16. Planning Hour — Periodic Travel
A great thing happened to me last week. After a hectic day of work, I was on a 50-minute train ride, with my mind still racing. I managed to complete my work before leaving office, so my mind was searching for other things to consume its energy (coffee may have had something to do with it). It immediately gravitated to analyzing the things I’ve been ignoring — notably, blogging. After making a commitment to writing 365 posts during the year, I went on a week long hiatus. It wasn’t intimidating — it just felt like a waste that so many ideas weren’t being written down.
Instead of pondering on what other aspects of my life were being ignored, I acted on impulse, picked up my phone, and wrote down some blog ideas — little did I know that I would come up with 12 fairly well-fleshed out ideas in 30 minutes. Clearly, these were not ideas I thought of for the first time in the train.
What helped me achieve this?
- Having a fixed deadline — 50 minutes felt like the perfect amount of time for me to have one burst of activity without breaks.
- Making a public commitment to blogging
- Finishing work in office
- Caffeine (not proud of this, but it sure provided me some energy)
- Listing down ideas — once an idea was listed, my mind could safely move on to the next one, instead of worrying about storing the previous idea. To shamelessly reference my previous post, I was delegating storage to technology and focusing on imagining.
