Spaceship you (CGP Grey's newest video on lockdown productivity)

I really liked this and thought I’d post it here for others to see too, if you haven’t already. Enjoy!

I’ve got some thoughts and plans related to it, but I don’t want to prime anyone in any particular direction before you’ve even watched it for yourself and had your own thoughts about it!

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Really timely and relevant, thank you for posting this :slight_smile:

Personally, I thought this connected some really useful ideas/findings (re: choosing particular places to do certain things as well as the interplay of physical and mental health) that are emphasised throughout popular productivity/motivation work like the Motivation Hacker and Procrastination Equation to our current situations and helped make them more tangible.

What kind of thoughts did you have about the video?

(Also, one thing that I thought was cool was the focus on creation; being new to Beeminder, I recently did a read through the archives and saw that Brent Yorgey had a Beeminder goal for creating one thing a day which I remembered bc of this video and have added a task to try this in future!)

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Yeah, I liked this too. I think I have been taking some of this stuff for granted because I’ve been forced into it by the combination of caring for my family + still having to do a bunch of work for my job (I teach at a college in the US and have been teaching online for the past five weeks (wow, has it really already been five weeks!?)). But the semester is almost over and it’s about to become a lot more relevant as my summer is going to be pretty much completely unstructured. This video was a good reminder to think really intentionally about how I want to organize my time and space during the summer.

I like the focus on creation too. My ‘create’ goal that @nestairov mentioned is easy to keep up during the semester, especially now that I’m recording video lectures, but again, I will have to plan for it more deliberately over the summer!

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Great video!

Working from home became so much easier once we got an apartment with an extra room that would be solely my office space.

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Good stuff! (And is that a very subtle Beeminder plug at 0m35s? Ok, probably a coincidence.)

Attempt to summarize:

Mission: emerge from lockdown better than when you entered.

Create physically separated areas for different activities:

  1. Sleep
  2. Exercise
  3. Work/creation
  4. Recreation/relaxation/entertainment

If you’re failing to stay focused on work, physically leave that area and try again later. Same with sleep and everything else. Be strict about the physical separations. Only do the sanctified activity in the sanctified borders.

Make sleep super consistent, beemind a minimum for exercise, and a maximum for recreation.

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When I saw that I was hoping so hard this was going to be a revelation that Mr. Grey is a Beeminder user. Alas… :cry:

What was it? I’m not going to watch the video but I’m curious what the possible beeminder reference was.

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@zedmango:

reference

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Ok, did a bit more research, and it seems like this is just a CGP Grey thing.

“I’m going to let this one slide because, oh man, do I love hiding stuff in videos! And it brings me tremendous joy when people find all the things! For example, have you found all the bees? There’s a lot of them now” (Q&A With Grey: Favorites Edition, starting at 1:49).

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I like how the spaceship metaphor takes the viewer away from themselves and makes it easier to accept the suggestions.

But why is nobody talking about the elephant in the room?
If you use your bed exclusively for sleeping, what about sex? Do you have an own isolated zone just for that, too? :wink:

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Sex is only allowed in the recreation/relaxation/entertainment areas. NOT ALLOWED in the sanctified sleeping area. Put up big “no sex” signs to remind yourself. There is no sex in the champagne room.

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We have a “yoga chaise”. Not an official boundary but it basically keeps the sleeping area single-purpose. Highly recommend

Great video! No new ideas for me, but definitely a reminder to do better at this stuff, and I love the spaceship metaphor.

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How does it work?

Just enables a variety of more ergonomic positions. I’ll let you google that, haha.

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This video convinced me to get a room divider/shoji screen so that I can tuck my work desk away at night by moving it in front of it and then pull it back while I’m working so that I can sit in front of it and so that it kind fo blocks off the view of the relaxation space when it’s work time. I’ve picked it out and just have to order it. I think it’ll help make the division between when I’m working and when I’m not more salient.

I used to create this division, in a previous apartment, by having a desk at which I only ever did work (fairly strictly, actually) and it did quickly put me into work mode when I sat down and raised the barrier for doing non-work things that normally you’d just pop open a tab for. If you have to unplug your external hard drive and carry your laptop to the couch to check news or Twitter or non-work email, it’s a lot less enticing. It also meant that when I chose to relax, it wasn’t just stealing a minute here and there and so felt more compltely relaxing.

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