The Blockade

It's time again to look towards self-improvement. I have more a desire for cleanliness and order than I have the discipline to obtain those things. It feels incredibly good to walk freely about my room without fear of clutter, but tidying up is often beyond me. The merits of a room that smells nicely (or at least doesn't smell of anything) are self-evident, but I have a very difficult time keeping the things that make smells out of there.

The main thing is food. I'm about always eating, and I'm about always on my computer. My computer is in my room, and so the food invariably follows. I have been meaning to stop eating meals in my bedroom because of the very issue I outlined above, to say nothing of the crumbs that accompany the eating and the odors. Between the cleanup and the difficulty of keeping myself from eating in my bedroom, it's hard to say which is worse.

You'd think that it would be easy to get myself to eat in front of the television in the living room. Well, I did do that with success in the past. I blame other things for that. We had a couch and a coffee table. On the coffee table I could lay my laptop, and adjacent to my laptop I could have my food. Provided that I didn't go from laptop to food or vice-versa without washing my hands, it was a pretty good system, and I didn't have messes in my bedroom or in the living room to any serious degree.

That wasn't a really true solution, though. Better would be if I didn't need all of the distractions to be in a certain place. When eating, it should be all about that act. We convince ourselves that we are more productive when we multitask, but we are less so. I don't eat any faster or get work done any faster when I eat and work on the computer. Worse, I enjoy my meal less when partly attentive to the computer. Now that I have some good food, that really is a shame. It's my hope that I can get my meals away from tv or computer and just focus on the food.