Taking Breaks
Mixed feelings, pressure, laziness.
Do you ever take breaks?
I don’t, usually. Sometimes that’s because it’s better to push through and if you’re not used to hitting your limits, it can be easy to let yourself slide too much.
Not recently, though.
In fact, you may have noticed that I haven’t posted in weeks—which is crazy. How does someone go from writing every day to not writing for weeks? I’m not sure, honestly. You’d think the habit would be so ingrained that it would be hard to break at this point, but that’s just not the case.
It’s also kind of hilarious and ironic that the last post I wrote was about Falling in Love with Structure and Discipline. Ha!
Some of the things I’ve noticed after deciding to stop publishing daily:
The posts got bigger.
The posts got easier to procrastinate.
The posts got easier to skip entirely.
I am definitely a person who needs pressure or urgency to make something happen. Without a deadline and accountability to others, it’s just so easy to put things off. For some reason, if I don’t have to answer to that big red “publish” button, everything seems less urgent—maybe even less important.
In the private “Up To Something” slack group, I mentioned the idea that I’m probably just inherently lazy. I really believed it, too.
Then, Dana Ray posted a link to this book.
I guess I should read it eventually. Maybe later. Seems important.
The relationship I’ve made with myself has been around forcing behaviors. Trying to hack “will power” by controlling external factors. We all do this to some degree.
Have you tried any of these?
Putting your alarm clock on the other end of the room to force yourself to get out of bed.
Freezing your credit card in ice to force yourself to think before you make a big purchase. (Not sure this works in a virtual world anymore.)
Writing a $1000 check to a friend who will cash it if you don’t take the actions you said you would.
There are so many ways to manipulate extrinsic motivation.
Humans. We’re just not the robots I wished we were.
From a personal perspective, I’m sure most of you can relate to the kind of year it’s been. It’s one of those, “eating peanut butter from the jar” or “sitting down in the shower” kind of years.
If you’re a new subscriber waiting for posts, check out my archive of past posts to hold you over for a bit. I’ll bet you can find something useful in there.
I’ve been writing for years, so I bet you can’t even scroll to the bottom. :)
I hope this post helps put some perspective for you productivity nerds out there. If you’re like me, you’ve probably gotten a lot of your self-worth from your productivity. I’m not saying that this approach is 100% right or wrong, but I’m starting to think that it’s the wrong question to ask.
Comment below if you ended up getting something from this. It might be fun to share more personal failure if you learn something or if it makes you feel good.
Dana gave some great advice there. I also don’t believe that laziness exists. I’ve written about it before.
However, like you, I do chastise myself for being lazy on many occasions. It is truly something many of us have to work on in our relationships with ourselves.
And for the record, eating peanut butter out of the jar, with a butter knife, is absolutely the only way to do it.
Thanks for this. I'm not the only one thinking I have lost the ability to complete tasks, or come up with new things/projects to do. I believe apathy has crept in during this very long 15 months of waiting for the world to start up again.