Post identifier: Life Challenges #3: Bookworm Challenge, Part 3
After 3 months of painstaking effort, I have finally produced good news for the Bookworm Challenge - I managed to complete the goals that I set out to do (read a book, do a reading summary and read the news for at least two days in a week), even though it took much longer than I had expected.
Results of the challenge: A partial success.
The task of reading itself was not that difficult. I just needed to be consistent in how long I read and how much time I spend reading. But being consistent was not easy because of other competing priorities and commitments. By the time the training of the day had concluded and I had some time to myself, I realised that I was usually too tired to be able to understand what I was reading.
This was especially the case for the task that required me to complete reading a book. I had 210 pages and just reading a couple of pages would take me an hour. Progress was slow, especially in the middle part of the book because I felt that I was so far away from my goals that I would despair and give up on this challenge. Fortunately, I gave myself more deadlines to help me see this challenge as a priority, and tracked my progress to motivate myself.
Completing the reading summary was relatively easy. All it took was for me to type out the key takeaways in bullet points for a new article in one sitting. Only a few hours of work was required for this.
I also had some trouble with reading the news on a regular basis. They took up mobile data and I only had enough time to scroll through headlines before I felt less interested. I think reading the news can be the main focus for the sequel to this challenge. I get the importance of reading the news as a means of staying informed so as to make better decisions in my life, but I get overwhelmed by the many things that are going on that I have trouble concentrating on understanding current affairs.
The lessons I have gathered after reading the book (which was written in Chinese) would be published in my Chinese blog. As for the reading summary, it will be uploaded soon on the Vincent’s Academy website. When these things are ready, the links for them will be appended here. As these outcomes were delayed for too long, I cannot say that I have completed this challenge successfully.
Delays after delays - what went wrong again?
There were a few weeks when I just got exasperated by the many things going on at the same time, which drove me to give up and indulge myself with all sorts of distractions for days on end. After a while, I eventually realised that instead of feeling good, I felt more guilty and unsatisfied instead, because losing myself by mindlessly watching videos and seeking forms of entertainment and pleasure was not what I had wanted. I got back on track by measuring my progress in the various things that I got involved in, and put in more effort in planning my time so as to maximise my productivity.
Most of the time, it seemed that reading was not so high on my priority list. I also had the thought of delaying it till my weekends because I thought that it would be easy to catch up on the pages that I have missed. This was blind optimism unsupported by any knowledge of how much work I need to put in to complete the reading. When I got back to reading the book I started on a more regular basis, I realised how wrong I was - reading just a couple of pages took me up to an hour, and reading a chapter or two could easily let me spend half a day!
This was also why I had not been updating my blog as regularly as I liked to. The permanence of the blog as a space to write out my thoughts and the lack of viewership made it hard to nurture any kind of urgency in completing my posts. It became a side hustle that was not unlike an untended backyard, with wild grasses growing unchecked, flowers and potted plants withering, and branches becoming tangled and messy. I was always looking for some suitable time, such as the period of time where I had a long break, before I would pick up blogging again. The key to overcoming this was to develop systems that helped me to keep track of all my tasks and help me be more in control of how I spend my time.
Unexpected consequence of this challenge: systems to maximise my productivity
As I became increasingly frustrated with my lack of productivity. I took breaks from this Life Challenge and worked on the upcoming one, which was about gamification.
In the process, I created a role-playing game that had a lot of features, which purpose was to encourage players to check off their tasks in order to get access to more items, features and stories. It was meant as a healthy form of recreation to get a change of pace from the usual grind.
I also devised a motivation system and assigned points to my tasks and habits based on the duration it took me to complete them and how much value I place in them. This was integrated with yet another with my creations, the Commitment Tracker, which was a spreadsheet that monitors all the tasks that come up on a regular basis (these include habits, dailies and pseudo-habits).
Lastly, I brought in these new systems and the task management systems that I have already been using, such as Habitica, Google Keep and Google Calendar, together by visualising them on a flowchart map. This is what my entire Productivity System will look like.
More elaboration and sneak peeks of these systems will be revealed in my upcoming “Life Challenges” series post, which will be introducing a new Life Challenge.
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