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Goncharenko centre Lviv, 2025-11-13: Doing effort to improve your life: Making time by not wasting time [ pre meeting text ]
Prepared overview for the 3rd meeting
Before this meeting, read the meeting notes of 2025-11-6 and 2025-11-10, try to watch the videos mentioned on this page and try to implement my suggestions from meeting 1 which I repeated in the pre-meeting notes of this and the 2nd meeting about removing distractions from your life. See how you feel after 1 day: Does it improve your life?
Plan for the 3rd meeting:
- A recap of parts of meeting 1 + 2,
- how to make time (by not wasting time) for if you feel you do not have enough time to do a lot of tasks.
- The purpose of these meetings, message between me and a translator and response from someone in Kremenchuk.
- Then your input on topics for coming meetings.
-I will probably leave most of the details of the starting topic of doing effort for yourself and avoiding procrastination, for yourself to read. You can read the full text from the link below in which I deal with more of my suggestions on how to deal with a limited amount of time, how to select on which task or hobby or sport you want to spend more time and how you should view spending time and not seeing progress on long term goals.
Note: These meetings are essentially about improving your life, by providing insight and methods. So I thought we can add something: Think about something in your life that you want to be different, maybe changing your mindset could help this become reality. Or perhaps you have problems dealing with some people? We can discuss many more ways of changing your views of life (than just stopping procrastination and doing more effort for yourself), and how to deal with people in later meetings, using what I explained in my "List of life"... (see meeting 1 from Kremenchuk and the overview at the end of this page).
If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, you can email me or send a message via Telegram. See the bottom of this page for contact details.
Note: Here is the full text of what I prepared for the meeting of 2025-11-13. After the meeting I added information and additional things we talked about to that page.
Improving your understanding, changing your attitude
Videos, if possible watch these before this 3rd meeting
Watch these short youtube videos on procrastination. Do you think the methods work? Why or why not? Does anything else stand out? (Such as, it may make you think: "this is insightful", or the contrary: "this is nonsense", perhaps something else?)
Exercises part 1: Improve your concentration (I mentioned these in meeting 1)
My recommendations from meeting 1, to improve concentration, remove distractions and force yourself for 1 task to concentrate on finishing it even if you don't like that task:
- you need to do something that costs effort and that you don't like.
- switch off notifications of any 'likes' and anything you don't need, on youtube and other apps.
- try a day without music. [ I mentioned to various people, such as in the meetings in the Goncharenko centre in Kremenchuk, that I never have background music on, because then I can't properly listen to the music and if I do listen properly to the background music then I can't concentrate on the tasks in hand... ]
- use Brave browser to block almost all ads on the internet.
- use Revanced or Brave browser to watch youtube. Both block all advertisements there.
Exercises for the coming 2 weeks
Exercises part 2: The coming 2 weeks: Improve your concentration
Continuing with preventing wasting your time:
- do not watch any 'youtube shorts'. Disable the shorts display/menu in the revanced app.
- do not watch bad channels on youtube nor in other places (instagram, facebook)
- don't play stupid games on your phone.
- don't engage in stupid conversations, try to talk about meaningful, interesting things only.
Exercises part 3: The coming 2 weeks: Improve your ability to analyse and stop worrying
Do this every day:
- Try to imagine why someone does or says something. That improves your ability to analyse/to reason.
- Try to let worries go. It takes time, but I have given the recipe in my list of life and it works. From 1) understanding that worrying does nothing useful for you, nor for anyone else, you go to 2) awareness after some time (which means you don't need to remind yourself about the fact that worrying accomplishes nothing), and then to 3) feeling, at which point you mastered it. See the first meeting at the Goncharenko centre in Kremenchuk for more explanation.
Summary of principles discussed in meeting 1 in Kremenchuk about my "list of life"
Negative emotions are signals that you need to make a change in your life (change = take some action, or change your thinking).
How to look at the past, and not have regrets: Each time you think about the past:
- Look back, but accept life: "What happened happened, you cannot change the past".
- Each time you do think about the past say to yourself: "I did the best I could, given the circumstances, given my personality" (otherwise you would have chosen a different action!).
- Use your past experiences only to improve your decision making process: "I will use my past experiences to improve my decision making, that is all I can do with looking back".
How to look at worrying (with a 'problem'), each time you have problem:
- Keep this in mind (1): "Do not worry because worrying does not fix any problems. Worrying only makes you feel bad.
- Keep this in mind (2): : "Accept what happens in life because: I can't control the world, I can only control what I do."
- What you need to then do is this (3): You identify a 'problem', then you seek a solution, then think "the only thing I can do is my best." to not feel negative about any aspect of this process of dealing with issues in life.
Worrying has been reduced to having a 'problem', so then we can continue: How to look at 'problems' as not problems but challenges, so not something negative but simply life, something to which you need to find a solution, nothing more. No negative feeling.
There are 3 stages to go from seeing 'problems' to 'just something I need to deal with':
- Stage 1: When you have a problem, think back to these phrases: (1) "A problem is a pessimist's view to a challenge", (2) "Many people have far bigger problems in life!".
- Stage 2: Do that every time with any problem: By doing it each time, it gets imprinted on your mind, so after some time these pop into your mind without trying. This is when it has become awareness.
- Stage 3: After a while this becomes not just awareness, but a feeling: This means that you no longer feel you have a problem, but you just decide what action to take, there is no negative association any more. You have changed, your feeling (= what makes you do certain things) has changed.
You can also look at negatives as positive. A woman whom I knew years ago made a comment once about love: "If you love someone then you will love someone's bad qualities". I later realised it was correct, and it is not just accepting bad qualities, but it can be actually appreciating them, which may seem strange but these are examples with which I feel it:
- "I like it in Ukraine. I don't like the bad roads, however the bad roads are just part of Ukraine, you can't live in Ukraine without experiencing bad roads. Bad roads (and sidewalks) are a reminder that I am in Ukraine, therefore they are not negative, but positive." [ well, to be honest it is a bit more 'accepting' than 'appreciating' in this case when riding with my bicycle on some of the bad roads. ]
- "I like it in Ukraine, I don't like the smell of cigarette smoke. People smoke a lot more here than in the Netherlands, I don't like it, but, the smell of people smoking is what makes me realise again that I'm in Ukraine, and my view of smelling cigarette smoke is actually positive (because I like it in Ukraine, and smelling smoke reminds me of being where I want to be)".
Note that the 2nd point does not mean that I want to smell cigarette smoke all the time! :) I mean that the occsasional smell of cigarettes walking on the street is negative for me in NL, and positive for me in Ukraine...
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Copyright W.H.Scholten, 2025. To contact me you can email or send a message via telegram (via phone +31648816383), or via vk.com (https://vk.com/w.h.scholten, which I don't really use but I will get notified of messages from there).
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