hemingway’s novel on Saturday. No stops. I want to keep moving forward because I set up a daily time block in my schedule devoted to just transcribing. I’ve learned a lot by transcribing the Great Gatsby. Every time I go through a few pages, I pick up something new, not only about the story but about the process of writing a novel. A way a sentence matters or how a certain scene is structured. The way Fitzgerald shows his command of everything he’s doing is simply inspiring. Each time I finish one of my sessions, I feel a sense of disgust toward my novel. I want to throw it away again and start over. Fortunately, I know how wasteful that is, so I just keep my head down while also moving my feet as much as I can.

A Farewell to Arms is also the first paper book I’ll be reading in years. It felt so strange reading with the lights on since I’m so used to the backlit screen of my Kindle Paperwhite. It was a great feeling, though. I pulled out my mechanical pencil and underlined a few passages, and I loved the sound the lead made against the paper. I love the feel of the pages, and I loved folding the paperback cover behind the book while reading. All these things just can’t be replicated by the Kindle. It makes me wish I spent some of my money on paper books rather than the Kindle copies I bought. In the end, though, I’m grateful I read period. I remember a time when I didn’t read at all and how blindly oblivious I was about the world.

Tomorrow I start the second month of Insanity Max: 30. I’m not sure what to expect. The first month was tough, and it really didn’t get any easier as the days went on because each workout forces you to push harder and last longer than last time. This time around? God, I don’t know. This was the first full week where I broke down every hour of my days and actually succeeded in following the plan I set for myself, so this new week with this new workout and this new book to read and transcribe means a lot. It means I’m pushing myself out of my comfort zone and doing more with myself while still living the same 24 hours as I have before.

Life is short. Life is also what I make of it, and this is how I want to be spending it right now. This is not how I want to live it forever, however, but I just hope I’m preparing myself for when I do jump all in and start living it as crazily and as fulfillable as I can. Those walls are slowly coming up.

Back when I tried to pare down my possessions to just the essentials, I had a strong desire to digitize everything that could be digitized and toss their analog copies away. I went from lugging around thousands of pieces of paper to just a few select pieces. I spent months and months scanning everything I could scan and organizing them with complex names and deep folder hierarchies on my computer, and after years with this system, I realized I almost never refer to these scans. So instead of lugging around physical crap, I’m lugging around digital crap that I may or may not need. When I moved up to Montana, I left behind my physical library of books. That was okay, though, because I had my Kindle, and I could replace this physical library with an entirely digital one. And for years, that’s what I did. Every new book I bought, I bought on the Kindle. I haven’t read a paper book in years, and I’m kind of sad about that. Digital is great for some things, but sometimes there’s something about paper that provides that intangible something that digital will never replace.

One of those things is the simple act of showing my work. I love paper notebooks because they keep a record of every detail I marked in their pages. The slant of my handwriting, the compression of my words, the hurried nature of my writing, the crossed out words, the neater than neat penmanship, the ink smudges, the yellowed paper, the erasure marks, the notes of my life, are all faithfully recorded in these notebooks. Back in the early days of my blog, I wrote about my discovery of the Confidant notebook by Baron Fig. Before then, I was a Moleskine guy through and through. Then I tried the Field Notes. But I liked the look of the Confidant, the fact that it was hardcover, its pages were wider than most notebooks, and that it had an attractive yellow ribbon bookmark all pleased me. Unfortunately, I didn’t really use it once I got it. In fact, once I stopped writing my journals in my Moleskine’s and instead wrote digitally for this blog, I stopped writing period. Slowly, though, I wanted to bring it back.

