Retirement – Page 11 – Auxiliary Memory

Does An Organized Desk Mean An Organized Mind?

Recently I read “10 Things Organized People Do Every Day” by Jordana Jaffe at MindBodyGreen. Jaffe is the founder of Embarkability, and her ten simple habits about being organized seem very practical and real. I hope she doesn’t mind that I quote the ten for those people too lazy to go read her article with explanations. They are:

They plan each day the night before.
They have and keep only one to-do list.
They spend at least 30 minutes going through and addressing emails in their email inbox.
They clear their desk of paper piles.
They have a morning routine and an evening ritual.
They spend 10 minutes at the end of each day tidying up.
They put their clothing in the laundry bin.
They never leave dishes in the sink.
They carve out time for lunch.
They open up their mail.

The ten truly resonates with my cluttered lifestyle, so I feel maybe she’s right.

I guess this is why I’m not a successful entrepreneur. I do eat lunch every day, mainly because going without would be painful. And I’m pretty good about putting my dirty clothes in the proper bins. But I’m pretty bad about the rest, especially opening mail, processing email, and leaving piles of paper on my desks. To pat myself on the back a little, some days, not most, but some, I put the dishes right into the dish washer after eating. I keep trying to-do lists and failing, and I’ve often tried to develop morning and before bed planning times. Unfortunately, I always drift back into unorganized chaos.

My scientific question is: If I faithfully make these ten routines into regular habits will it change my brain so I’m an organized person? People seeing the way I work and live will not believe this, but for my whole life, I’ve wished I could have an organized person with an orderly desk. Jaffe tells us organized people follow these habits, but I’m not sure if changing my bad habits into good ones would transform my brain and make me into an organized person. It’s an interesting experiment to consider.

However, looking at the piles of unopened mail, magazines, forms, warranties, etc. sitting on my desk, and checking that my email inbox has 2,054 messages, makes me think it might take a while to get my neurons to dance a different jig. I think I’ll try, and I’ll even tell my wife and lady friends to nag me thoroughly, which they love to do, and I start testing this hypothesis.

I wonder how many days of following these ten habits will it take to rewire my brain?

JWH – 5/20/14

Will I Be Left in the Tech Dust If I Don’t Own A Smartphone?

I’ve been using computers since 1971. Mainframes, minicomputers and microcomputers – labels that have long since disappeared. I got my first personal computer in 1979. I used FTP, Usenet, Gopher, email, years before the web, and remember being blown away when Mosaic came out in 1993. I spent a lot of money on computer and gadgets over the years, but for some reason I don’t want to buy a smartphone. Oh, I’d love to have a smartphone – I just don’t want the monthly bill. And since nearly everyone else is becoming a smartphone user, will this leave me in the tech dust?

I have a poor man’s smartphone, the iPod touch and a pay-as-you-go dumbphone. It essentially does most of what a smartphone does, and I only spend $50 every six months for 500 minutes. I also have an iPad 2 and a Nexus 5. I’m not totally out of it, but when I read Engadget I feel like I’m at a black tie party wearing a sports jacket and jeans, and even those are getting threadbare and moth eaten.

Now I’m reading about smart watches. Pass. Google glasses. Pass. Have I gotten too old to compute?

I am cheap, but then I’m retired. I now spend about 99% of my time at home, so mobile devices just don’t have a compelling sell to me. Yet, all the tech glamor is now in mobile devices. I do use mobile apps on my Nexus 7, but I’d much prefer using most of them on my 23” monitor.

Is the bleeding edge of tech savvy now limited to on-the-go computing? Am I joining the ranks of the cyber-Amish by not owning a smartphone. Am I less of a geek for not wanting the latest smartphone every year?

Getting old is getting old, so I must accept that young people are going to do and know things I don’t. BFD. I’m not whining, but since I’ve retired I realized, more and more, I’m cutting myself off from the mainstream of people. I’ve always done this. Being a gluten-free vegetarian atheist has a way of isolating me from normal life. Being a computer geek is something I’ve always identified with, so is choosing not to follow the cutting edge of tech another way to isolate myself? (I can hear my friend Annie growling at me, “Hell yes, you moron.”)

