| I had to get to a point where I could understand the concept that the best way to get the work done is to just get the work done. There's no magic pill. There's no yoga. There's no special coffee. There's no long walks on the beach. There's nothing that will get the work done for you. You're the only one capable of getting the work done, and it just takes sitting down and doing it. Of course, that is easier said than done. But try it some time. Try repeating to yourself "the work does not get done until I choose to do it." I also started getting very comfortable with the idea of giving up on things. I either choose to do a thing now or I throw it away completely. If there was something that I couldn't give up on, then the whole process sort of naturally collapsed into a propensity for starting things right away. We make up these lies to ourselves. TODO lists, with multiple things marked as "high priority". There can only ever be one priority. If someone says two or more things are a priority, they are confused. You have to figure out what the actual, real, priority task is. There is always one thing, one real thing, that is the actual priority, and people can often lose sight of it because they think they have their planning covered. Tasks are always on the backlog until they are being worked on, and only one thing can be worked on at a time. Certainly order the backlog by what is important, but don't delude yourself into thinking you can work on more than one thing at a time. I got more comfortable with the concept of living a lifestyle, rather than achieving goals. When you define success by goals-achieved, then you are constantly a failure, until a brief moment when you succeed, and then you need to define new goals and are right back into being a failure. I am a success because I live the lifestyle I want. Because I'm not living in a constant state of failure, then there is no sense that any particular action is woefully inadequate towards achieving success. No task can be inadequate towards achieving success, because all tasks that I engage in are a symptom of my notion of success. And I grew an understanding that living a certain lifestyle meant not living other lifestyles. To choose to be a certain way is equally to choose to stop being another way. If there is some way that you want to be that you are not achieving, it means there is some way that you are that you need to choose to stop. I'm overweight, I could choose to stop drinking beer, and I would lose weight. I choose to have a lifestyle that involves drinking beer in front of my computer at night. I choose to not have a lifestyle that involves rock climbing on weekends. I choose to work on Virtual Reality software. That means I also choose to stop working on electronics, painting, photography, writing novels, or whatever other low-grade hobbies I had before I finally found focus. So long as you understand your choices and their consequences, I don't think they can become psychological weights around your neck, keeping you dragged down in the duldrums of anti-productivity. |