Setting Goals 2006, February 14, Tuesday
Posted by Levent in Goals, Motivation.add a comment
It’s Important to set goals, but sometimes this can seem extremely difficult. Sometimes setting goals doesn’t seem like a viable idea. Maybe because you feel like your goals will not have any effect on your actions.
Setting a goal can set you up for failure. If you aren’t likely to follow through with your goals you will not achieve them. This is why it is important to know how to set goals effectively. This is a skill that needs to be learnt, or rather built up; it is a skill that doesn’t have a roof. You will never become perfect at setting goals. You can only always improve your ability to set good goals.
What is a good goal?
A good goal requires two things:
- It is achievable
- It efficiently improves you
What does this mean?
Never set a goal you cannot achieve. It is pointless and de-motivating. This does not mean it cannot be hard; in fact it should be hard. And this does not mean you cannot fail to achieve a goal, we can learn from failure or mistakes; as long as you can see yourself achieving it, otherwise you will feel like you are fighting inevitability. And if it is not at least somewhat difficult for you to achieve your goal you will not have efficiently improved yourself. This then means setting balanced goals.
What is a balanced goal?
A balanced goal is one you can achieve given your current situation. This means you have to assess for yourself how much you can do. If you feel you are very unmotivated and a big procrastinator start small. Give yourself something you can achieve which will help you grow. Think of something you could improve on now. How could you break this down into steps to help you achieve your goal? Maybe you can’t think of anything to improve on right now, perhaps you can get rid of a bad habit or and addiction, or improve your sleeping or eating habits. It’s important that each goal is broken down into small steps, so that you can follow your progress. Don’t try to change too much at once. Change takes time.
Following through
Are you ready? So you’ve decided one thing you want to change. You’ve broken it down into progressive steps. Make yourself an achievement plan. Write down each step, and a completion time, then periodically check back on this and mark your progress. How far are you to completing each step? Do this at least once a day. And give yourself a mark out of ten for the day. If you grade yourself a 9 or 10, remember what you did and try to keep the effort up the next day, if you got lower try to progressively build up your grade so that you become better at completing steps everyday.
Learn and repeat; set greater and greater goals as you become better at achieving them and you’ll be well on your way to becoming the person you really want to be.
Polyphasic Sleep Diary – Day One 2006, February 14, Tuesday
Posted by Levent in Polyphasic Diary, Polyphasic Sleep.add a comment
It’s about 1am, Tuesday 14th of February, about 5 minutes after I woke from my third polynap of the night.
I woke up from a normal nights sleep at 7am yesterday morning. At about a quarter past seven in the evening I have my first nap; I use Eric Mueller’s 28-minute mp3 timer on my iPod, but I got woken about 5-10 minutes early by noises outside. I remained lying down until the timer went. Approximately two hours later at 9:30 I lie down again. I don’t think I fell asleep this time, but you can never be sure, your body can play strange tricks on you, and especially with polyphasic sleep, which is uncharted territory for me. My body did feel completely paralysed at times though, and that definitely was a new feeling; I didn’t anticipate any new sensations until at least several naps more in. It wasn’t really paralysis as such as I could still move if I tried (and I did try) perhaps it was more like pins and needles, all over my body. So after that sort of non-nap I watched a film. A 90’s Jack Nicholson Film Noir; I enjoyed it, but I was over 2 hours and so I only got my third nap started at about 12:20, and I almost didn’t wake up from it (I slept through all sorts of horrible noises the timer makes). Might have to set my earphones a little louder to make sure it wakes me next time.
Perhaps you’re reading this and you’re entirely unsure of what I’m talking about. Well, I’ve gone polyphasic. By the end of this week I hope to be sleeping 6 times a day, every 4 hours for approximately 20 minutes each time, giving me a total of about 2 hours sleep per day. If you haven’t heard of Polyphasic sleep before you might be thinking: that’s nuts; I’ll explain it sometime.
Right now I’m trying to get into it by sleeping every 2 hours so that I can eventually start removing every second nap and be left with the correct schedule.
Later:
It’s about 1:50 now, and there is one thing I have to add. I feel extremely awake. And I have heard and experienced this to be the case: you can miss one night’s sleep and feel fine (in fact you body will be pumping out hormones to make you feel artificially awake). Your body can borrow some extra time. So I suppose this first night will be the easiest, the 2nd or 3rd day will really be the hardest hurdle.
3:20am
I woke up from my last nap about 20 minutes ago. I felt hungry so got so I ate what I could find in the kitchen. Some food got stuck in my throat in a weird way that I hadn’t experienced before (mostly because the food was soft and would usually just have slid down), drinking water cleared it right through though; it was as if my mouth and/or throat were malfunctioning; I kept eating, making sure to chew more and it didn’t recur. Maybe that shows my level of alertness, I couldn’t even eat properly.
The Battery on my iPod ran out, so I had to do without my polyphasic sleep track and had to rely on a conventional alarm. I have to keep it quite at night though to avoid waking other people, and during the day I probably won’t be able to get to sleep without it drowning out outside sounds with it’s white noise so I’ll have to remember to keep my iPod charged.
At the moment (other than writing this) the prevalent feeling is boredom. What to do with the extra time at night when the rest of the world sleeps? I’ll have to sort that out some time, at least I have plenty of it.
8 hours later: 11:20am
I woke up twenty minutes ago. I had trouble falling asleep and probably only got a short 10 minutes or so, even though I missed the previous nap. That’s the first one I missed. Since the one at 3:20 entry I had these naps: at 4:30, 6:30, missed the 8:30 one, and took the 10:30 partial nap just now. I might as well do only every 4 hours during the daytime if I have trouble falling asleep. My eyes feel extremely tired though so I’m going to lie down for the next one, even if I don’t get any sleep, to rest my eyes.
10:10pm
At this point I feel extremely tired, the feeling is mostly coming from around the eyes and in the form of slight headaches. Since the nap I missed this morning I got all my naps in, except for the 8:30pm nap which I couldn’t take because I was at my theatre company meeting (What an amazing coincidence, I missed the 8:30 am and pm nap). I’m going to take my next nap in about twenty minutes, and hopefully continue the 2 hourly routine from there until I start experiencing REM naps, something I’ll hopefully notice straight away; Although I may miss the first one (or two).
