My friend said that I once told her that instead of knowing what you want to do, “it is just as important to know what you don’t want to do”. I don’t have any memory of having said that, so it entered my mind as a new piece of knowledge and floated around in my head for a few days. (Congrats, past me?)

Dr. K has this video about working on x while working on y while working on z. He says just work on a small amount at a time, you don’t have to do everything. I think we understand this in principle, but in practice it’s hard to keep track of what I want to work on. I often forget that I was working on something, and then pick up something else that interests me in the moment.

Having too many things to work on feels like a relatively modern phenomenon. We used to be working all the time, mostly housework when outside of wage-work, and with physical labor as well. Outside of that, or even during working, humans would be socializing with peers. Then technology boomed, and two things happened: humans had more free time, and white-collar work eventually emerged. Now the influx of internet has made our free time so isolated that we spend it on hobbies instead. Hobbies to get fit, hobbies to socialize, hobbies for art. Source: trust me bro

To combat this “working on everything”, I redownloaded Habit Tracker, an iOS app. Basically, whatever I don’t have in my habit tracker, I won’t obligate myself to do. This narrowing of focus helps me feel less guilty at the end of the day. I won’t shrink in my skin as I tell art friends I haven’t been drawing lately. It’s okay when my language friends are doing grammar drills and I just do 10 vocabulary flash cards. When they learn to cook new dishes and I don’t. I shouldn’t need to partake in all of my friends’ interests to earn my place as part of their lives, though I often feel otherwise.

This is probably not how most people approach habit tracking. Most people use it to “get stuff done”. It reminds me of my approach to money – I am trying to learn budgeting not to limit my spending but to tell myself it’s okay to buy things that improve my quality of life. I’ve got a rudimentary transaction-tracking spreadsheet, but I haven’t set up the charts and categories yet.