What do you do when you are puzzled and aimless at the start of the day? Mild discomfort and an overwhelmed feeling are when your state of mind feels like.
Right now it’s because there are many obvious things to be done and I don’t want to do them. That’s pretty much the barometer: internal discomfort means I’m avoiding something that needs to be done.
It’s important to take action in situations like this. I’m going to start with fulfilling a promise for action I have made (and broken) for the last two days.
Here I go. (That’s me coaching myself into action.)
Lessons learned, relearned, and rerelearned:
- Be careful about your commitments because you take them seriously and feel bad if you don’t do them. Make fewer commitments.
- As soon as you see commitment backlog (and the sadness that comes with it) stop. Take an action, any action to fulfill a commitment, any commitment.
- Revel in the feeling of completing a task.
- Do another one.
- Sooner or later you will reach the commitment that is really bothering you, and you will do it.
Reality is created by commitments made. Unfulfilled commitments hurt my soul. I make too many commitments to myself and others.
Let’s do “no” for today. Anyone asks me anything that I can’t do in one minute? The answer is “sorry, no”. No reason needed, just no.
What I did to feel better today
Here’s what I did today, after waking and feeling . . . feelings.
- Write this post.
- Tackled low-hanging fruit. Specifically I walked to Starbucks and bought two pounds of coffee. One ground for French press, one whole bean. Commitment fulfilled. Whew.
- Came home, put away the coffee completely, and cleaned up the coffee-making debris (French press, etc.) and while I was at it I rinsed all of the other dishes in the sink, ready to load in the dishwasher. Principle in action: clean up as you go, bring things to a natural stopping point as you go.
- Reconfigured the Starbucks app because it wouldn’t let me buy coffee. Needed a password which wasn’t in LastPass. Saved to LastPass so next time I’m in good shape. Principle in action: fix broken things thoroughly as you come across them.
- Start the rereading of Relentless, this time with underlining and notes in the margin and all that. Did the preface and wrote down the key takeaways. Principle: get the head right while getting the action machine rolling.
- Wrote down some notes about the preface of Relentless. Principle: make it yours by writing it down.
- Into action on a business project that is urgent. Now we are getting to root causes. If I can get this one to a point of rest, it takes the pressure of the commitment off. Someone else picks up the baton. Principle: I used momentum from tackling little problems to get to one of the big problems.
- Sidetracked by my brain – a technical fix to a website needs to be replicated on another. Send email to tech support to make this happen.
- Back to the work project.
- Lunch break. Look at YouTube while eating. (Ahrefs tutorials).
- Lie down after lunch and relax quite a while.
- Family and dinner. It’s a weekend.
- Finish the email and send it after dinner. File everything completely.
- Assign some tasks out to other people to do.
That took a bit of pressure off. Tomorrow will include a big chunk of family time. Be sure to remember that this is your number one priority, above business tasks.
All in all, it was a day.