This reminds me of a friend who died about twenty years ago. He had become so negative about life that he only like two things, Duane Allman’s guitar playing, and Benny Goodman’s clarinet playing. Luckily I still love hundreds of things, but I’m starting to realize that list is shrinking. Is that another way of defining aging – that you list of likes shrinks?

There another way of looking at though. One I feel is more positive! As we get older we juggle more balls, or spin more plates. Remember those guys on Ed Sullivan that would keep plates spinning on sticks? Back then, we called life “the 9 to 5 rat race.” As we grew up we learned to spin more plates. At some point in your life you realize that keeping all those plates spinning is a lot of damn work. Then you go all Zen dog and start spinning fewer plates. Retiring is moving into those years when you spin fewer and fewer plates. And the positive spin I mentioned? Well, you enjoy life more because you just keep the things you love most in motion.

JWH – 2/25/14

The Mathematics of Book Buying

Can you resist a great bargain? Especially when buying something you particularly love? Every day Amazon emails me the Kindle Daily Deals, of which they have five ebooks on sale, usually for $1.99. Sometimes it’s $2.99, and sometimes it’s even .99 cents, but usually it’s $1.99. And I’ve gotten some amazing books for $2 – fantastic bargains! At Audible.com, also owned by Amazon, they often have audiobooks on sale for $4.95. Plus, I love going to my Friends of the Library Bookstore, where it’s not uncommon to find great hardback books for just $3.

If I read one book for every ten I buy though, the real price of that Kindle ebook is $20, or $50 for the audiobook, and $30 for the used hardback. That isn’t a bargain, is it? If I think of myself building a library, then getting as many books as cheap as possible is a book shopping thrill. But if I think of myself as buying books to read, then buying books I don’t read is wasting money.

Since I’ve recently retired, how much I spend each month is very important. Every dollar I spend now is one less dollar I’ll have in the future. My real goal should be to spend little, and read more. Now I have time to read all those unread books in my library, but not the money to keep building the library.

Another way to rationalize the numbers is to think of myself as enjoying book buying. That shopping for books is the pleasure I’m actually budgeting, and ignore whether or not I read the books. By that measure if I spend a $100 a month and get 25 books, rather than 3-7 at new prices, then yes, I’ve been having a great time bargain hunting for books.

To be honest, owning books is not my goal, so I have to face the fact that I am wasting money. That’s sad. Maybe what I shouldn’t completely give up something I love, but just lower the budget. I wonder how many great books I can get for $25 a month? Save money, start a challenge!

JWH – 1/16/14

I’m Retired–Do I Throw Away My Alarm Clock?

Which is better: Following disciplined habits or natural cycles?

Having to get up and get to work on time used to provide discipline in my life. When I was off for weekends or vacation days, the time I was ready to start my day got later and later. Every morning I need to shower, exercise, dress, eat breakfast, floss and brush teeth before I’m ready to start my day. If I get up at 6 AM I can be ready to go by 7:30. But if I snooze until 7 or 8 AM, my day might not start until 9:30. This morning, I got up later, and didn’t hit the computer until 9:36.

Now that I’m retired I have a choice to make. Do I live by the clock or my biology?

[Living against the clock: does loss of daily rhythms cause obesity?]

Sleeping in seems so wasteful. But is that a false assumption? Now that I’m retired, does it matter what time I start writing each day? Would I be more productive if I lived by the clock or learned to adapt to my natural rhythms?

I’ve always assumed discipline is a major virtue. That we each seek to conquer nature by using willpower to bend our bodies and environment into our control. Isn’t it everyone’s assumption that we must overcome our animal urges? However, studies on health and stress show that might not be the best way to live, and that going with the natural flow of things might be healthier.

If you look across the Earth, have we conquered nature, or merely destroyed it? That’s getting awful philosophical as to whether I should sleep in or get up early. Can’t I just accept that the early bird gets the worm? Now that I’m thinking about this question I realize I’m living by a lot of assumptions. My 9 to 5 work years forced me to get up early, but now I’m free to follow a different path.