Every now and then, I would transcribe the Great Gatsby in my Moleskine, but it was never as regular as I would have liked. In effort to find an excuse to use my Field Notes and Moleskine Cahier notebooks, I began to spend about five minutes every morning writing the three biggest things I wanted to accomplish during the day. Sometimes all I would do was write them down, put the notebook in my back pocket, and not open it again until the next morning. I just wanted an excuse to write again. Slowly, though, I began to rely on the notebook. I would write down notes about my tasks or notes for new tasks or just notes about something important in general. As for my Confidant notebook, I began to use it solely for my novel. I would write my thoughts on how crappy my current chapter was or notes on a specific character. Recently, I bought the Apprentice series of notebooks from Baron Fig and began using that for notes on all the computer stuff I do at work. I wrote down notes for specific tasks on a certain printer that I was having issues with, and in the past week, I would write down all the issues the servers were causing me and all the changes I made and my thoughts for why I made those changes.

I have all these notebooks now that I can quickly refer to and simply see the progression of my thoughts. I could see how I got from point A to point B, and I could retrace my thought process to help me get to point C. Digital notes can’t really replicate that. When I first got my books back last month, I flipped through many of my old favorite titles, and I saw all the pencil notes in the margins and underlined passages I made years before. I would flip to one page, read a note or a passage, skip to the end, and read another passage or note I made, and I would instantly remember why I wrote that or underlined that passage. The Kindle makes it easy to highlight text, but it doesn’t make it easy to go back and just read something I highlighted on a random page.

There’s this whole philosophy of simply showing my work that appeals to me a lot. I can go back a few months in my pocket notebook and see how productive I was or what I wanted to commit myself to in a specific week. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to replace OmniFocus or nvAlt or anything like that in my life. I’m just here to sing the praises of analog tools because they provide something that digital can never replicate, and that’s the simple pleasure of seeing your thoughts and following the progress they made from day to day.

For the past two months, I’ve been spending about five minutes every night writing three things I’ve been grateful for during the past day. At first, I wrote short sentences about some obvious things: writing, reading, working out, going to work, etc. But as this habit slowly grew into something I loved doing every night, my entries grew longer and more personal. Sometimes I would choose something so small and seemingly insignificant, but once the words came out, and I saw some meaning in the little thing I was grateful for, I really began to love this process. Even when I was having a bad day, or a bad week, I would force myself to find three things to be grateful for during the past day. This whole process has made me appreciate life much more than I’ve ever appreciated it. Every day consists of a series of small battles, and by focusing on the victories, the defeats don’t seem so bad, and in fact, fuel me to learn from them and be even better next time.

I was lying in bed listening to some music for a good ten minutes trying to figure out what to write about tonight, and I didn’t know. The past week has been full of events and things to write about, so I grew used to quickly getting started on my entries and writing something good enough to post. Tonight, though, has been tougher. The day was standard. No crises at work, nothing eventful happened in my personal life, and I’m lying in bed right now simply content with life and where things are going.

This week I tried something new: I broke down my days to the minute with events for me to do — from 5 AM, when I woke up to 8:30 PM, when I planned to fall asleep. Every hour in between had something scheduled, and for the most part, I followed it to the minute. I started transcribing the Great Gatsby once more, which I’m almost done with, and I cut back an hour of watching TV, even though I really wanted to cut it to two, but the stress from work this week depleted my will power. If things go better at work next week, I plan to be a bit more strict about my TV watching habits. I want to read more. My backlog of books and articles to read from the web is weighing heavily on my mind, and I want to get back to that. I also want to go back to increasing my English vocabulary, which is something I haven’t been pursuing as seriously as I used to. I still have to submit my taxes, even though it’s pretty much done. Instead of expecting a nice refund, it looks like I’ll be owing the Federal government some money. Fortunately, that amount is less than the refund I’m getting from Montana, so I’ll still come out a few hundred bucks richer, but it’s not the $1,200 or so I was hoping to get back. Serves me right for making so much money from three different jobs last year.

I hit 150 days a few days ago, and I didn’t mention that then. I knew I’d hit this target, and when I realized I hit it, I told just one person and that’s as much recognition I wanted. I’m not so concerned about my day count anymore. This blog has become my life, and I love writing in here every night. Not every entry is good or anything, but each entry has helped me grow in some way. If not into a better writer, but into a better person, and that’s something I’ll always be grateful for.

