Digital Alterity

I am not good at doing things halfway. I am absurdly devoted to whatever my current obsession happens to be. As a result, I can often do amazing things in a very short amount of time. I can lose a hundred pounds in a year. I can learned how to draw in just a few months. I can go from a couch potato to someone who runs 30 km/week in just a matter of months.

Along with this devotion comes a parallel obsession with measurement and statistics. It’s not enough to just go exercise, I have to measure my speed/distance with a GPS watch and log the data in a spreadsheet full of complicated formulas. I can’t just eat healthier. I have to painstaking track every calorie I consume. I can’t just be more productive. I have to track all of my completed projects in a wiki. In fact, sometimes I wonder if the reward for me isn’t actually the task itself but rather the appeal of benchmarks and descriptive statistics. Are my obsessions just data sets for geek analysis? It’s certainly hard for me to do much of anything without some means of tracking or describing success through some kind of number. I tend to quantify a set of benchmarks before I can even motivate myself to start.

Herein lies the difficulty. I’m constantly competing against myself. Rather than just opting for a navy shower over a bath when convenient, I’ll outline that I’m only allowed one luxurious bath per week—an absurdly extreme benchmark for me. I’ll outline that I have to lose at least 0.5 kg/week. I’ll outline that I have to draw something every single day. I’ll outline that I must increase running distance every three weeks. Measurement, quantification, and benchmarking inevitably lead me into the dangerous waters of over-performance. In turn, this leads to exhaustion and burnout.

I want to work on getting on track with a lot of things, but I need to do so in a way that won’t encourage me to start speeding down the exhaustion turnpike. I need to focus on making changes with small, painless deltas that move me in the direction I want to me moving toward without suddenly making extreme changes in course.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 6:17:22 and is filed under Productivity, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.