For my Measuring Me exercise, I decided to pay attention to my behavior throughout the days and really focus on idle time. Like your typical Stanford student, I struggle with feeling like I’m never productive enough. My first Measuring Me exercise made me very painfully aware of how much idle time weaseled into my life. Idleness itself isn’t bad, of course, but I was troubled by how much time I felt like I was losing — time that could be spent towards my startup, towards reading more books, towards actively doing something that brings me joy. I needed to see if there were any patterns regarding my idleness, and the connection circle solved that for me.
Drawing out the connection circle was so satisfying because it felt just like card sorting a user interview and tangibly seeing/learning a pattern that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. As I began writing out my actions/behaviors throughout the day around the perimeter of the circle, and began to just connect the obvious links (exhaustion –> sleep), I eventually realized that so much of my idleness actually came after an experience of great emotion. Whether I was with friends or exercising or working on my startup, I would flood with so much intense emotion that it would later mentally exhaust me without realizing it. My body was essentially overwhelmed by emotion to the point that it would physically tire, and I could do nothing but just sit still with my emotions until time blurred to the point of “wastefulness.”
While drawing the connection circle helped me make that thought for the first time, it was the fishbone diagram that actually allowed me to articulate these very thoughts. As I began to label the bones of the fish, I had to really separate all of the factors that led to my idleness. Emotion. Environment. Energy. Schedule. Filling in the bones fleshed out the reason and felt like extracting something deep inside me that may seem obvious, but actually needed this structure to coax out of me.
I’m not sure what the solution to idleness could be, since I won’t fault myself and my body for needing the time to decompress. I’m alive, after all! Perhaps something I could do (if I want to feel like I’m “actively” doing something) is actually sit down to journal whatever intensity of emotion I just experienced.
In fact, I’m going to start doing that now. And I’ll still measure my days. I’ll see how that goes 🙂
