Splitting these into things that are time investments and things that you want to stop doing is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is to divide things into recurring and non-recurring time investments. For example, exercising regularly is a recurring time investment, that takes a few hours every week; but scouting out gyms, choosing an exercise routine and setting the precedent for doing it is a one-time investment. For things that look like recurring time investments, or that look daunting, try to split off one-shot tasks that move you in the right direction.
Spending a higher percentage of the time working at a computer actually getting stuff done, instead of getting distracted by the internet.
More concretely: Install Leechblock (or a similar plugin) to either give yourself a time limit, or limit which times of the day you can surf in. Make your blogreading more efficient with RSS feeds. Choose the site with the lowest intellectual content to addictiveness ratio and delete it from your bookmarks.
finding some recurring activity where I'll probably meet the same people over and over to improve the odds of making longterm friends.
More concretely: Browse meetup.com and similar sites for recurring activities in your area which others have organized.
Improving my diet, which mostly means eating less cheese. I really like cheese, so this is difficult.
It is much easier to change your diet by adding things than by removing things. To displace cheese, add other sources of fat and protein. However, removing cheese from your diet would not necessarily be an improvement, and it's unlikely to be the best available improvement.
Stop making so many off-color jokes. Somewhere there is a line between doing it ironically and actually contributing to overall weight of prejudice, and I think I've crossed that line.
More concretely: come up with some general-purpose jokes that aren't off-color, and start using those instead.
Somehow stop losing things so much, and/or being generally careless/clumsy. I lost my wallet and dropped my lap top in the space of a month, and manage to lose a wide array of smaller things on a regular basis. It ends up costing me a lot of money.
More concretely: cultivate the habit of checking your inventory whenever you exit a building (even if you really do have everything). Put some thought into how you manage the inventory items you tend to carry. Throw out any clothes with insufficient pockets.
Thought I'd check in and let people now how their advice has paid off so far:
Just wanted to followup on how these suggestions have actually worked out for me:
1) I installed "Stay Focused" (Leechblock for chrome). It has definitely helped, although I'm not sure how much. At the very least it makes me aware of how much time i'm spending. An issue is that approximately every few minutes, the programs I work with take 30 - 200 seconds to save or open a file (I do computer animation), so a substantial fraction of the day is spent waiting, during which...
Lately I've been identifying a lot of things about myself that need improvement and thinking about ways to fix them. This post is intended to A) talk about some overall strategies for self-improvement/goal-focusing, and B) if anyone's having similar problems, or wants to talk about additional problems they face, discuss specific strategies for dealing with those problems.
Those issues I'm facing include but are not limited to:
Of those things, three of them are things that require me to actively dedicate more time (finding an apartment, getting exercise, social life), and the others mostly consist of NOT doing things (eating cheese, making bad jokes, losing things, getting distracted by the internet), unless I can find some proactive thing to make it easier to not do them.
I *feel* like I have enough time that I should be able to address all of them at once. But looking at the whole list at once is intimidating. And when it comes to the "not doing bad thing X" items, remembering and following up on all of them is difficult. The worst one is "don't lose things." There's no particular recurring theme in how I lose stuff, or they type of stuff I Iose. I'm more careful with my wallet and computer now, but spending my entire life being super attentive and careful about *everything* seems way too stressful and impractical.
I guess my main question is: when faced with a list of things that don't necessarily require separate time to accomplish, how many does it make sense to attempt at once? Just one? All of them? I know you're not supposed to quit drinking and smoking at the same time because you'll probably accomplish neither, but I'm not sure if the same principle applies here.
There probably isn't a universal answer to this, but knowing what other people have tried and accomplished would be helpful.
Later on I'm going to discuss some of the problems in more detail (I know that the brief blurbs are lacking a lot of information necessary for any kind of informed response, but a gigantic post that about my own problems seemed... not exactly narcissistic... but not appropriate as an initial post for some reason)