Willpower and Distraction – The Lure of the Movie

I was feeling guilty for dropping off Facebook for a couple very busy months at work, but it seems like a lot of people have be puttering down on Facebook. I’ve been generally chastising myself for losing momentum lately, but I think I’m getting things back on track now that I’m home.

But I have a distraction. The thing is, I love movies. I cut them from my life entirely in October so that I would use that time each evening to focus on my life mission, to make a little progress in some way every day. That was easy to do after CGW, because I gave all my DVDs to my dad to keep until at least next summer (a couple hundred DVDs, I think? Yeah, umm, can we say movie-a-holic?) and I don’t have TV satellite in the RV, just internet. So, no movies to watch, piece of cake to follow through on not watching movies while traveling.

Since I’ve been in the RV and on the road since October, I am only now getting to spend time in my home, where my satellite TV is disconnected, but I’m still lured to the DVR where there’s about 70 hours of recorded movies.

I can go three ways with this. My choices are:

1. Leave the TV and the DVR in place, and force myself to use willpower over distraction. Do-able, but that’s kind of like going raw without throwing out the regular-diet foods, the willpower really has to be there to pull that one off.
2. Put the TV back in the box and in the storage shed. This leaves open the option of having a TV again someday.
3. Remove the temptation entirely and sell the TV. This is tempting, but I imagine some day I’ll want or need a TV for some reason and then I’ll have to go through the hassle of buying another one.

Hmmmm, this is sounding like a 30-day trial in willpower. But there are more important things to focus my energy on than using up energy to maintain strong willpower against a distraction right now. For now I think I’ll just try to get through the next two nights, then worry about the rest of the month later.