This weekend is a busy weekend:
- I did some comprehensive cleaning up work for my home systems (home Linux hosts, NAS and this website host);
- updated these systems after backing up the data;
- changed some of the preferences of these systems and also my home computer which I wanted to change for a long time but didn’t have the time to find out how and get it done.
No big or very complicated tasks, but some tasks that do need some time. I know I should have done them earlier and regularly, like the system update and data back up, but, well, I am lazy…
It comes to me that most of the things in our daily life are not difficult or beyond our capacity but do help quite a lot for us to become better ourselves, like reading a book, practicing a new skill maybe 1 or 2 hours a day during the weekend, or getting physical exercise after work every day. But it’s quite common that most of us can not get these things done even though we are determined to. It’s been a long time since we read a book (we might have opened a book but didn’t get it completed somehow). We tell ourselves that we will go for a run today after work or the morning of this weekend, but there is always something stopping us, whether it’s an invite from a friend for shopping or dinner, sleeping, or maybe just simply unwilling to get up. We want to sharpen our Photoshop skills, but it’s been more than a month since we opened Photoshop on our computer… But why?
Maybe it’s just human nature: actions always fall behind the plans (people are good at breaking their promises). Plans and schedules are always promising and thrilling, but when it comes to reality, well, things are not that promising or thrilling any more.
But there is still something we can do, and things are not that bad, at least not always. We can still try to get improvement. We might need a month to finish reading this book though it only takes about two weeks per our plan. We can have some practice on the new skills like once every two weeks or even a month if we don’t have much time to give it more practice. We can do the physical exercise 3 or 4 times every week if once every day is too much. One thing we can do to improve the whole situation is to change our plans to better fit the reality as more often than not, we can not foresee the problems or issues when we make the plans, but we will have a better understanding on the environment when we actually start doing things as planed and then we realize some tasks are not practical and some of them just need much more time. The other thing we can do is to remove the things or temptations on our way that stop ourselves doing what we are supposed to do. For example, we often find ourselves playing mobile phones though we are supposed to be reading a book or doing physical exercise. Then just put our mobile phones somewhere out of our reach until we get our tasks done.
I like the saying, “Life is simple. You set up a goal and then you go for it.” But we might not always be able to reach our goal. Life in reality is more of trial and error. We try something and we might fail with a better understanding on what we should insist on and what we should change and then we try again. It does not matter that much whether we succeed or fail on one of these tasks if we look from the whole life perspective, but it’s the procedures (we always have something to pursue and we fight for what we want) that really matter because we find ourselves become better, smarter, more efficient during these procedures and we also find the goals we have are becoming more and more difficult.