Workwise, I had a bad Saturday. It was my first day back in the RV, away from family, and I had psyched myself up. The plan was to work the entire day and knock out a big Sett task, plus the little cruft that had been building up on my schedule. Very little of that happened.
It’s been a long battle with procrastination, but I do well with it these days. I see it coming, bob and weave, and usually come out ahead. That’s not to say I’m perfect, only that I waste a very small amount of time compared to the amount of time I used to waste. But Saturday was tough, and I got almost nothing done.
Every day I have a few little daily things. I write a blog post and I listen to a language tape. Combined those two things take less than an hour. Recently, though, I’ve been pushing them to the end of the day and doing them while tired. I’d rather spend my best hours on Sett, so they get the dregs at the end of the day.
On Sunday, the day after my high-procrastination day, I did those things first. For some reason I had a hankering for an extremely difficult Russian tape, so I worked through it. Then I realized that if I wrote my blog post, I wouldn’t have either little task looming.
Being on a roll, it seemed ridiculous to do anything unproductive. With a couple small wins under my belt, I was excited to tackle the big Sett task that I’d barely put a dent in the previous day. By one pm, I’d done more than I’d done the entire previous day.
Sometimes you’ll find yourself on a multi-day or even multi-week groove. You hit that rhythm where you wake up excited and ready to drop into flow state, and all of a sudden it’s night time and you absolutely have to go to bed. I love those periods.
Other times, especially when routine is broken by travel, those flow states are hard to come by. The best method I’ve found to counteract this is to build up early wins. It makes sense, too. If you’re not already moving at full speed, you need to build up momentum. The best way to do that is slowly and consistently.
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Picture is a little sea snail from around the island.
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