#and see if I can pick up dairy-free Mac n cheese. I haven’t had some good Mac in a while

[janeaudron]

Another year :)

[kissingwithcannibals]

Resolution

Back in January, I made a list of New Year’s Resolutions. (Is this considered cliche? Have we all collectively decided that none of us will actually stick to these commitments?) Well, I decided I needed a change. I found that I had let my usual hobbies fall by the wayside in favor of drooling in front of a screen. I wasn’t feeling satisfied, productive, creative, or fulfilled.  

I found the entry in my journal. Here’s the list. Please take note of my exquisite penmanship. 

Keeping to the list is coming along...decently. For example, I’m not a vegan, though I have cut out some dairy. (My long-term relationship with Kraft Mac n’ Cheese continues.) In my mind I closely associate my goal of veganism with my aspiration to eliminate junk food, because the only junk food I generally still indulge in is chocolate, ice cream, and pizza. I still drink coffee, but I hate that I am dependent on it. If I don’t have my morning coffee, I become stupid, impatient, and grumpy by late afternoon. A drink should not have that kind of power over me. Every few months I gradually reduce my caffeine levels down to decaf coffee or decaf tea, but I inevitably fall of the wagon. 

One bright spot has been the daily reading, which has been consistent since January. I’ve knocked back several books, and I’m working through a stack of New Yorkers that have piled up. Goodreads has been useful in tracking my books. I have a bad habit of browsing the internet with my morning coffee and when I’m lounging around before bed each night. Lately I have made an effort to replace my laptop with a book, with some success. 

Most of my leisure time in January was spent cooking up some posts for the new blog. I’m not a good writer but I do enjoy the challenge of it. But I am also a slow writer, and often I find myself, after five or six hours of working on a post, asking myself if the final piece was worth the time. (In fact, I’m making an effort to speed up my pace. As I write this I have set a timer for one hour in which I hope to complete this post.) 

Ultimately, I have done okay with my resolutions. There’s a lot of room for improvement. You may notice that I made special note of “Practice as much as possible.” Because while I have committed more time each day to things like reading and writing, there remained a glaring omission: guitar! 

I love playing guitar! But considering how long I have been playing, I’m not nearly as good as I should be. For several years now, I’ve been content to just “noodle” whenever I pick up the instrument. Noodling is just the mindless act of playing licks and riffs that come easy to you. It’s a common trap for guitar players, and I would often noodle while browsing the web and watching Youtube videos. 

Over the winter I read a book by Cal Newport called “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.” It covers several topics, but mostly it’s about how some people come to master extremely difficult skills in a very short span of time. 

I’ll spare you the detail, but here’s how you become a master at something:

High Quality Work = Time Spent x Intensity of Focus

Work for extended periods of time on a single task with full concentration and free from distraction

Experts are produced by intensely focused practice. And this can be applied to anything: learning piano, a computer language, skateboarding, chemistry, juggling, history, or, of course, the skill of writing itself. You have to put in the hours, and they have to be good, productive hours. There is evidence to show how even brief distractions or interruptions will cause your brain to require much longer time to  learn the intended work. 

So, tired of being a lousy guitar player, I’ve restructured my approach to guitar. I compiled a list of fun, but challenging songs to work on. (Current projects include, among others: Interval’s “I’m Awake,” CHON’s “Bubble Dream” and “Puddle.” Songs like “Always Focused” by Tiny Moving Parts have improved my tapping.)

I no longer check my phone or the web when I sit down to practice. I use a stopwatch to track my hours each day. At the end of each day I mark my productive hours on an Excel sheet. Here’s a graph of my time thus far. 

My goal is to practice at least 8 hours a day, but as you can see, I will need to step up my efforts before I can achieve that. 

Still, I have seen results already. If you watch this clip of the song “Dew” by CHON, you’ll see the guy on the right -Erick- doing some fancy tapping maneuvers. Boy, when I first sat down to learn that, I had to slow the song down to a crawl to even hope of coordinating my hands and land the notes. But as of last night, I can now play the song at full speed, and decently cleanly! I never thought I’d be able to play this part. 

I also want to talk about something that I fully acknowledge will sound like (and likely is) complete bullshit, but here it is: I’ve conjured up this idea that maybe I can, like, re-wire my brain to crave playing guitar in the way that I currently crave internet use. This is rooted in the idea that I want to replace one addictive habit (internet use) with a new one (guitar). I mean, I think back to 8th grade when I first started playing, and how for the first few years I had no laptop of my own and virtually no internet or computer access. But my playing improved pretty quickly back then, in part, I believe, because there were far fewer distractions in my daily life that would impede my learning of this skill. My hope these days is to replicate that productive environment. I’m trying to eliminate from my daily life anything that might prevent me from engaging in deep work toward the guitar. This mostly means cutting out shallow/superficial internet use and not checking my phone (I’ve removed all social media apps except snapchat). But I’m also wondering what would happen if I cut out something like sugar from my diet. Because I truly find sugar to be addictive as well, and on days that I don’t have any, I just feel...antsy. And if my brain is craving something besides guitar, I might find myself playing less. It’s a junk theory, I know. I will say this, though: as I’ve reduced my internet use, I find that my attention span in regards to reading has greatly improved, and I find myself feeling less scatter-brained, and I sometimes wonder if my attention span and short-term memory have recovered some. Does a reduction in internet use have positive impacts on things like concentration and memory? I’d be curious what evidence exists on this topic.

I know this all sounds silly, but it is an idea I find pretty fascinating. And to be fair, Newport in “Deep Work” does discuss some evidence to suggest that constant screen time has caused our attention spans to take a hit. I can only speak for myself, and I do believe my shift in priorities has had positive impacts on my sense of well-being. So...yay!

This is a long-winded way of explaining why I haven’t been blogging every week. My priorities have shifted to guitar. But if I can structure my time more intelligently, I can easily find the time to write for even one or two hours a week. 

Post-script: Argh! I blew my timer. This took more than an hour!