I might have cracked the procrastination nut.
One of the things that's plagued me for years is that a heavy, intense period of doing lots of good stuff is frequently followed by a crash.
The crash partially negates the gains from having a good period. If you put in an excellent, intense four days of creative work, that's good. But if you can't look at your work and projects for half a week afterwards, you negate some of that progress as compared to just slowly, steadily putting in time.
What's worse is that, for me, the crashes tended to be full-on, nothing-valuable-happening. I don't mean not working. I mean nothing valuable. When I'd crash, I'd usually not be reading good books, spending time in nature on the beach, or whatever. It'd be more like getting into high stimulation distraction, where it sucks your time without giving you anything back. Without even recharging you, even.
So, I started looking at how crashes come on.
For me, it's usually not, "I feel exhausted, I'm going to take a couple days off." I actually don't mind when I do that, and taking a couple days off usually works well.
More like, I've been really blazing fast on a project for five days in a row, many hours a day, and on day six I get stumped. Then I say, "okay, I'm just going to take a short break" and I click over to - Hacker News, or... whatever.
And then it's 10 hours later and the day is shot. Yucky.
Partially, I think the problem was, on day six I'd be trying to keep going on whatever project I'm on. So instead of saying, "Okay, I'm going to shift gears for a little bit," I'd say, "I'm just going to take a break." But then the break lasts a couple days.
So I'm rolling a new way of doing things - my new mantra for the area is, "anything valuable" - for a while, I was prioritizing the most important things to make sure I didn't do busywork instead of the most important and meaningful stuff.
That's not really a problem any more. I shifted gears upwards in that department, but now I'm getting a mix of valuable stuff and the occasional totally useless crash time. (Again, real relaxation isn't useless - it's great. Crashes tend to not be really relaxing and rejuvenating)
New way of dealing with it? Anything valuable. I'm not forcing myself to do any one project right now at any time unless a deadline is looming. So if I'm not feeling it, or not creative, or not high will, or whatever - well, that's okay. I can pre-cook a bunch of food, clean, catch up on phone calls, research some of the next stuff I'll be working on, etc. Anything I've deemed valuable in advance.
It's new, but so far it's working quite well. There's always a boost from getting on a new initiative, but I think even once the novelty wears up I'm going to pick up a few hours a week that would be spent in burnt out vegetation state and put it into reading, researching, general little life stuff, errands, catching up with people, etc.
A few hours a week? I'll take it. New mantra: "Anything valuable."
You could substitute in the word "initiative," "goal," or "target" if you don't like mantra. I'm not a believer in anything new agey or mystical. Rather, for me, "mantra" captures a complex and detailed idea in a short word or phrase. They're things I'm working on.
I was brainstorming at a cafe what I'm working on, what's most crucial in terms of development. This is the list I came to -
Create Enterprise Start day productive Focus Celerity I don't need to feel good to do the right thing.
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In greater detail:
I'm thrilled that Tynan is coming to you with two things -- first, he's offering a breakthrough session through GiveGetWin. It's geared around doing more of the kind of excellent work you want to do, becoming more internally focused with your emotions, having a more enjoyable life, building great habits, and producing a lot of value in the process. There's five spots, so check it out now.
Second, we have this wonderful tour-de-force interview: it starts by covering how Tynan made the shift from unfocused to focused, how to derive internal enjoyment from things, useful actionable exercises you can do right now, Tynan's method and mindset for producing creative work consistently, how to set up great habits and an excellent mental and physical work environment, and how to make blogging work and similar endeavors work for you.
Total Focus; Total Enjoyment by Tynan, as told to Sebastian Marshall
When I turned 30 and I had a minor freak out… I thought, "I'll be 40 in not long, and then 50… there's things I want to do in my life, and they're not happening at this pace."
Before that, I had a general idea of things I wanted to do and have in my life, but I went about in an unstructured way. It was good in a lot of ways. It made be a broad process, but not much depth.
