Follow-up Challenge:
Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don't feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I'm passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.
Follow-up Entry:
Just to really make the weekend exciting, Day 4's challenge had a Part 2. For those of you who don't memorize everything I write, the question I posed to myself on Day 4 was: "How can I build habits?"
Obviously, I've built a habit or two. The subtext was figuring out how to tackle the tough ones – the things I keep saying I need to do but somehow manage to flake out on over and over. Some are big, like exercise, and some are stupid, like flossing.
I'm not going to magically solve all of these problems at once, but I think I wrapped my brain around one of them. I have a bad habit of false starts.
Let me explain. My commute is roughly 3 feet (1 meter, if you're European) – the space from my bed to my desk chair. It's even on my side of the bed. This is usually where people tell me to shut up and quit complaining.
Luckily, I'm not very good at doing what people tell me to. The problem is simple : I roll out of bed, turn on the computer, check my email, and the work day has begun – sort of. In the back of my mind, I know that I haven't really started – I need to go to the gym, take a shower, and so on – so, I end up not starting anything serious and waste an hour screwing around.
The worst part is that sometimes I screw around so much that I don't even do those things that I'm supposed to do before I can officially get started. These are the days that I skip the gym and shower at 1:30. I have a personal philosophy that 2pm is the shower threshold – after that, what's the point?
So, I'm going to make a conscious effort to leave the computer off until I've really started my day. This should save me some goofing off and help me make sure that the gym, shower, and breakfast happen more than twice/week. It's a little tough, because my wife travels, and I have our baby daughter some mornings, but I think it's doable.