Since my health is in decline, it’s more important that I listen to my body than the Clock app on my iPod touch. Just writing these words shows me I need to do a lot of rethinking of my commonly held assumptions. And what other assumptions do I need to question about my other daily habits?

How many meals should I eat and when? Do I need to shower every day? Does it have to be in the morning? What time is best to do my exercises? When is the best time to write, clean house, socialize, watch TV, etc? What if I follow my circadian rhythms and I no longer track a 24 hour clock? How do I adapt my freeform schedule to my friends who follow a work schedule?

There is something to be said for natural sleep . I notice this morning when I woke up at 7:30 that it was just getting light. I’m wondering if my natural alarm clock is set by the amount of light outside. The room in which I sleep faces east, and has one long window without curtains across the east wall. Maybe I should do a scientific experiment and note when I wake up and when sunrise is for that day, and see if in the course of the year if I follow a natural cycle.

As I’ve been sleeping later, I’ve been wanting to stay up later. I’ve been retired just six days but I’m already having a hard time remembering what day it is, and I’ve stopped following the clock. Also, I’m now eating at different times. I even nap later.

My retirement goal is to write a novel. I assumed before I retired I needed to stick to a disciplined schedule and work at novel writing just like I worked as a computer programmer. Now I’m thinking that was a false assumption. Or is that just a rationalization to sleep later?

The western world changed after the invention of the clock. Now that I’m retired I realize I’ve left clock time. Because I don’t have cable TV, I don’t even watch TV to a schedule anymore. I’m on Netflix time. Does this mean I’ve been a Morlock all my life and now I’ve become an Eloi? That might not be good. Modern sequels recognized the virtues of the hideous Morlocks – they got things done, while noting the Eloi were lazy and wimpy.

Living by the clock is mechanical. Living by nature is undisciplined. There’s got to be a happy medium – or is that another false assumption?

JWH – 10/28/13

I Am Retired!

Finally, after many years of planning and dreaming, I am retired. I started work with my current employer November 14, 1977, but got my first hourly job back in November, 1967. A month before I turned 16, my mother told me I had to get a job within two weeks of my birthday. I did. I worked 25-33 hours a week while I was in high school. My first job was at the Kwik-Chek in Coconut Grove, Florida – a Winn-Dixie grocery store. My starting pay was $1.40 an hour, but I lucked out and minimum wage zoomed to $1.70 before I left a year later.

And before getting an hourly job, I had worked at mowing lawns, babysitting and two different paper routes. But I was no Horatio Alger, Jr. I hated work – it impinged on my childhood freedoms. I had many jobs between 1967 and 1977, but getting my job at Memphis State University in 1977 coincided with getting married in 1978. I couldn’t just quit a job anymore and move on. I had to settled down.

I always imagined I’d quit that job, never dreaming I’d stay 36 years. Instead I assumed Susan and I would move on to another city and state. We never did. But working for the state for all those years paid off with a nice pension. Plus working at a university was wonderful. In those ten years between my first job and the last, I worked many types of jobs and discovered all the kinds of work I didn’t like.

It took me over ten years to finish college. I ended up working with computers because I had so many computer courses, but ultimately I finished my major in English. I started taking computer courses in 1971 when they were still using punch cards and batch processing programs on an IBM 360 mainframe. I studied FORTAN, Assembly and COBOL. But by the time I got my first real programming job in 1987, I was hired to develop a dBASE III program for a Novell network of microcomputers. After web servers came out, I converted my programs to HTML/ASP/VBScript running on IIS using MS SQL Server. Those programs I developed in 1987 are still running. I wonder how long they will last? In 20-40 years, will someone still be maintaining them?

It’s strange to think that from now on I have no job to go to when I get up in the mornings.

Well, no regular job. My plan is to write novels. That’s my new career. I shall be my own employer. I hope I shall make myself work long hours and be very productive.

JWH – 10/22/13