Andrew Melder

While I’m not depressed or at a sort of life crossroads; I do feel overwhelmed and not keeping up. I’ve never been great at coordination, to-do lists and time management, but I feel more out of sequence on what I need to do than ever before.

This maybe a result of a culmination of life events highlighting my existing inefficiencies. However it does feel like my ongoing struggle to maintain healthy online habits may be an unnecessary factor here.

I’ve posted previously on how I manage my online habits, particularly on my phone. Restrictions I place on when and where I use online services but I still feel distracted. I don’t hate my time on social platforms, indeed there are some great communities of likeminded interests; however it doesn’t stop it feeling like it’s taking away my focus and time on other things I should be doing.

It maybe time for a change. A hard cutoff from the online services. Not just from my phone, not just logging off from them and resisting; a full detox and deletion.

The question I keep coming back to internally is: do any of these microblogging services actually provide more value in my life than what it takes from me?

No doubt, I’ve interacted and actually met some cool people in my online interactions. Some of them I may lose contact with. That part of the disconnect will suck.

I also know I can’t just disconnect from it all and expect other items to magically get better. I hope to use more of my focus to improve my ability to organise and get life items addressed.

Then there’s aspects of real life that now blends into the online life that gets slightly more annoying to disconnect.

My kids sporting clubs and school groups are all on Facebook. While I don’t personally have much of an issue with Facebook usage, I would love to still turn that tap off. However, I also don’t think it would be very fair to dump those things for my wife to keep track of for me.

I will discuss with her before I decide on that one.

Outside of Facebook, the plan is to get rid of the following: Instagram, Threads, Reddit, one of my micro.blogs, a few small forums I’m part of, and even Mastodon.

LinkedIn is an interesting one. It feels like a need to have given I’m in the technology industry. I know you can very much communicate and connect without it, but I’m not a natural face-to-face communicator and connector. Networking is hard enough as it is for me; the added friction of trying to do so without a LinkedIn connection feels a step too much.

I don’t have a firm date of when I will pull the plug, but it will be sooner rather than later. It’s coming up to the beginning of May; a new month seems like a good a time as any.

Adapting how I journal to the medium

After I wrote on why I type my daily journal over handwriting, I thought I would challenge myself during March and handwrite my journal everyday instead of using my trusty digital word processor.

After 30 days, I felt slightly more comfortable with the notion of hand writing my journal. And while the long term lessons are probably yet to be determined, there is one key difference I’ve noticed between the two types of journaling.

Stream of consciousness vs deliberate thought journaling

One thing that became very clear to me early on was that I had to change how I wrote in my handwritten journal over my word processed ones: I needed to slow down.

My typed journaling is very much a stream of consciousness given my comfort with typing. It’s not that difficult for me to write the equivalent of a couple of pages of thoughts in the morning without much effort, and it’s fairly easy for me to get into a flow state of writing.

When handwriting I find it more frustrating. While over the course of 30 days I found myself getting more comfortable with handwriting much of that was due to forcing myself to slow down and be more deliberate with my thoughts, and in turn physically slow down my writing.

I see this as being a different kind of journaling: deliberate thoughts versus a stream of consciousness.

Forcing myself to take the time to write a deliberate thought, instead of trying to write as fast as I can to keep up with my mind, resulted in less words on a page for sure. However my main goal of journaling is not to write the most words, but to gather my thoughts and work through things so they aren’t cluttering my brain.

In the end, both methods achieve the same goal just in different ways.

Slowing down the mind through deliberate journaling has its benefits

My mind is very much prone to overthinking things; both a blessing in some scenarios and a curse. One of the other goals of journaling is to just get the clutter out of my head to clear up space for what matters.

Stream of consciousness journaling is one way to achieve this well. However, sometimes if the brain is already working overtime and a bit tired it might not help with actually calming your mind down, despite whatever you end up writing on the page.

More deliberate handwriting of a journal; taking your time and re-writing a word of a sentence just get the thought appropriately documented, can be more useful in calming a manic mind.

So which method am I using moving forward?

The truth is I’m not sure which way I’m going to go.

Using my word processor this morning to write my journal felt a little odd. I found myself wanting to get the tablet to handwrite.

However the other part of the equation is my desire to write more posts and articles about topics and items I enjoy. While I found myself enjoying the handwriting experience, I also found myself not sitting down to write as much outside of my journal time. As I did this morning with drafting this article, my flow sometimes involves moving between my journal file and article file and writing in both in the morning sessions. And I have no desire to handwrite these blog posts.

The other part is I don’t actually do anything yet with the journal notes, handwritten or typed. I back them up since they are all digital, but I have no plans to really use them once they are done. That might change with future technology possibly able to analyse our previous thoughts to get better insights for us to use, so a typed journal would be better for that use case.

In the end, I might try and keep up the handwriting practice for a little longer.

Today has been a little humbling, with some much needed perspective being indirectly provided.

Sometimes we get so caught our own worlds. Focused on the issues in our own little rat race that we lose sight of the importance of what we do have.

Perspective is needed to keep on track emotionally.

