Monday was the first official day of “being back at work”. I started it off by adhering to my 15M ritual, though I woke up pretty late. No matter! It’s the sticking-to and the first-action-of-the-day-ness that matters! I also ate a little bit of protein, some rare roast beef I had made the night before, to fortify my system until lunch.

Sitting down to write, I thought of three things I wanted to get done:

1. Rewrite the copy on the home page of davidseah.com so it was less wishy-washy.
2. Get going on some client website maintenance work.
3. Go to the gym

I got all of them done. I attribute the success to maintaining a good attitude, which I managed to trick myself into action by doing the following:

• When I thought of something to do, I considered why I shouldn’t do something about it at that moment.

• When I felt resistance or negative reactions arise, I wrote them down as best as I could to understand what the feeling was or was coming from. I then asked myself if they were really important. It turns out that I just dislike having to gather, hunt, remember, calculate, sequence, or organize anything because it takes time. And why does this bother me? The best I can figure is that it seems like a waste of time, and I just want to get things over with without having to think about it. However, I couldn’t think of why this should stop me from doing what I had to do, other than wanting to be pissy.

• Having determined that my resistances were coming from a petulant place, I then chose to put them out of my head. It was like ignoring someone who is whining about having to work. I just moved my hands, because it was the thing to do. Sure, I didn’t particularly enjoy having to search for a list of ancient passwords or remember how a particular website worked, but I accepted the chore as necessary. An interesting side effect was that I regathered the material in a form that would be more efficient to use in the future, with everything I needed to know in one password-protected spreadsheet along with any workings notes. That felt good to do, and this helped lift my spirits. Efficiency!

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p>Another interesting realization of the day was that the three tasks provided scaffolding for related tasks. As I performed the work on them, I opportunistically took care of other tasks along the way. For example, going to the gym entailed driving near the supermarket. I remembered that there was a tomato plant there that had looked sad and unloved, so I bought it. I then drove to Home Depot for some potting mix, and saw that the other tomato hybrids were available. I got everything home, and over the course of the day I found the missing bits of the gardening kit. I didn’t get everything potted, but I made significant progress and that felt good. It wasn’t even on the list!

As it was the first day, this was more of a light assessment day than a real push to get a lot of work done. I’ve been very gentle with myself when it comes to demanding high levels of productivity. Stuff got done, I was in a good mood, and I maintained a sense of continuity from the previous weekend’s writing. So far, so good.

Tomorrow I am going to revisit the same 15M writing I did in the morning about my daily plan. I’m going to read what I wrote yesterday, then rewrite it for today (first saving a copy).

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