We fixed the internet today. By we, I mean the network engineer Shawn and me. It was a long, somewhat painful process, but oh so much fun when we finally narrowed it down and found the problem. First thing Shawn wanted to know was where we received the internet. I showed him, and we began to run some tests. The main switch that receives the fiber internet from our ISP split into four different directions onto the main switch, and we disconnected all of them and plugged them in one by one until we discovered the problem. Three out of the four worked fine — they connected to the internet and everything seemed back to normal. The problem fiber branched out to the Middle School, and that was our next stop.

We went to the Middle School switch closet, and sure enough, we saw that one of our two switches wasn’t showing any network activity. Fortunately, that meant we narrowed it down. Unfortunately, this switch is the only one on the whole campus that has 48 ethernet ports; all the others one only have 24. Not only that, nothing was labelled, nothing was bundled together, and everything was messy and unwieldy. So what we did was take a pad of paper, follow each cord back to the patch panel, which luckily did have rudimentary labelling, and we wrote it down. All 48 cords. We then disconnected each one and started connecting them back one by one. He ran an infinite ping on his laptop, and we began with port 1. Then port 2. Then port 3, and we kept going until we saw which one locked up the network and gave us the problems. At around port 12, we noticed our first problem. We took note of it and kept the cord disconnected. A few ports later, we found another problem. Then around port twenty-something, we found another problem. So three ports were giving us problems, and we didn’t know why. We kept going. We reached port 43 when the power went out.

We were pissed and very disappointed. We were almost there! But instead of wallowing in pity, we decided to go investigate the three ports that were giving us issues. Unfortunately, each one was located in a different room, so we went to the first room that had the problem and we investigated. We checked out the computer, saw that everything looked okay, but we still marked the computer. We went into the next room, did the same thing, and marked that computer. While we went to look for the third room, the power came back on and we were back in business. We went to the third room and investigated the last port that was giving us problems. I found the right port, followed the cord out and noticed it plugged back into the port right next to it instead of to a computer. That was our issue. That was our loopback that was causing all our issues. Someone, instead of connecting that cord into a computer, connected it back into the network, and that loop buckled our switches, overloaded the internet, and brought our school to its knees. We corrected this error, finished plugging in all our cords back into the switch, and tested the network. Everything was up and running and working like it should.

This took us most of the day to figure out, and by dividing and conquering, we were able to trace our problem back to the source. It was so much fun and so enlightening and my plans for this network changed completely. I’m going to play the maintenance game, organizing everything so this doesn’t happen again. And, fortunately¹, I have the full backing of my superiors. I know what to do next time, even though I hope there’s no next time. I’m glad we don’t have to replace anything, that everything’s working like it’s supposed to, and we can all get back to our jobs.

What a fucking trip.

I was offered the opportunity to teach a class next quarter, and I took it. I’m going to be teaching cinema — whatever that means — to about 10 students two times a week for 30 minutes per class. This was something I discussed with the superintendent during my interview with him, but it hadn’t come up again since he hired me. Until today, obviously. This is going to be fun. I’m a little scared, very eager, and extremely clueless as to what to do. I’m thinking of first teaching the kids the principles of telling a story. As long as they have that down, I think the rest will come easier. Afterwards, I was thinking of maybe doing a little bit of 5secondfilms.com inspired short films. If they can tell a story in five seconds, film it, and show it in class, I think they’re good to go.

The principal offered me this job while I was sitting by the conference table in the district office writing notes in my little Apprentice notebook. The internet was still down, and I didn’t know what to do. In the morning, First Call Computer Solutions — the guys who set up the network all those years ago — gave me a call and tried walking me through the issues. I told them all the information I could give them, and we tried a few things. One of the main things he wanted me to do was to ping our switch, which is this device that connects devices to the internet. We tried to see if we could at least contact it, but we couldn’t. It was unreachable from the few sources I tried, which could mean our switch had failed. We tried a few more things, but we couldn’t do anything if we couldn’t connect to the switch. I reset it to factory defaults, tried again, and still nothing. Something’s wrong with it, and tomorrow they’re sending someone up here with a temporary switch to see if that would fix the problem.

