Rolling with this first thing…
…in the morning. I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading from various sources that suggest doing your most creative activity first thing in the morning, before the rest of you day starts rolling. To me this means writing for my daily writing habit before other responsibilities begin to occupy my mind and usually long enough after I wake up to have a clear mind. Now that I’ve been doing the writing habit for just over a week, this means waking up, giving my body time to adjust, doing a daily bible reading, meditating, then sitting down to my computer to write. The exception is Sundays, when I put pen to paper as part of my plan to disconnect and unplug as much as possible.
I deviated from the plan this morning and decided that I would quickly dispense with one of my three life/admin to-do’s for the day, before sitting down to write. The to-do was to update our household’s Amazon Subscribe and Save subscriptions. I set these up last year and the subscriptions save us a good amount of money and especially time each month. There may be more to come on that later. Something happened along the way and a number of the subscriptions needed to be reset. I found this nagging at me for a few days and decided to knock out the task early, thinking it would release the incremental tension I was feeling from not having them in place, and make it easier for me to write.
Wrong. Or at least kind of wrong. The simple task, which I expected to take 10-15 minutes took about 30 minutes. The back-and-forth of updating shipping addresses, billing information, and replacing products that I had carefully reasearched with equivalent products became a mentally demanding task that started to scatter thoughts around and open the door to plenty of other distractions. For example, I realized that there was no contact information on this blog. Then I started to try and figure out the right email address to use for the blog, etc., etc., etc.
I had a feeling this may happen so I created a short checklist of items that needed to be updated and used this checklist to remain focused. Time was passing and I realized that my schedule was getting pushed back, since this was taking me longer than I thought. My tension level began to rise as a result.
Alright. I knocked out the checklist and got the subscriptions back where I thought they needed to be for upcoming deliveries. There was a slight sense of satisfaction and relief from experiencing that small accomplishment early in the day. However, I found that the resulting tension from feeling like I was already behind for the day overwhelmend the temporary sense of accomplishment experienced by getting one of my three daily life/admin to-do’s done. Maybe througout the day this will prevent some additional pressure from building during the day, knowing that one is done and there are only two to finish.
This morning’s experience really does reinforce a few things for me. The first is that an administrative task can really throw a wrench in things quickly, no matter how simple the task appears to be, and that it’s likely to take longer than expected. Also, trying to timebox a task, which I do agree with on some level, can conversely add to stress levels, as I race to get something done in order to move on to the next one (hey Jay-Z, great show at the Barclay Center on Sunday!). Finally, sitting down to write and resisting the temptation to “just get this done quickly before I get started” really works and had been working really well for the past week. It took this morning’s experience to help me see that. As of tomorrow it’s back to just rolling with this first thing in the morning!