It’s not that we must feel grateful (or put a positive spin) for everything in our lives, good or bad. Using perspective, we turn down the amplification of items that may not be going well so we are no longer overwhelmed by them.

Remaining focused on what’s possible to solve our issues, freeing us to take action instead of being paralysed when we catastrophise the scenario.

My mind seems to be sabotaging me again.

Taking quite a privileged position at work and turning it into a “fight or flight” scenario; getting my anxiety up and wondering what’s next?

Once again, I find myself unfulfilled at work and I’m struggling with it. Most of the time (like right now) I can move forward and put my job as just a way to provide a lifestyle.

This morning was a different feeling though. A vagueness in my attitude, a lack of drive to do anything, a lack of energy just to move. Black dog, I know you well.

Thankfully I know the drill: you will come up with the worst possible scenarios to mull over. I have to identify them, accept it’s my brain being unreasonable, and move forward.

Always move forward. Never ignoring the minds tricks, but not wasting energy battling them and let it pass.

Context is key. I have choices here, my job itself isn’t actually bad, I have a reserve of leave available if I absolutely need it, home life has the usual stresses but we are in a far better position than most.

Balance. Not all about career happiness but not being afraid to pursue it. Not assuming the grass is greener elsewhere while also keeping the door open if something better is available.

Deep breaths. Slow the manic mind. Gratitude. Things will be fine.

Anxiety falls, clarity appears.

Move forward.

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately. Not entirely focused on anything, lacking any productivity.

So three days ago, I made a change: I disabled my Threads, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts.

Since then, I can’t say I’m magically more productive; however I do feel like the noise has been reduced in my world. I suspect this is the lack of algorithm-based feeds in my life with these three social networks removed. I’m still on others like Mastodon, YouTube & Reddit, but the ability to turn off or ignore any algorithmic feed (if they have any) is useful.

I can go into these services, use them and then move on without the pull of the dopamine reward of the pull-to-refresh function coming along.

Thinking about it further and reading a post from Lee Peterson on the subject, I’m starting to look at reducing my consumption of podcasts throughout the day.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but many of them are simply background noise as I go through my day. This is not helpful for my focus, as the voices and discussion tend to hamper my own thought process.

So while I haven’t deleted my podcast app yet, I’m making a conscious effort to no longer randomly put them on in the background.

We shall see if any of these changes stick. I suspect professionally I may seek to reenable LinkedIn at some point. The dopamine part of me misses Threads, but I think about how at ease my brain has been since I disabled it. Instagram only exists to give me access to Threads, so that it pretty easy to keep off.

I don't really celebrate birthdays.

I believe a lot of that comes down to spending most of my late teens and early twenties being very depressed. My naturally negative mindset would lead my self worth down some dark paths before I developed some methods to address it.

As a result birthdays were often a day of internal torment; a day meant to celebrate but often felt like there was nothing to celebrate. This of course would move me into a deeper depressive state, leading me to try many things to avoid referencing the day at all. Thankfully nothing super negative but I would often take the day to turn off my phone and drive south of the state where I didn't know anyone personally to avoid any reference to my birthday at all.

To this day despite my life and mindset being significantly better (although the mind isn't fully addressed), the initial response to my birthday is one of dread. I often do my best to not remember it at all and find that I currently just tolerate it because celebrating my birthday brings joy to my wife and kids.

I'm quickly realising that there are still some unresolved negative traits in my mindset, ingrained from years of depression that I haven't moved forward from.

Any sort of self-praise in my mind is associated with an inflated sense of self-worth. As a result I'm terrible at any sort of acknowledgment of the work I do; whether its self-acknowledgement in performance reviews or feeling extremely awkward, almost to the point of embarrassment, when others call it out for me. "Isn't that what you pay me to do?" is always my first and most prominent feeling; not really accepting of any good work I've done.

Combined with a leaning towards introversion and high social anxiety levels, any form of networking on a personal or professional level has been a dead end. With the exception of being around the handful of my closet family and best friends; I'm never at ease or comfortable with myself. It's exhausting and often leads me to just wanting to be home where I feel comfortable and safe.

I feel sorry for my poor wife, who is at times the polar opposite of me socially. She's the only reason I got to my end of year work gatherings; which is causing me additional dread this year as it's my 10 year anniversary and work often does a presentation for those who reach that milestone. I only have to get my name called out and stand out with a bunch of others for 5 minutes but it makes me anxious just thinking about it. I've have been close to cancelling the RSVP a few times, my wife is the only reason I don't.

Of course, the fact that this self-negativity is one of my major concerns in my life is such a privilege compared to what most of the world is going though. The reason I have been more focused on it recently is I see these negative mindset traits in my kids occasionally as they get older. Wanting to help them avoid what I've put myself through is a powerful motivator. Hopefully the journey of self-discovery I'm currently doing will help me teach them the tools needed to avoid or manage their own doubts in the future.

Honestly I don't know why I'm prompted to write let alone publish this today. Quite possibly the simple act of writing it down is purely cathartic.

One day, I hope I can be in a mindset to actually celebrate my own birthday. Until then, I'll take the joy it brings to my kids as enough for now.