Daily writing prompt
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
I feel like there is too many to count, but I also tend to be highly critical of myself. In any given day, I never seem to have enough time or energy, or both, to do all the things that I want to get done. Part of the reason is because I’m incredibly ADD, but I’d rather not be on medication because the last time I was on ADD medication it made me super groggy and messed with my head quite a bit.
I’ve mostly been trying to implement little things to rein my ADD, like keeping a calendar and following a consistent schedule. It’s not an overly obsessive schedule, and I do leave room for it to be modified given changing conditions throughout the day. But for the most part, I always reference what I’ve written on my calendar as to what I should probably be doing at any given time.
The problem I usually have is getting sidetracked, or sometimes getting hyperfocused on something that I don’t put it down for hours. That mostly being chess. I play online chess compulsively, and if I could get away with playing it seventeen or more hours a day, then I would. But when I get sucked into playing hours and hours of chess, I never accomplish anything, or at least I don’t feel as if I accomplished anything. Plus, I start to slightly hallucinate chess moves that I should have made in x, y, or z game.
I think the general perception is that ADD means you are always distracted, and for the most part that’s true of me. But, as I said, I can definitely get hyperfocused on one particular thing for long stretches of time, and I find it incredibly difficult to pull myself away from whatever it is I’m doing at the time. Hence, why I feel the need to break my day down into little segments that I put in a Google calendar that sends me push notifications to let me know what I should be doing at any given time.
The problem I face is when I become too critical of myself when I don’t do all the things and tasks that I want to do in a given day. It then feels like the entire day is ruined, and the rest of the night my mood is shot. I feel defeated. What I should probably do is setup my calendar where I focus on only one or two things each day and only tackle those things. Though it’s usually never that simple, really. Most of the tasks I want to accomplish revolve around something creative I do outside of work, like writing, painting, sewing, or they’re something I try to do to improve upon myself, like reading a book, learning a new language, or taking free online classes on topics I don’t know that much about. Some of those things just depend on what I feel inspired to do that day, and rarely is it dependent on what I put on my calendar.
So, I suppose the main improvement I can make is trying not to be too critical of what I don’t do, and more so focus on the things that I have done any given day.
Also, now that I’m older, I need to make improvement on my health. I know I’ve let myself go. I was never a gym rat, so I never built any habits of working out or staying active. Instead, when I was younger, I used to walk everywhere. I’d probably estimate that I was walking 6-10 miles per day, whereas now I barely walk 3 miles per day. I live a pretty sedentary lifestyle. And my doctor has told me so. They’re telling me that I’m right at the precipice of being overweight for my height, which a pretty big bummer.
The doctor gave me a list of simple recommendations that seem easy enough to follow. But I’ve had trouble keeping to eating smaller portions and being even slightly more active. This is probably one of those more major improvements that I need to make, but I suppose the first thing would be making small steps to improving my overall health. Maybe walking a little bit. Definitely eating less processed foods and more fruits and vegetables. I guess it’s mostly trying to make vegetables taste better. I tend to not really like the taste of raw, plain veggies. Fruits I could eat all night and day, but they obviously have naturally occuring sugar in them, so I doubt it’s super healthy to just focus on fruits and not integrate veggies into my diet.
Granted, it’s always super easy to diagnose a problem in your life. But taking the small steps to improve and better yourself is incredibly boring, much like brushing your teeth and taking a shower. Small improvements are a form of maintenance that you tend to not see the payoff until much later, if at all. Though perhaps not seeing any drastic change in one’s life is an indicator that the small improvements are working.
Fred Aiken Writing 