Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)
I had an unusual experience this weekend while I was sick. After laying around for 2 days with brain fog, I woke up early Sunday morning and watched TV, checked social media, etc, but was sick of consuming information and had the strangest feeling that I wanted to work on something productive but my body aches wouldn&#x27;t let me concentrate. I also felt like.. playing video games? I haven&#x27;t had the urge to play video games since my first semester of college in 1995 before I discovered partying and dating.<p>I was bored.<p>It finally hit me that I haven&#x27;t been bored in over 25 years. I&#x27;ve been hopeless, exhausted, overworked, financially destitute, depressed, burned out, lost in countless ways. But never bored.<p>Now, I meditate often, I&#x27;ve learned a great deal about the higher self on neurodivergent TikTok, and I&#x27;m mindful of my contribution in service to others. But I can&#x27;t really emphasize enough how much this shook me. I&#x27;m still processing it.<p>I wonder if getting life goals done could be as simple as carving out large blocks of time where you aren&#x27;t allowed to work on them. I don&#x27;t mean filling the time with something else like work or other obligations. But literal you-time, with a rule that you can&#x27;t exert yourself in any way or you&#x27;ll risk relapsing into nonprogress. This is more like transmuting one form of attentive energy (negative) into another (positive) by dwelling on the opposite thing than you&#x27;re used to.<p>For example, I perceive every stoplight as being red. Since I started commuting a half hour to work a few days per week, I&#x27;ve been bringing coffee. Now I find that I never get a chance to drink it, because every light is green.