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I'm reading this book "The Guinea Pig Diaries" and so is Jeremiah. I started by just reading one chapter after he read it because he was laughing so often while reading it and I was curious. Then I skipped ahead to another chapter with an interesting premise. And so forth until I'm almost done the book though it's completely out of order because I honestly didn't think it would be good enough to bother reading like normal.  I'm in the middle of a bunch of other books right now and didn't want to waste my valuable free time on a gamble.

The premise is that this guy would subject his life to some premise for about a month and write about how it went.  Contrived, right? But he's a really funny guy. And he actually has some interesting insights too. Enough that I'm adding a few of his trials to my potential New Years Resolution list.  Here are the ones I could go with:

1) Uni-tasking as opposed to multi-tasking.  He takes it to the extreme of not talking while eating, not thinking while trying to fall asleep, not listening to music while driving, etc.  That is not sustainable for anyone not in the monkhood.

I am the queen multi-tasker.  I do it every day with my kids and my work and I've been known to add so many tasks in at once that things get broken and burnt and confused and whatever else.  Sometimes I find myself inadvertently being disrespectful to people and things because my attention gets spread too thin.  I've already made major steps toward compartmentalizing my work so that it doesn't compete for my attention with my kids so much.  I'm also "training" my kids to practice patience and independence so that I can get some things done for a few minutes (which gets it done faster) and then I can give them a healthy dose of quality attention and so on.  But I could use a self-imposed limit to keep me in check. As his chapter points out, research has shown that the more you multi-task, the poorer your performance, your speed, and your recognizance (I'm always wondering how things got done bc I don't remember doing it. Forget about having a recollection of the drive home from work!). 

2) Radical Honesty. He tries to remove the filter between his brain and his mouth. This is not just blatant honesty. It is uncalled for honesty. It's being a dick. 

I don't want to do that at all. Not at all. I believe in sparing people's feelings. I think being nice is being nice, not avoiding your responsibilities from one human to another (as was theorized). 

But I could stand to cut some of the little white lies. I avoid telling some people what I really think because I don't want to hurt their feelings. I tell my kids things like "we can't eat that cookie now because we don't eat cookies in the morning" even though I know that's not a rule and I myself often eat cookies in the mornings. I smile even when I'm not happy and I say "fine" even when that's not how I'm really feeling. I could do with a little more honesty. What I love is that his honesty begat honesty from others. I'd love to be engaged in more authentic communication sometimes. 

But this is just a side note. I would never waste a New Years Resolution on something as subjective as honesty.  Plus it wouldn't be a good political move (just being honest).

There are other interesting concepts there too but right now I got myself all worked up into reading that book some more and I'd rather do that than this. (honesty again)