People don't explore enough. They rely on cached thoughts and actions to get through their day, not even trying to solve most of their problems, be they major or minor. The solution is simple. Do one new thing a day to solve one of your problems. That's what I did for one month.
It worked.
Intellectually, I knew that annoying, persistent problems are often solved with 5 seconds of true thought. But it still suprised me to see so many of my problems, even major ones, yield to a brief burst of focused thought each day.
For example, I had a wobbly chair. It was wobbling more as time went on, and I worried it would break. One day, I decided to try something new: spend a minute tracing down the cause of the problem. 1 minute and 10 turns of an Allen key later, my chair wobbled no more.
Another example, the one that started this self-experiment: I had a minute attention span. I kept wasting all my time constantly refreshing pages till they would refresh in the hopes of getting the tiniest of dopamine hits. This sucked. I couldn't read anything longer than a page without getting distracted, I couldn't practice skills for more than a moment, or write anything longer than a tweet. Then I decided to try something new.
First, I blocked out two hours in the morning, banning all electronics. This sorta worked. I spent the morning exercising my brain and my brawn. But my momentum would fade after the two hours were up. A few days later, I decided to go to the library after my electronic fast. This sorta worked, too. I did not doom scroll in the library.
But alas! The internet is infested with attention-hijacking processes which are out to get you. They got their hooks back in, my friends. I doom scrolled in the library. So I divided my day in two hour blocks. For two hours, I could use electronics, then for two hours I could not. Rinse and repeat. This kinda worked. I thought that the two hour blocks would halt the feedback loops of the attention-hijackers. I was cocky.
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