Today was the first day since I've started the 84 days journey where the discipline that I usually possess seemingly faltered. Today, I spent much of the day beating myself up as a few of my systems have started to crumble.
For example, my editorial buffer has been running very low and today reached zero days. Now this is not the first time since I’ve started the 84 days, but today for some reason it triggered a wholesale judgeathon of my various habits and systems. My head has been playing some games on myself today, and it is likely my need to perform and output that is providing the bullets that I’m aiming at myself.
I just had an absolutely incredible weekend which was exactly what I needed after a fairly intense week that spanned work and my family. I had a bit of a health scare with someone very close to me that was scary sick for a few days over the course of the holiday. This definitely triggered a number of reactions that rattled a few of my habits last week in terms of consistently producing for myself outside of work. Work and my fitness habits were consistent, however a few other habits languished during the week last week. So things have been a bit sloshy as of late outside of my professional life, with this past weekend being exceptionally awesome.
So for some reason, I guess I started to feel a bit guilty about my lack of discipline over the last few days.
I put in a solid 11 hour day at the office today starting at 630am and wrapped up around 530pm today – likely closer to 6. Well around 4pm things got critical, as I could not stop thinking about the things on my to do list from my morning scrum meeting with my team meeting, and the morning review I conducted for myself independent of my work to do’s.
A couple of very key colleagues came from vacation today, a few other folks stepped up today on a couple of key tasks, and the team across the board was very responsive and engaged today. Overall – work was quite productive, and we got a few folks back form vacation. Yet, I felt like I did not get everything done today that really needed to be done. The sense I had around 4pm today was that things were getting just silly in terms of the self judgement. So after I ended the calls for the day with a quick call into my boss, I cracked open Headspace (the app) for the first time in months in the hope of refocusing.
That actually made me tired and more unfocused. I am so ambivalent about this meditation thing at the moment…
So around 5pm today here was where I was at:
- I was convinced the day was a total loss
- I did not get anything done
- I was increasingly stressed about my plans for the night
- I had just captured about 12 blog ideas, an equal amount of to do’s for work, and another half dozen things I really get to tonight
Then I noticed I was not breathing. I am better than this!
My next step was to check my daily journal for my after hours schedule, and it had me at the gym an hour ago! WTF!!!
So I stopped the pressure. I left my home office, my iPhone on the desk, and walked into the kitchen. I was convinced to restart my day, clearly it was not working well today…So to get momentum – I started to decide some things…
So I slammed the green tea that I had ready to go for over an hour, slammed down the pre workout drink, and decided to finally get in the shower. It was nearly 6pm at this point, and I realized that I had been so busy that I did not get a chance to hit the shower. So I decided that I would pick off two things from my work to do’s, and hit the shower – then revisit my list.
Frustratingly, one of the two to do’s at work was partially blocked, and I will end up missing a commitment to a team member as a result. Unfortunately, it is out of my hands due to some procedural things. So that did not get done, despite my best efforts. Damnit, the frustration.
The other thing, I knocked out right afterwards. Okay, batting 500 again.
I hit the shower, and while in the shower I decided to cut the shit and get to the gym immediately after finishing up.
Which I managed to do. I got out of the house in under 10 minutes from that decision and promised myself that I would spend as long as I need to at the gym.
Well, this was nearly 2 hours today, and it was the best two hours of the day as I was able to reset my mindset while doing the longest walk I have done in weeks. I pounded through two complete podcasts while taking down notes from the content of the shows.
I captured another dozen or so ideas in terms of my various projects – inclusive of topics for this blog.
The mental chatter had died down, so I decided to hit the weights. This is where I decided that my journey through today would be the blog topic, and that I’d begin to dig myself out starting with my next set.
For the rest of the time in the gym, I began to recap all of the progress I had made today from doing 5 loads of laundry, to cleaning off all three of my whiteboards, to the numerous things I got done at work – one of which is a key idea to be exercised later in the week that could potentially unlock a major opportunity at work, to the fact that I just hammered out miles of walking with my energy now finally rising. By all measures, I was already cranking before I ever hit the gym – but I was convincing myself that I was failing across so much of the day…
Then it hit me, these are the games our minds play on all of us. Somedays we can power through, some days we get yanked around by a variety of forces that we allow to consume us, and the trick is how fast we recover.
So I get home, and I’m about midway through this post – and the phone rings. One of my brothers from college calls me up, this is a phone call that was overdue by a few days. I had a tinge of pressure wash over me as I picked up the phone, and I shut this laptop down.
It was the best conversation of the day, as we both shared some serious stuff going on – only as brothers do. We rapped for quite awhile, and he wished me well with returning to the blog.
For me today has been an instructional day with a few key takeaways:
- Work in Progress – I am still very much a work in progress and have ongoing battles with weakness and follow through.
- Mental Chatter – The self talk today was unusually harsh and condemning until I recognized that I was doing this to myself. Mindfulness is a key tool to disarming this bomb for myself.
- Bursting with Creation – So many ideas and energy right now, need to keep capturing the fireworks that are popping at the moment. I was able to resist the urge to work the new ideas and creations emerging all over the place except for one or two of them. I captured nearly all of the ideas, one white board is filled at the moment to be processed into my Evernote and OmniFocus at a later hour.
- Basics Are Grounding – I have cultivated a deep habit that involves my getting to the gym. It is my safe place to actively meditate, to get really clear, and to enlist not only my brain and heart – also my entire body in the process. Not getting off that treadmill until I was done clearing things was the best thing I could have done today and for the rest of this week – likely the rest of the month.
- Reset Your Mindset with the Basics – My reset point was a decision to begin deciding. My mindset was what was screwed up today. My follow through and production was higher than most, and yet I was bad mouthing myself in the background for some reason today. Once I decided to begin moving forward – things began building back up.
I am not sure what is going on with all of the ideas that are coming my way at the moment, the energy that is now pulsing (I got some great sleep this weekend), and the juxtaposed negative chatter. It was all in play on a volume of 10 for much of the day.
Retrenching back to my journaled plans for the day, linking small decisions together to get some momentum, and hitting the gym all resulted in getting very clear on what needs to happen tonight, tomorrow, and a few more days this week.
Having a basic habit or two turned out to be the failsafe that I needed to get the momentum flowing again.
An instructional day for sure.
