I surprised myself today.
I’ve had a rhetoric going for a while that I don’t really have trouble doing what needs to be done, but I’m bad at doing what I want to get done. Because there are no consequences to not doing the things I just want to get done. And I don’t want to do them, to be clear about the wording, I just want them to be done. What I want to do is just have a nice fucking time, which unfortunately usually equates to watching too much YouTube.
But something snapped in me last week – just a subtle break – that caused my insides to shift a bit, and suddenly the world looked just a little bit different. And I realised it was quite possible for me to take more personal responsibility…without fabricating anxiety to flog myself into achieving.
So I made a schedule. In Excel. With colour codes. I block scheduled twelve hours of every day, put in the bare minimum of what I need to get done, left some leeway for the things I’ll want to do, and filled the rest of the hours with all the glorious things I want to get done.
And then I didn’t stick to it. Which is, of course, completely and utterly predictable.
But here’s the fun and surprising part. I didn’t stick to the hours I needed to get done, because if I just do what I need to do, rather than adhere to the standard of excellence I naturally incline myself towards, it doesn’t actually take as long. And then, because I hadn’t burned myself out on my prerequisites, and I’d mapped out a space for specifically this task, I just got on with what I wanted to get done. And I didn’t wander off, or feel like taking a nap, or find myself suddenly compelled to run a hot mid-afternoon bath. So now I’m four hours work further forward on a project that could lead me somewhere good. And, like, I also got my dishes done?
Somehow, somewhere, I’ve recalibrated my priorities. And, by golly, I’m pleased with the results.