a better habit than being online when tired

BJ Fogg ("Tiny Habits") acknowledges how hard it is to "break" a bad habit and recommends starting with replacing an undesirable habit with a desirable activity that satisfies the same or similar need, and building that desirable activity into a habit gradually.

If you spend time online when tired and then berate yourself for it, have you considered what you can replace this habit with that would be more constructive?

ummm, sleeping?

sleeping would be the absolute best, agreed

I try sometimes to read instead of being online but when tired I can’t focus, likewise tv. I need to think on this some more, maybe something like putting some hand cream on might be nice.

I like both ideas: reading a physical book and putting hand cream.

I used to spend way too much time online when I was tired—it’s like I didn’t have the energy for anything else, so I’d just scroll endlessly. It got to a point where it made me feel worse, not better.

Well, im not saying that i am decreasing the amount of car chases and crashes that i watch, but i am trying to increase the self-help type of videos, like cooking and cleaning / hoarding. I mean, an old girl has to have SOME excitement in her life!

I just resumed cardio after an injury. Walked on a treadmill for 30 minutes, really slowly, at 2 mph, with an incline. What did I watch? A video about decluttering. A very interesting video advising not to go overboard with it.

No danger of that here!

Don't go overboard pretty much means don’t be like my brother who periodically does extreme decluttering that causes him to go to the stores right after. Last time he decluttered he threw away a tea kettle 🤣

I am more like michelangelo carving his david - i need to chip away anything that is not home.

I wish I could send that video your way for you brother but it is in Russian. The woman narrating it went deep into the psychology underlying going overboard and offered convincingly simple steps for how to curb it. She also started her narration reviewing the Japanese esthetic that inderlies Marie Kondo's approach and argued that the approach is not for everyone and only makes sense against the backdrop of that esthetic.

Sounds interesting Tart Cherry, I find Kondo interesting but I do feel her shows exploit some of the clients and what I feel should be private family issues not used for entertainment- but that’s just my feelings. I however like her folding techniques.

I have only read one of her books on tidying up. I have not seen thr show.

I also have bought one of her products from the Container Store (my favorite store). Spice jar labels. Buy I also bought other brands of spice labels and ended up keeping a different product, not MK. The quality of her product was underwhelming.

By her folding technique, do you by any chance mean rolling instead of folding? I now roll when packing for travel. I have read it is better and I agree based on the little experience I have had. But not sure that came from MK.

I partly practice MK's idea from her book on not moving clothes seasonally but only partly. All my autumn slash winter (slash because I live in Northern California and there is no real winter) are in my coat closet in thr apartment. I simply do not touch them in summer but I do not move them someplace else for half a year. It makes sense and having coats and jackets on hangers all the time prevents wrinkling.

Buy for shoes, I have winter and summer pairs which I swap as I do not have enough space to have both sets at the same time. So the current rotation is on short shelves in my office and the off season rotation is in boxes.

Speaking of shoes, MK recommends shorboxes as the eternal and essential unit of storage, but I much prefer clear plastic boxes from the Container Storage for most things I store. Yes they cost money but they last long and I love seeing at a glance what is inside the box. Labeled opaque boxes have never worked as well for me as clear boxes, labeled or not.

So in my limited experience, MK had helpful pointers but is not a panacea. One still needs to think through one's individual circumstances, needs and likes.

Yeah I now roll everything lol, it does work well but you’re probably right MK has popularised it rather than ‘invented’ it.

I like her method of vertically "filing" rather than horizontally stacking tshirts and undies. The little bit of extra folding is not a hardship for me. I like to fold!

I bought a label maker several years ago, and it is my favorite possession. No more looking for a marker.

My brother is married to a hoarder (my sister in law got better last few years though because her hoarding became major issue in their marriage), so his overboard decluttering was related to that. “Stuff had to go” because he reached high level of frustration.

He in general likes minimalist style of decor. We grew up with messy hoarding parents so we never wanted to live like this so we are both clean freaks. I don’t like minimalist style though, I like to have stuff and more decor but it all has to have a place and be neat and organized

It’s weird how growing up effects us one way or the other, like being opposite of the parents. My daughter is very messy (not hoarding though), she has to have cleaning service regularly or she’ll drown. Go figure

That is most definitely so. Come to think of it, my aunt who is 30 years older than me mentioned this method when I was a teen. She and her husband were a piano duo who gave a lot of concerts and thus traveled a lot for work. So she really needed to develop a method of keeping her clothes wrinkle-feee living out of a suitcase. So that was in the 1980a. Marie Kondo is not old enough to beat that. Of course I do not imply that my aunt invented the rolling method but that it was known back then.

Oh I know Divine! Being the opposite.

I used to spend way too much time online when I was tired—it’s like I didn’t have the energy for anything else, so I’d just scroll endlessly. It got to a point where it made me feel worse, not better.