As I began my perpective experiment it occured to me that I never offered my final reflections from my distraction experiment. Time to make a mends…
In 2010 I began my disctraction experiment. Over about eight months I gradually added eight items to my list of things which seemed like possible distractions and which I would try to avoid for the remainder of the year. They were: TV, chocolate, junk food, “stuff”, daydreaming, negativity and cynicism, technology and the internet (see the original posts for explanations of the implications of each one).
I had some successes and some failures along the way–and some very strange looks from people who I tried to explain the experiment to–but I did discover a few things in the process. Firstly, the road bumps…
Replacements
One thing I discovered very quickly in the experiment was how easy it was to replace one distraction with another. This lead me to the belief that while the idea of the experiment was good, it needed something more. I needed to be asking, “What am I replacing it with?” This became something of a theme for me for the year as I recognised that I often tried to make possitive change which would end up being fruitless. When getting rid of something negative in life I needed to fill the space with something positive, or I was ultimately unsuccsessful.
The feeling of failure
There were points at which I didn’t achieve what I wanted to. This takes a bit of managing. How do we fail but keep going without feeling like a failure. The times where I dealt with this well were when I admitted it, recognised that I was human, and went straight back to my resolve. The times where I didn’t were when I justified the failure and pretended like I hadn’t deviated from the resolve.
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