On Ceilings and Floors

10/06/15

So, today was a bad day. But it was a better bad day than usual.

I have been continuing my attempts to quit various time-wasting habits I can't afford, and a current mutation shows promise.

Basically, I have a bad-habit jar. Every time I do something I have decided I don't want to do, I incur a monetary fee. This fee is in place for visiting websites I want to eradicate from my information diet, and junk I want eradicated from my diet diet.

Since starting this system a bit over a week ago, I had one bad day.

Today.

And the amount of junk I consumed, both dietarily and information...ally... was a lot more limited than most other days.

And this has led me to a line of thought I found quite useful lately, in my consistently inconsistent productivity, discipline, and resolve.

A high floor is as important, if not more important, than a high ceiling. And bad days like today are my chance to raise the floor. I've been having high ceilings lately. Bouts of productivity that are close to my best way back in Febuary 2014.

But something I forget is that my floor was way, way raised back then. I had successfully purged the vast majority of my Internet consumption then, for many, many months. I believe it was from Febuary to June that I read no blogs, webcomics, or reddit. It was a boon.

My destructive behavior (as benign as it was even at its worst) was brought to a minimum. My struggle to return to that place has been quite real, but that was perhaps due to my focus on self-improvement made during motivational highs, which itself was due to rewards from such behavior, both intrinsic and extrinsic.

But at a low, I find that I am indifferent to reward. Apathetic. But punishment or risk avoidance is still very much in play.

In this example, monetary punishment is something I am very much trying to avoid, what with my interest in early retirement and just the various virtues of spending less. And the threat of this punishment, self-inflicted, very much limited the depths of my actions today. And thus the floor was raised.

So, perhaps I need to inject more risk or consequence into my days, especially when a funk falls over me.