Since this happened early in the morning, and I really couldn’t do anything else network-wise for the rest of the day, I wandered around the campus and talked to students, teachers, and other staff members. It was a relief, to be honest, to get away from those issues and just branch out. Many of the students think I’m cool, and yes I’m bragging. I was talking to one student in the hall when one of his teachers came up to us, and the student told him that I was one of the coolest guys he knows. Later, I wanted to go back to my office, but the path there went through some school girls during recess. They asked me where Luigi was, I told them he’s messing up our internet, and they laughed and said I was so cool. It was strange, but a good ol’ ego booster, especially when I felt useless today.

During the end of the day, I was asked to be a judge for this elementary school geography competition. Fifteen students were given really tough geography questions, and if they missed two questions, they were out. Everyone but one girl missed their first question. They were really tough questions, especially for 4-6 graders. In the next round, two more girls answered correctly, but everyone else didn’t so they were out. The semi-finals had three girls, and the questions became harder. Everyone missed their first few questions until finally someone answered one correctly. In the next round, someone else answered one correctly, giving us our championship round. Each girl missed the first two of three questions, but with the last question, one of the girls answered correctly and the other one didn’t. These were tough questions and to have someone win was incredible. It was fun, and I’m glad I was able to take part in it.

Sometimes we can’t let the bad hinder our ability for good. The internet was down, and people depended on me to get it back up and running, but I couldn’t. I felt like a failure until I decided I wasn’t. The switch could have failed. There was nothing I could’ve done to fix that short of going to the store myself and buying a replacement. I joked around with people as I walked around the campus, and they understood what was going on. I liked explaining the issues to people because it let them know what was going on. I didn’t do that last time. I just had a good day when it looked like I was in for another long, hard, and horrible day.

The network is down again at school, and I was irritated this morning when I came into work. It had actually gone down about half an hour before my shift ended yesterday, but along with the internet being down, our phones were down, too. I figured it had something to do with our phone and internet provider, but we called them this morning and they said it was all on us. Well, on me. I purposely tried to stay away from any and all server stuff since I fixed it last Monday, but maybe I should’ve babied it a bit while it was recovering. Regardless, the internet was down for everyone, and it was my duty to fix it. Unfortunately, I didn’t. The internet was down. I couldn’t do any research. Reception is horrible in Charlo, so I had to go outside and pray to the reception gods for a little bit of 3G. Every time I found something to try on Google, I walked back to my office, tried it, and when it didn’t work, I walked back out, spent some time in the cold while waiting for Google to load, and then go back into my office once I found something else to try. This got old really quickly, so for the last part of the day, I just tried figuring it out on my own. I made progress, took a lot of notes, and I’m going to go back tomorrow to try a few more things that I couldn’t get to or didn’t even think about today.

All this reminds me of is being careful for what I wish for. I complained last week how work was slow and boring compared to the insanity of the week before. Oh how I wish I had a boring day today. Oh how I wish to respond to teacher’s telling me their internet isn’t working, and when I get there, I tell them that the ethernet cord isn’t plugged in. I wish all problems were that easy. Unfortunately, they’re not, and that sucks. The internet is down, and I don’t know if it’s a network card issue or a software issue or a specific server issue. I’m not sure if I could’ve done anything that could have done this, and I did, what that thing was. I don’t know if it was Windows Update again screwing around with our systems, or something in Group Policy, or if we were hacked or infected with a virus. I don’t know.

