There’s a lot weighing on my mind

• Looking for the pattern in the laziness this weekend. Is it solely due to the social day on Saturday requiring a huge amount of recharge time?
• I thought of plenty of things I could do this weekend to be productive, but didn’t carry on with any of them. Why is that? None of them grabbed me, really, or required too much effort, or the effort itself was unknown, or the timescale of the reward wasn’t immediate.
• I thought of ways to reduce the distance between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. It might be a personality thing…I’m not the sort of person who jumps up and immediately does something UNLESS the payoff or curiosity is right there in front of me. As a friend once commented, I don’t like doing things until I know what it is that I have to do, and there is quite a high threshold of understanding that has to be met before I think I’m ready.
• I think it’s worth itemizing some of standard ways of breaking down the barrier there.

It’s also the third week of the “wake up and focus on work first” experiment. It seems that right about now, 3 weeks in, is the time that I assess and look at the patterns. A few patterns that I note:

• Cycles of energy, with more than one determinant of peak energy. I am susceptible to sleep cycle, hydration, and time of day. I also am apparently much more sensitive to variations in food intake; there were at least three times when I thought I was too tired to think, and it turned out that I just needed to eat something for the feeling to go away.

• Maintaining clarity on “the mission”, after the initial novelty of the method has worn off, is a challenge. The daily journaling has been good because the feeling of accomplishing something by writing things down (essentially, data collection) is a carrier for real productivity and problem solving.

• The daily writing, however, doesn’t solve the overall sense of wanting a strategic map of achievement, where I can see tangible progress toward a goal being made. Toward payoff.

• Learning to be productive as a solo practitioner means being able to spread the risk, because not all risks (that is, activities) pay off. And the payoff is often unpredictable. There’s a kind of productivity by statistics mindset that has to be put in place. The more risks in play, the better the average yield over the long term, but it requires a different kind of task management.

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p>Those are the thoughts for today.