Hello, everyone! Welcome to a 7th episode of Sensibly Happy. This episode is about the tool that you can use to improve the quality of your life. I would bring some intro to it.
Control freaks
I bet you know about control freaks – the people who are obsessed with controlling everything in their life. But sometimes such people control only one part. For instance, counting every calorie they eat, or every minute they spent on something, or writing down every single thought which comes in their minds. I should confess – I’m that kind of person. If you are wondering is it any good and how that approach can improve your life, then continue listening.
The first impression - this is too much
Every time when I’m speaking to somebody and I’m telling how I monitor my activities or how I’m keeping records of my daily expenses, most of the cases the reaction of the person is: “No way, this is too much. You should live your life, not to focus every time on such minor things.” And I understand their reaction. Because without understanding how you can use that data it’s really hard to motivate yourself to keep all those records. And right now I will share with you my experience: what do I control, how I do that and how I use it.
Conclusions after I controlled amount of water I drink
I used to control the amount of liquid I’m drinking during the day. One video from YouTube was a trigger for me. There was an explanation of how water affects our body and that lots of people don’t drink enough. So, I thought to myself: “I should, probably, drink more”. But before changing my daily behavior I decided to understand what is my current status. I installed an application on my smartphone, where I was able to enter an amount of water every time I drink it. And I started the monitoring process. I’ve been doing that for one week and I didn’t change any behavior. The results showed me that I drunk 20% less than I should.
The next iteration for me was to drink more using the application which reminded me to drink. And for the hole next week I was very self-disciplined with the new approach of drinking. And what do you think was the result? It was very simple: I stopped monitoring the quantity of water. Why? Because during that week I didn’t feel any improvements in my body and at the same time, the moments when I was drinking extra water didn’t bring me any pleasure. Even more, I felt that I don’t want to drink it. But the application was reminding me about that constantly. It trained me and the experiment was over.
I understand that some of the nutrition gurus could think that I was wrong, that I should spend more time on that experiment and the results would have come, but that was my decision. And the decision was very simple. I don’t want to spend extra efforts to monitor the amount of water, because I don’t feel that this is important for me.
How I changed my behavior after tracking calories I eat
The second thing that I was having control over was the number of calories which I ate during the day. What was the reason for me to control that? I started to gain weight and I felt that my body loses flexibility. I have chosen an application out of many which had in its database most products I had in my ration. I spent some extra time entering products that weren’t in that database to have fully working tool for me. Worth mentioning that I didn’t make any changes in my daily menu. Because the initial goal was to understand what I was doing wrong. That experiment took me around a month. No changes in menu, no changes in behavior, but a very detailed recording of every single meal. And here are the results that I saw in the aggregated data: application showed me that I was consuming around 2300 kcal of food during the day. But was it good or bad? To understand that I researched a little bit for myself, read articles, checked some online calculators and my conclusion was that with such amount of calories I would continue to gain weight slowly. I didn’t like it, of course. That meant that if I have to lose my weight I should decrease daily consumed calories amount for around 20%.
I took the whole list of the food I ate during the experiment. What type of food I should remove from my ration? Of course, there was a balance by choosing those products. The balance was between tasty and healthy ones. I like tasty food, like most of you, I believe. But tasty food often has more calories. So I founded balance, recalculated my new menu to make sure that calorie number is good. I imagined my new life, my new day and made it a part of my new behavior. That means that before ordering something I have a clear understanding of what this or that dish gives to me. Is it vitamins, calories, pleasure and how does it work with the previous meal. No more freaking control, but a clear understanding of what I am doing right now and what do I get in the result.
Finance goals and how detailed accounting helped me
The third thing that I was controlling is spending money. I’m proud of myself that I was doing that for six years. I was using the application where I was adding the expense and income and income categories, I had around thirty of them. My accuracy was 5 cents and the amount of money spent on unknown direction was around 0.5% range. Some of you think that I’m crazy. But I would say that I’m self-determined. Because it wasn’t about controlling things, it was about achieving my goals. The main goal was to build a house for my family, and the second goal was to understand that if I’m spending money, I should have something in return. It should be something useful or pleasure. Because we spent too much time and energy making money that it is not wise to convert that energy to the things you don’t need or not enjoy. For instance, one person has a habit to drink coffee with some goodies but he doesn’t need additional calories right now and those goodies are not so tasty, then, probably, goodies can be rejected without any impact in person’s life.
Returning back to my goals of tracking spendings, I’ve reached both of those goals. I was able to allocate resources for building a house as well as handling some loans without going crazy about waiting for the salary. And together with my wife, we were able to remove redundant expenses from the family budget. Right now I don’t use this approach anymore, and I don’t monitor my expenses. But it is because of one unfortunate incident. Several months ago my database with all the finances was dropped by accident and I lost my motivation, to be honest. But I’m sure – when the new financial goal will appear in my life I would be prepared to track all my expenses over and over again.
