I used to keep reading goals in the Goodreads app. I used to and still keep a steps goal of 12,000 steps per day on an app and it's there on the watch as well. One of the recent Android work OS I made (with widgets) is also a sort-of productivity goal packed inside a fancy dashboard. I keep writing goals too on the TickTick app. I'm bad at keeping track of and even following almost all of them. They are also not the goals this post is about.
I crave for the part of me that's still offline. You know the one without metric, dashboards, or streaks. I crave for just being.
Like having a room in the house that has no screen in it. Not the simple stuff like television, but even laptops, tablets, phones, or even a smart home speaker. It could become the space where the offline self goes to water plants for thirty minutes. Once every week, I water the plants and for the first minutes I get restless on why didn't I finish watering already only to realise that it's my 'work' mode kicking in. Ten minutes later, the body adapts and I forget to reach for the phone or any other interruptions.
Or like doing a ritual every year where having a full day in a week where the phone doesn't come on. Being completely unreachable by keeping the phone switched off. Nothing happens. Nobody's career ends. I tried doing it once last year and almost got through but couldn't succeed. I'm sure if I can pull that off, the rest of the days of that week will be built around the offline day.
I also want to read one full book in a month. By holding it in hand, a paperback and one that I don't read in parts and carry around with me in my bag to places. It should happen at a particular time every day, with no phone in the room. And the book has to be finished. I currently read books at the airport, on flights, at home with the TV on in the background and even picking the phone to check random things after going ten pages in. I read attentively and take religious notes but I want to lose those situations altogether.
Sometimes, having one long, unhurried, in-person conversation with a person also crosses my mind. And it does happen with one or two of my closest friends. It lasts more than ninety minutes and phones are naturally out of sight. I wish for more of them to happen. you love, every week, for the rest of your life. The conversation has to be at least 90 minutes. Phones are off and out of sight. Nobody is checking anything. The conversation can be at a dinner, on a walk, on the verandah after work. It does happen, with maybe two people. Those go past ninety minutes and we don't reach for the phone. The first twenty minutes are usually nothing. It gets good somewhere around minute thirty, which is about when I'd normally have left.
I love making things by hand. I do this in the form of sketching sometimes, creating notes (or as you know them as blogs), building Legos, and a bunch of other things but in my mind it's also cooking food that my Mom used to make for me, or to create music, a tiny piece of 3D printed miniature furniture, a garden bed? I mean the thing doesn't have to be great but has to exist. I want most of the things in the house to be things I made.
A colleague shared this. And I don't know when will I be able to. To sleep with the phone out of the bedroom. At least once. Then for a week, and then making it a norm. I want the first hour of the morning and last hour of the day to be for my offline self. I don't think it's practically doable for at least the next several years but I have it seeded and some time in the future, when I'm older, I will.
I don't remember the last meal I had where I was not on a Zoom call or in front of a screen. I want to have meals with no phone or screen in front of me and just with people I love, slowly, at a table. I hope that meal to last for at least 45 minutes where I enjoy the food like I used when I was a kid. I remembered that I used to love chewing drumsticks for five to ten minutes. I'm also sure the portion will be less but more filling.
I also want to stay around relatives and friends more. Call me dreamy but Modern Family planted that dream in my head years ago. I want to visit them once a month, in person, with no agenda and have tea. The visit can be at their house, our house, at a wedding, a hospital, a funeral, or on a regular Sunday. Just like my childhood where we don't look at the clock during the visit. If some of the books are right and I can see them to be, I'd be a more anchored person.
I also think about having one private, sustained, un-shared project that I work on for an hour a week, that nobody knows about, for at least a year. I did that once while selecting a property years ago. But yes.. the principle is to do the project not to post on social media. It'd simply be to get the thing done. Like making a miniature world in the terrace garden with 3D-printed objects. The project will be dreadfully slow for my liking but it'll probably become one of the most important thing for me in the week.
A note. I do some of these. I listed these because the wishes for these goals are real and the failure to keep them is also real.
An hour a week I can do. A meal in peace I can do. A book, the conversation, the room… not sure.