I’m tired of these issues, but I am the tech guy there, and I am making more money than I’ve ever made in my life, so I have to suck it up and deal with it. I don’t think I’m panicking or anything, but this is getting ridiculous. I just renewed my Lynda.com subscription because I knew I didn’t know enough and I wanted to learn more and be better. I literally just had a day to even try to learn more before it all went to hell again. When I’m at work, though, I’m calmer about it because my mind is focused on a singular problem and doing all I can to find that solution. It’s only when I come home when all that frustration comes out. It did help me out today as I worked out harder than I have so far in Insanity Max: 30. Before when it took me at most around 10-11 minutes before I maxed out on any particular workout, I lasted over 17 minutes today. I needed an outlet to let loose and working out was it.

There’s no point to freaking out when I’m the only tech guy at the school, and it’s my job to fix any and all problems that come up. I love this job, and I’m getting paid handsomely for it, and I don’t want to get fired. That’s motivation enough. And I love solving problems. Here’s to tomorrow’s entry being about how I fixed everything.

I sat in my office when my phone rang. It was a student calling from his teacher’s phone. One of their computers was down, and has been down for over a week, and they needed my help in fixing it. He described the problem vaguely over the phone, and from that information, I decided to take the Windows 7 installation disk as a precautionary measure. The problem with the computer was that it started into Startup Repair mode, but except of fixing it, it kept saying it couldn’t find any errors. The computer would then restart and boot straight into Startup Repair again. It was a vicious cycle that I couldn’t get out of. Starting Windows into Safe Mode would take me straight into this screen again, so I inserted the Windows 7 disk and booted into it. I ran the Startup Repair from the disk, and it gave me all the same issues. I tried running some commands through the command prompt, but none of them worked because this Startup Repair had told Windows it needed a reboot so it could complete its repairs. An essential kernel file was corrupted, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

After some time researching the issue on Google, I ran a few more commands, deleted some files, recreated others, and ran another scan. The scan said it would take an hour, so I left to do other work. I came back maybe thirty minutes later and found that the scan had finished and that it didn’t find anything wrong. I did some more research, ran a few more commands, and finally, I was able to fix it. What had happened was that Windows Update was updating Windows, but that it had somehow failed. Once I was able to boot into Safe Mode, Windows reverted all the changes from its failed update, and I was back to the login screen. I rebooted and logged into a normal Windows state, and everything seemed to be working fine. The teacher came up to me and said, “It works,” in a surprised and relieved way. I said, “Yup,” and left.

I went back to my office and opened up my calendar on my computer. I was here until 4, and it was almost noon. I wanted to revise my daily schedule, to push some things earlier so I can try to make it to bed by 8:30 PM. It’s 8:37 PM right now. I spent a bit longer reading than I imagined I would, but that’s okay because once I write this entry, I get to go to sleep. I get to go to sleep earlier than usual because I want to make sleep a bigger priority than it has been in my life. By scheduling almost every minute of my days, I was able to see where I could cut, where I could improve, and how I could be better.

To fix the computer, I had to figure out the underlying cause for all the symptoms. In order to become better, I have to figure out every aspect of my life that can be improved. I’m cutting back my TV watching habits and replacing that time with productive tasks to do. I’m starting my routines earlier so I can go to sleep earlier and have more energy to live my days when I’m awake. More energy means more work I can do to be better. And that’s what this is all about.

To be better, I have to attack every aspect of my life from all angles, and I cannot quit. If I quit, then I’ve failed. I can’t fail. I won’t let myself fail.

January is in the books, and we’re now at the mercy of February. It’s a new month, which means it’s a time for reflection and planning. I started something new today: I compiled all of my entries from January into a single PDF and read it all on my iPad. I’ve never read these many of my entries all in one go, and I learned a lot. I learned my moods really dictate what my entries end up being about. If I’m sad, I write a somewhat reflective, somewhat longing entry. If I’m pissed, I write with profanity and an energy that is kind of lacking in my other entries. I also started the month in California, drove back home to Montana, built and lived with my new furniture, got sick for the first time in 4 years, skipped a week of working out, my car broke down and was repaired again, spent a week trying to figure out why the internet at my work was down, fixed that issue earlier this week, and spent this past week building my house. Pretty awesome month, if I do say so myself.

