I’m Focusing on Defocusing

As part of my new year’s resolutions my friends told me to defocus, and to live in the here-and-now. (Yes, we had new year’s resolutions for each other, and not for ourselves.)

It was good advice. But it’s hard. For me.

I’m very good at focusing on my work. Which is probably why I felt I didn’t get much value out of the pomodoro technique when I tried it. (I found it annoying that I was interrupted every 25 minutes, and that my breaks were dictated by a plastic tomato instead of the natural flow of my work.)

I don’t need tools for focusing. I need tools for defocusing.

That’s why I started using the following tools, in the hope that they will help me defocus from my regular work as a writer, speaker, and trainer:

1. I bought a little Casio photo camera and I try to take nice pictures, which I upload to Flickr.
2. I now spend more time reading novels, and I keep track of my reading progress on GoodReads.
3. I like watching movies (though never alone), and I keep track of my movie ratings on IMDb.
4. I bought Wallpaper City Guides for each of the cities I will visit in the next few months (if available).
5. And I’ve started a project finding and organizing my favorite music on Spotify.

I hope this helps.

Though, I must say, I noticed when playing around with my photos, books, movies and music, that I seem to have a quite focused approach to the problem of being too focused.

(photo: ume-y, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)