Monthly Archives: April 2023

Anti-Email and Phone Checking Challenge: How Am I Doing?

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Ever since the birth of this blog I’ve been grappling with how best to avoid electronic distractions, since it comes with the territory of managing a creative life.

In a damning scourge of anti-productivity, the same laptop, smartphone, browser window, and email account that we use to take care of productive work tasks also lead to horrible distractions.  How many times have you gone on Facebook to check the spelling of someone’s name and ended up poring through old photos?  How many Wikipedia rabbit holes have you wandered down when pausing for a quick fact check?  And worst of all, how much time have you burned through watching YouTube videos during work time because the algorithm Continue reading »

A Fond Farewell to My Old Office…

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Last week in General Ian Life News: I moved to a new apartment.

The move itself was a fairly easy one, and one I’d been planning for a long time, to an apartment in the same town close to where I was living before.  The move itself went incredibly smoothly, since I had plenty of help and the new apartment was so close to my old place that we could easily shuttle things over using multiple car trips.  This was in sharp contrast to previous moves, where I’ve had to scramble and dash around to be out of my old place by a firm deadline.

While I’m very much looking forward to having my own place again (especially once everything’s finally set up!), in this post I want to say a warm goodbye to my old office, where I had a lot of good times and did a lot of meaningful work.
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Getting Back on Track After Being Sick…

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For the past few years I’ve found myself getting a nasty sinus cold around the first week of April—two years ago after a long day of exploring a cherry blossom park in Joetsu, Japan, and last year when I was preparing the pre-orders for MFA Thesis Novel.  And this year, the same thing happened again.

I’d been getting a bit of a sore throat in the mornings and at night for a week or so, but it never lasted long.  Last Wednesday, though, I found myself with a bad runny nose that got worse throughout the day, and after crashing hard that night, I woke up the next day too tired to do much of anything.

I write about this in detail not because I want to share a play-by-play of being sick (because not only is that gross, but it’s unnecessary storytelling-wise), but to emphasize that sickesses come up unexpectedly, often at bad times when we have other things going on, creating real repercussions for how we deal with them.  Charging forward with your regular routine even when you’re sick is rarely if ever a good choice: not only will you not be at your best and likely make mistakes, Continue reading »

Fixed Mindsets vs. Growth Mindsets: A Way of Looking at the World

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Have you ever noticed how some people tend to persevere through challenges by doing their best, while others see challenges as beyond their reach and give up?

Think about the last bad day you had.  Maybe you got chewed out at work, something went wrong with your computer, you made a mistake at home, or you had a fight with a friend.  Maybe you found yourself in a situation where there seemed to be no way out, or where a solution seemed completely outside your reach.

When the bad day was over, did you think about ways that you could actively work to improve your situation?  Or, did you simply accept what happened as inevitable, as being completely outside of your control?

The difference between the two lies in Fixed Mindsets and Growth Mindsets, a concept pioneered by Stanford social scientist Carol S. Dweck about how ingrained patterns of thinking affect our ability to deal with challenges Continue reading »