Working With a Timer

I will work on this for 18 minutes and 18 seconds.  A lot of cleanup of a room can be accomplished in that time.  Exercise takes 25 minutes and 25 seconds, as does my goof off break.  Writing assignments take twice that 50 minutes and 50 seconds, with my mind usually petering out before that.  I rarely achieve Flow where time of performance disappears.  While do it until completion seems a better way to accomplish tasks, my interest fades more often than not somewhere during the task.  A timer makes for decent compensation unless the activity is both short and finite.  

My new GloryFit smartwatch has a timer, something its iTouch Slim predecessor did not.  Smart phones, tablets, PCs all come with timers.  It's utility has expanded far beyond keeping track of what's in the oven.  But still, it would be nice to occasionally enter a state of Flow.

Seeking Flow

Our screens have largely fragmented our time, or worse, usurped it.  Amid that sink that diverts us from doing what we should be doing, people still manage to get absorbed in worthwhile activities.  Books get written, science insights accumulate, art gets painted, and movies made.  Some things we do because we get satisfaction from doing them.

I have a few of these too.  To my surprise, as I benefit from better dedication to the treadmill, my sessions become more of a challenge and less of a burden.  I express myself because it gives me satisfaction to do it irrespective of how any recipient reacts.  Once the barrier of activation energy gets overcome, I write my Medscape articles each month for the challenge of writing them. For some things, the activity is its own reward.  Whether I ever really achieve FLOW is open to question, but for all the programmed allure of social media, it is never really at the top of the list of things I want to do.

What the flow activities seem to require, though, are specified times to set aside other distractions to enter the world of exercise, thinking, writing, or even driving.  Then the activity, along with the desire to do it at that time, feeds on itself.  

As much as the dot.com enterprises research and implement the optimal ways to draw our undivided attention, the best they can come out is second.

Langishing

Most days I seek out a TED talk, stumbling across that of a Wharton professor who described me quite well as a person who has been languishing for much of the pandemic, if not before.  He noted his NY Times article in the talk, so I read that afterwards, this time not blocked for lack of a subscription.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html

The pandemic has taken me through stages, depending on what I had to do or wanted to do.  For a while I probably met medical criteria for loneliness, though less so now.  I don't think I was ever despondent but often without purpose and hard to get motivated to leave My Space for more purposeful activity.  I did not feel sad or angry, even when I should have.  More numb or Stoic.

The talk and article, which the author had experienced, outlined remedies, some of which I had begun to figure out before understanding what had overcome me.  He advocated finding activities that had three features.

• MASTERY 
• MINDFULNESS 
• MATTERS

For him, that came from assembling family time to play a video game with relatives in other cities.  For me some of what has made me feel a little better has been my success at maintaining a treadmill schedule.  I now exercise at a level not possible when I made the commitment to do it.  I remain inner focused on a tune, with scheduled glances at a preset timer.  And I would like to feel more energetic, so the effort matters.

My self-expression has not gone as well, meeting mindfulness and matters, but not yet with the mastery.  In fact, it's still a project overdue in its formation.  I do very well responding to what others have conveyed, not nearly as well assembling and expressing my own thoughts or experiences.  It's also not yet Flow, that effortless feeling which keeps me focused on nothing else.  I still work with a timer, as I do with the treadmill, and have gotten better at not watching it, though not as well at letting it run to zero to define each session.  But it does capture the three M's.

He did not talk about giving up situations that promote languishing, for me the sanctuary of my synagogue on Saturday morning.  It currently and for a while has lacked all three M's, a place at which mastery is neglected, I'm not offered anything of importance to do or creativity to accomplish, and end results that do not seek to generate the excellence that really matters.  I do have a more challenging assignment for Pesach which may help.

Now that I have a better grasp of where my psyche has taken me and the better places it could be, I should be able to at least move in the direction of Flow, if not actually achieve it.