Photo Credit: Battish
I woke up this morning feeling pretty depleted. Welcome to Monday. I had a board meeting on Sunday (New Zealand Monday) and so Saturday was reading board papers and Sunday was all work. So Monday feels like...well who even knows anymore.
Usually I bounce out of bed and write my blog first thing on a Monday. Usually I draft it on Sunday. Today I sat in bed and drank coffee while scrolling through my email and looking for new dog toys that might take Winston the puppy more than a nano-second to destroy. Welcome to a six-month old puppy. #Ieateverything.
My practice, and let’s call it a discipline because it needs to be, is to do things like email and toy-purchasing at the end of the day. I do a quick email-check to make sure I am not holding anything up but I work hard not to get sucked into the Hamster-Wheel of letting my inbox dictate my priorities. I focus on the stuff that will move my life forward, while my brain is fresh.
There was nothing fresh about my brain today.
So the puppy got a bath instead. The laundry got done. The rubbish taken out. The dying roses were liberated from their vases. The house got a vacuum. I had a second coffee.
How familiar does this sound? Procrastinate much?
Daily, this is a problem. When your brain-battery needs a charge, we need to give ourselves a big fat pass on the discipline. Especially when the life stuff is staring us in the face much more than it usually does. Or staring ourselves in the nose, in the case of puppies that need a bath.
I am acutely aware that today’s distractions were instant gratification for my productivity-obsessed self. They were easy, low-hanging, to-do list fruit. So I grabbed it. There is something nice about feeling like you are winning the day from a stalled-start.
So check in with yourself on a daily basis. Do you need to clock some productivity points and feel like the day has momentum. Go for it! Get those little things done. You deserve to feel like a winner. Then get to work. Make another cup of coffee and sit down and power up your future. Sweat the small stuff but make sure the real workout happens too. You owe it to yourself to make sure you spend more time in the forest than in the weeds. Or something like that.