For me, dreaming bigger starts with clearing my own path. With a full time job and an active social life, it often seems like there's no time for being creative and working on my own projects. But deep down, I know that it's me not taking the initiative and devoting time to them. So today, it's time to put on the gardening gloves and weed out the traps and time sinks that are easy to fall into, but hard to escape.
As someone who spends a lot of time doing research online, I'm very prone to the internet rabbit hole. Whether it's the quicksand of a Buzzfeed list article or the bear trap of a pointless personality quiz, I want to avoid negative, empty interruptions.
Distractions can be good. In fact, I often get my best writing done when I allow myself to be distracted. I'll find out a nugget of information to weave into a story, or rest my brain for long enough to think of that rhyme I've been searching for. But Chrome and her cookies are on my tail with personalised clickbait, ready to pull me into a world of banal sports gossip and pictures of well-dressed micropigs.
Worst of all for me is what I call the 'clever clickbait.' The stuff that gets me even when I think I'm on high alert. A good example is this one from Zergnet: "Workers reveal what it's really like to work at a buffet." The part of me that makes me click is expecting a riveting account of the buffet industry from the people who felt trapped by their hospitality job - clearly I've been spoiled by podcasts.
The rest of me knows what's coming: endless ad-filled pages of mildly amusing, mostly disgusting stories grabbed off Reddit about what customers do when they want to pay as little as possible to eat as much as they can.
I'm not saying it's an intrinsically bad thing, but it's literally designed to make you spend as long as possible looking at adverts. And that's time I could be spending being creative. So I'm trying to be more discerning, and make sure advertisers can't just scoff at my attention buffet for free.
The other big time sink I'm trying to change my perspective on is video games. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. They're great for when I've had a very busy day or week, and I need to relax while also engaging my brain. They sit nicely in between just watching TV and actually being creative.
But there came a point where I would be looking for any spare moment when I could squeeze in some video game time. And that's not helpful when it comes to dreaming bigger. If I have a spare half an hour, I want to work on that sketch idea, or call that pub to find out if we can use their upstairs room. With a full-time job taking up my time, I should be taking advantage of those moments, not just letting them pass.
Do you still fall for clever clickbait? Could you be making better use of your fleeting moments? If you want to dream bigger with me, think about what your traps and time sinks are and how you can shake them off.
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