Opportunities aside, a big disadvantage with packing up all your stuff and moving halfway around the world is that it screws up your rhythm big time. Back home I had a set work schedule, a familiar desk where I could write, and ingrained habits for how to get my shit done. In Japan, not so much.
Part of why I love schedules is that they help me develop better work habits: by doing my work at similar times of the day in similar ways in a similar place, the process becomes more familiar and less intimidating, thus helping me ward off procrastination and save time by getting down to work faster.
This is the same reason I do things like make my bed every morning and eat a similar breakfast (eggs over easy with toast if I have the time, cereal with milk if I don’t) so that instead of having to think about how to get my day going I can just do it, like a kind of reflex or muscle memory. Get enough of these little routines and rituals and your day will go a lot more smoothly because you can coast through the unimportant stuff on autopilot and get to the actual work faster.
In Japan, though, I have to adjust to a new work schedule, a new apartment, new furniture, and even new notebooks (the lines on the ones I bought here are way smaller), and in the midst of all the upheaval I’ve pinned down three main areas where I’m not using my time well…
Time-Waster #1: I Check the News on My Phone WAY Too Much
When I moved to Japan I bought a shiny new Huawei phone from AU, one of the three major Japanese cell phone networks. It’s smaller than my old phone, with higher resolution, better speakers, and an improved layout. So once I got used to it, I started using it a lot.
My new phone also provides super-easy access to Google news feed via a quick swipe, and I started checking it when I was bored or had some downtime. It picked up my searches about American political news right away and started serving me a lot of Donald Trump-related stories involving one scandal after another, and checking them became so easy that I started reading a lot of news…like, more than I did a year and a half ago when I pulled myself out of a major Trump-related news addiction.
Looking back, I fell into this trap because when I first got to Japan I was pretty exhausted both from jet lag and the massive heat wave the country went through this summer, so I was spending a lot of down time lying on my bed too hot and tired to do much of anything…except pull out my phone and check the news.
This is a pretty terrible habit because if I’m tired for whatever reason, the only way for me to recover is by genuinely resting—not by reading in-depth articles on my phone under the guise of resting. In these situations my excessive phone checking actually makes me feel more tired because it makes my mind start racing so that I need even more unwinding to calm it down, thus causing me to waste more time.
My news-checking habit started spilling into other aspects of my routine too: I found myself pulling out my phone during lunch breaks, before bed (which you really shouldn’t do), at random points of the day, and even while doing my creative work—usually after finishing one thing I had to do and before starting another. In my mind these shorter phone checks were serving as a kind of break, but once again, they weren’t the same as real rest.
My urge to check more and more news reached its peak during the Kavanaugh hearings a few weeks ago, propelled by my genuine nervousness about how things were going to turn out. It’s cooled down since I’ve reminded myself that news stories from different sources tend to repeat one another and you only need to read a bit before you know what’s going on…but I still catch myself pulling out the phone when I feel a burst of anxiety and need a distraction.
It’s a bad thing to waste time on, so here’s hoping that writing about it here will help me stop.
Time Waster #2: I Text WAY Too Much
Like reading the news, I find myself pulling up text messages at inopportune times and texting people more than necessary. The main reason for this is because in moments of anxiety I’ve been looking to fill the silence with some quick stimulation, but also because I’m actually receiving more text messages in Japan than I was back home, where I see more people face-to-face. I’ve even slipped back into checking my email at random times of the day hoping for some kind of stimulation—anything to fill the silence caused by being alone.
Someone told me once that if the first thing you do after waking up is reach for your phone, then you’re going to be a phone-checking zombie for the rest of the day. I find that doubly true in Japan: whereas back home I used a wood-paneled digital alarm clock from the ‘70s that woke me up with an incessant beep, in Japan I use my phone alarm to wake me up at different times on different days…and when I reach to turn it off in the morning I immediately see all the texts from America that people have sent me the night before (don’t forget the time difference!).
I don’t like relying on my phone this way and don’t want to feel like I need to keep in constant daily contact with people and return messages super-quickly, especially when I’m busy or need to focus on bigger projects. Unfortunately, since I do more creative work in the evening now when people in America or Japan are both more likely to contact me, I stopped turning my phone off during worktime (!) and opened myself to more distractions.
Again, focus is the name of the game: I want more time and space to concentrate on my work, and literally every second I waste on my phone is taking time away from that. So it’s time to stop.
Time Waster #3: Living in Japan’s More Confusing Than Living in America
This last one is less of a bad habit and more of an obstacle: living in Japan is rough and I have to figure out how to do it.
The day-to-day living stuff is quite doable for someone like me who speaks limited Japanese, but it requires more effort than things did back home. For example, my first time taking money out from the ATM I had to first find exactly where it was, then whether there was an English menu, and THEN plan when to go without incurring the extra ¥105 fee for off-hours use. None of these things are crazy difficult, but they just add up to more little things to juggle.
This problem’s come up with a lot of things I’ve had to do here for the first time: finding the post office, paying my rent, getting a haircut, and even paying for online purchases at the convenience store to avoid foreign transaction fees. They all require extra steps while I figure things out, and taken together, they add up to quite a bit of time every week.
Fortunately for me I’ve done a lot of these things already, and each week I feel more and more comfortable as I develop a routine and do them again and again. Getting more comfortable with the daily life stuff frees up my mind for more important things, since it’s hard to focus on writing a novel when you’re not sure how to work your rice cooker ;-)
Bottom Line: I’ve Got to Learn the Ropes and Put the Phone Down
I’ve been in Japan nearly three months and enough is enough: it was normal to take more down time and move at a leisurely (i.e., distracted) pace when I was still learning my way around, but I feel like I have enough of a hold on life here now so that I can up my game and start making better use of my time.
This is the kind of motivation that comes from inside, since no one’s really forcing me to do anything here besides pay my bills and go to work—and there’s even some leeway in that department since I have plenty of days off ;-) In the absence of external motivators I’ve got to call my own shots and set my own goals—so it’s time to start holding myself accountable.
Here’s a good habit for you—keep in touch!
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