It’s always not enough time
But the most influential monitoring process in my life is to track my own time. I have so many different ideas and so much energy to implement them. And the only thing that I don’t have – is time. Even during recording this episode I’ve got two new ideas which I want to implement but I’m not sure if I would be able to implement all this during my life. That’s why time-spending is so important to me.
Before I started creating Sensibly Happy Podcast I knew that I had no time for that because of my job routines which cost me more than 8 hours per day, because of my family that is my number one priority, because of different home activities like cooking or cleaning the house, some sports, different hobbies, way too much different activities in my life. But I realized that this podcast is something important not only for me but also for a lot of other people. That’s why I decided that I should allocate some time to create this podcast. But how to do this?
How I controlled my daily time spending
First check-point is to understand where the time is draining. Then to figure out – can I decrease the amount of time spent on different activities. And the final goal was to change my daily habits. I’ve done that process several times already in my life, so that wasn’t something new for me. As always, I’ve installed an app, added about 20 categories of activities and started recording every single activity change during the day with an accuracy of five minutes. Was it shower, cooking, doing my working duties, reading emails, chatting with colleagues, even reading news online or choosing some next-home appliance. In a few weeks, I had a clear picture of what I’m doing right, and where I spent my time inefficiently. I figured out that procrastination took me around 1,5 hours. An that was only one of the discoveries. I looked closely to that report of my time-spending, decided what should be removed from that and I have an amazing result! To create a single episode of my podcast and to promote it takes me around twenty hours per week and I manage to allocate that time without harm to my family relations and with no loss of productivity on my work. It was achieved thanks to monitoring and improving my time spending.
Do I like to record steps in my life?
Do I like to keep all those records? Sometimes, (actually, most of the time) I really hate it. Those apps are driving me crazy. I never could find a single app that will help with all my needs, this is always a compromise for me. I’m becoming angry when I realize that I can add a new record with less time and efforts then that application requires me to do. I don’t want to do three steps instead of one. Also sometimes I forget to note my spendings. And then, in the evening I’m trying to be honest with myself and try to recall what number should I put in the application. And this also takes my brain activity which I’d rather spend on some different direction. But to be consistent, to have a clear picture of the subject I’m monitoring I should do this.
The real value of keep tracking things
But what do I like in the process of tracking things? I’m enjoying the clear picture of what’s going on in reality with my life right now. Do I eat enough or too much, so I spend my money wisely and will I regret for the time which was spent watching TV, meaningless conversations or something else.
How control over things is related to happiness
What this topic about being a control freak has in common of my main theme of the Sensibly Happy podcast? How it relates to happiness at all? This is what my wife asked me yesterday after I shared with her some ideas of this episode. The connection is clear. Here is the definition of the word “sensibly” – in a wise way that shows wisdom or prudence, in a practical and functional rather than decorative manner. Becoming sensibly happy is not about swallowing a magic pill, but it’s about realizing who you are, where you are, and what you are doing right now. And by having answers on those questions, you can start changing your life if it’s needed.
An imaginary story about a guessing doctor
Imagine the situation – you come to a doctor with a strong headache, and of course, you expecting from him some advice or prescription. The doctor says that you should, probably, remove the internet from your life, because for several of his patients it helped. Or you should clear your mind, push out all negative thoughts because one of his patients recently did the same and it worked for him. Or you should take one pill of B12 vitamin, it would make your brain working more actively. But after all those ideas you were lucky enough to come to another doctor and after some diagnostics, it appeared that you had problems with your ear which caused that pain. By this example, I wanted to show you what we often do in our life. We feel the problem in some way and try to cure it. But without a clear understanding of the reason why that problem came to our life, we can spend too much effort of that time in the wrong direction.
I’m not insisting you of tracking every single step in your life. Moreover, I believe that it would affect your happiness because instead of being focused on happy moments in your life you would spend your energy monitoring. But if you faced some issue in your life that would be a wise decision – to do the diagnostics properly by monitoring that aspect of your life. And only after having those monitoring results, that aggregated data – you would be able to choose the best way to fix the problem. And that could be related to any sphere of your life.
You are becoming aggressively sometimes or losing motivation too often? Notify those moments and analyze them right away. Feeling the lack of time? Again, take the picture of your daily routines and remove redundant things. Do you want to get some promotion? Track how often you speak with the manager about your achievements. If you lose productivity sometimes – notify, when exactly this is happening. And so on. You don’t need to be a control freak.
If you want to change something, to cure the problem – start using proper tools to monitor your current state. Please, don’t spend your resources without a clear understanding of what you are trying to fix.
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