I took a nap today. I slept for about an hour and a half, woke up, thought about doing something productive, and then went back to sleep. Sure, I’d gotten a handful of small things done before the nap, but overall it was a pretty unproductive day.
Having unproductive days isn’t the end of the world, but at this point in my life, it feels like I’d better be trading productivity for something valuable: tea with a friend, visiting Iguazu falls, bungie jumping in Hong Kong. Not a nap.
It’s times like these that doubt creeps in to an otherwise optimistic mind. Maybe I’m just not that productive. Maybe I’m a bad startup cofounder. A reader tweeted me asking how I can be so productive and still have so much fun, which made me feel like a total fraud. I’m not being productive or having fun, just sleeping.
For a while I tracked how good my days were, and one very clear finding was that the worst days felt like they were the new normal, but never lasted beyond a handful. Maybe five days out of a month would be unproductive days, but each one felt like it would extend forever.
It’s hard to see very far when you’re in a valley. Unless you’re a robot, you’re going to have some days that are better than others. I find it easy to get out of a circle of negative thinking when I just accept that: some days won’t be as good as others, today is one of them, tomorrow probably won’t be.
And it’s also easy to find an opportunity in a bad day. You accept that today won’t be your best, but you try to mitigate the damage. For me that means I got rested, took care of a half a dozen little administrative tasks, and did my core of working a bit on Sett, writing this blog post, and doing a language tape. Looking back, it doesn’t even seem like a bad day anymore, just an unexceptional one.
The key takeaway is to remember that there’s variance in everything, including what we make of each day. A day at the lower end of the spectrum doesn’t have to be a total loss, and doesn’t have to breed negativity that will carry forward into other days.
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True to form, I had a great day today (the day after I wrote this). Sixteen and a half hour flight to HK, and I got tons of work done.
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