The momentum I built up yesterday carried over into today. I had the most productive weekend in a long time. I checked off so many tasks on my todo list, finished so many projects and started just as many more, and I was still able to watch some TV and even the Super Bowl. I finished another book today, my third for the year. I start the last week of “easy” Insanity Max: 30 tomorrow. I also renewed my Lynda.com subscription today after realizing that I needed to be more educated in certain areas of my job. I also went grocery shopping, staying under budget, did my laundry, and cleaned up the house. What a weekend.

There were times today where I didn’t know if I should be doing what I was doing, so I looked at my calendar — which had my routine broken down by minute — and realized that since I haven’t broken down my weekends from 8-4, which is my work schedule during the weekdays, I could do whatever I wanted. The fact that I had my day broken down, and the fact that I went to look at my calendar for guidance, I think reflects a shift to my routine and habits that I’m excited for the future. There’s a lot I want to do, obviously, and if I can get a lot of that done or even just started this month, then I’ll be super happy. I don’t know why working so much makes me happy, but it does. I’ve definitely noticed that when I’m lazy and don’t get anything done, I become restless and depressed. That’s when I indulge in all my worst impulses and fall into a rabbit hole of misery and despair. By working, I’m kept busy, I accomplish things that I know will make my life better, and the simple feeling of accomplishment feels good. Why wouldn’t I want to feel that all the time?

So here’s to February: you may be the shortest month of the year, but that just means I need to work with an extra sense of urgency to get everything I want done in a month done.

I live most hours of my days with a screen of some sort in front of my face. The main one is my MacBook Air, but my iPhone is really high up there, with my Kindle and iPad always there when the other two aren’t. I don’t know what to make of this. On the one hand, I live and die by my technology. They provide so much richness and value to my life that living without them is almost the same as not living at all.¹ On the other hand, though, I know I’m missing so much of life by isolating myself in front of these various sized screens. There’s people to meet, places to see, life to live. I don’t know. I didn’t intend to write this today because I had a really productive day today spent in front of my screens.

Do you guys know about the Pomodoro technique? It’s this productivity technique where you set a timer for 25 minutes, you focus and your work, and when the timer goes off, you read for 5 minutes. That 30 minute block is called a Pomodoro. If you do four pomodoro’s in a row, that’s two hours of focused work you could get done. I adapted this today with 45 minute focus time and 15 minute breaks, and after two of these, I get a 30 minute break. I wanted to do 4 of these today, which would’ve translated into 3 hours of work interspersed with breaks that lasted 90 minutes. I didn’t get those 4 pomodoro’s, but I did get 3, and I did get a lot accomplished. Mostly long-lingering computer tasks that have been on my mind for a long time. I’m glad I finished some projects and started others. I felt really accomplished, and I hope to take this momentum into tomorrow.

I don’t know if I’m willing to take a somewhat regular technology sabbatical. I don’t even know if I want to. My summer’s are when I go out into nature and fight fires, and that’s my yearly technology sabbatical. I don’t know if I want to do it when I don’t have to. Is that wrong? Is that just part of our generation? I wonder how people felt when everything was lit up with lightbulbs for the first time. Did people yearn for the dark? Or the light from a candle? Now people freak out when blackouts happen. Take away my phone, and I’ll guarantee I’ll freak out. That’s a scary thought to think about. What is it about these devices that makes us so dependent on them?

They do everything. I can do almost everything I’m interested in with these devices. From working to learning to entertainment, I can do a great deal. It’s what I use to write these blog entries, and I don’t know if I would be the person I am today if I didn’t use my laptop to write these entries. These devices are part of my life, and they help me lead a fulfilling life. I don’t know what I’ll do without them.²