Following right along from the previous tip (Day 3), on the topic of physical and mental exhaustion (aka "burnout") on SteemIt, let's talk more about the most extreme type of burnout. That is, when your addiction to SteemIt has pushed your body and mind to the point where they begin to malfunction, shut down, and need some SERIOUS rest and recovery in order for you to return to your SteemIt activities refreshed and productive.
Keeping Your Organic Vehicle In Working Condition
The scientific reality is that your body and mind are like any other organic systems, in that they have a metabolism which is dependent on proper intake of nutrients, and a proper amount of rest and recovery. In other words, like a car, you can't just keep running yourself at full-speed, indefinitely, and not expect your "vehicle" to malfunction. The most common ways that the mind and body can malfunction from excessive SteemIt use include: sleep deprivation, cognitive decline due to excessive information processing, physical stress disorders (RSI - "Repetitive Stress Injury") resulting from overuse of physical body parts in interacting with the computer. In this post I will examine more deeply the sleep deprivation and cognitive issues, and will give RSI its own dedicated post(s) into the future.
Sleep Deprivation Kills Through 1,000 Cuts
The detrimental effects of sleep deprivation of VERY real, can become VERY SERIOUS, and have been - and continue to be - thoroughly researched through hard science. These kinds of disorders have literally grown to epidemic proportions, as the global masses are increasingly attached to their computers and devices. The main issue I see with SteemIt is that of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is one of the NASTIEST health epidemics which humanity is increasingly facing in this age of 24/7 information overload. SteemIT feeds us a continuous stream of interesting content from people across the globe, in different time zones, which creates a recipe for disaster for those of us who are not able to find a way to manage our activity, and practice proper "sleep hygiene". Trust me, I have been living with chronic insomnia for my entire adult life, so there is ZERO preaching going on here by THIS guy. But perhaps my personal experience in finding ways to manage chronic insomnia will be helpful to all of those reading. This is a SERIOUS - and GROWING - public health problem, folks, and so if my research and writing efforts can help some people cope with this problem then I will consider it a humanitarian effort.
How Sleep Deprivation Destroys The Body and Mind
When the body is deprived of sleep it REALLY starts to break down. Both the physical and mental processes are affected, and the degree of problems proceeds EXPONENTIALLY as you continue to fight your body's natural urge to sleep and recover. How many times have we reached that point where we're sitting up half-conscious at 3 am just trying to summon enough energy to read that "one last" SteemIt article before retiring for the night? Or should I say "retiring for the morning"? How many of us have reached for natural stimulants (such as tea, coffee, etc.) to give us that "nitro boost" to get us through that "one last article", and thereby simply TRICK the body into further deterioration, as it will need to also recover from the additional time you have been awake due to the stimulants? Or how many of us have resorted to those tasty Big Pharma neurotoxins to "take the edge off". I think you get the drift.
Here's a good article examining the effect of sleep deprivation on the major systems of the body and mind :
The Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Your Body
http://www.healthline.com/health/sleep-deprivation/effects-on-body
Cognitive and Mood Decline Resulting From Sleep Deprivation
For this article, I think the most important issue to address is the cognitive and mood decline which accompanies sleep deprivation, as these two nasties are the ones which MOST affect our productivity on SteemIT. As you proceed deeper into the sleep-deprived state, as in when you are up into the early hours of the morning consuming content, your brain is becoming progressively less efficient at processing information. You start to feel that nasty "brain fog", have difficulty remembering important facts to develop in your articles, find yourself becoming more easily frustrated (since your mood-regulation capacity is declining), etc. Therefore, if our main goal on SteemIt is to produce the MOST high-quality content possible, and thereby receive the most high-quality response possible, then it appears logically counterproductive to push ourselves to this "point of diminishing productivity". So, why do we do it? Well, mainly because we have not developed a proper "productivity strategy" for our SteemIt efforts.
Success on SteemIt requires developing a proper "productivity strategy" which maximizes your productivity, and minimizes wasteful activity. As we all know, there are just a finite number of hours in the day. You CAN'T do it all. It is just that simple. So, what we need to do is develop a system which allows us to COMFORTABLY accomplish our unique goals in a way which minimizes our exposure to nasties such as sleep deprivation. Everyone will devise a strategy which is unique to their needs, but the important thing is that once we have devised an effective strategy, we STICK to it.
Developing Your SteemIt Productivity Strategy
The subject of developing a productivity strategy is a multifaceted one, and so I will be expanding on this process in future posts. For now, the first step we need to take in the process is to figure out what our "manageable" threshold for information processing is, as well as what your general sleep needs are. That is, can you handle COMFORTABLY consuming a maximum 5-10 SteemIt articles per day? Can you do 15? Do you also need time to develop your own posts, and thus have to drop your curation time down a few notches to account for this? The first step in developing your productivity strategy is to do a "productivity audit", where you simply monitor and estimate the AMOUNT of time/effort required to process the amount of information you desire in one day on SteemIt. As this first step is an ACTIVE task I will prescribe it to all readers of this post for homework, and intende to use your feedback to expand on the next step(s) in the process. So, go ahead and keep a simple .txt file log of ALL of your SteemIt activity over the next few days. Focus on "getting a rough feel" for the amount of time and effort required to get your desired tasks accomplished on SteemIt. Also, be sure to focus on getting a sense for your "SteemIt threshold". That is, at what point do you start migrating into the "point of diminishing SteemIt returns"? Like a body-builder, we want to get a sense of our SteemIt productivity threshold so that we can push ourselves JUST hard ENOUGH to achieve maximum productivity, but NOT TOO hard that we go into the danger zone.
Try this out, and feel free to comment so I can fine-tune the future posts on this girthy topic.
Full Steam Ahead...
