Reaction vs. Intention

Why scattered days feel unaccomplished 

For all my productivity sprints and focus this past week, I spent yesterday morning working, but halfway through, I couldn’t tell what I’d done for all my busyness.

This probably happened because I woke up thinking about learning jQuery. I spent the morning Googling and browsing through the fog of tabs, squinting for tutorials and the best way to learn. Between all the searching, there were random, small tasks. Not important enough to plan for, and not important enough to mark down.

These two ways of working, giving in to impulse, and scattered tasks make the day feel unproductive. It doesn’t matter how busy you are, or how well the tasks are done, the issue is with timing and intention.

Because the tasks are scattered, we can’t remember them in the context of a bigger goal we’re working toward. And because we’re reactive, we’ll shift directions and jump rails too frequently to go anywhere.

It’s like dropping a string on the floor instead of pulling it taught. One falls into a pile of squiggles, the other is a straight line from A to Success.

Without intention, eating could be a distracting snacking habit; with extreme intention, you could be a competitive eater.

For every individual action that can be considered a waste of time, the same task can contribute into a larger set of goals.

Without intention, checking your feed is thumb exercise, but with goals in mind, you could make meaningful connections, find work, and help others.

Watching a movie is usually entertainment and time filler for me, but filmmakers study and dissect them. On the same spectrum, I could watch an episode of any one show, which by itself doesn’t do much. But if you sit down and watch 100 episodes across 10 seasons of a show during a weekend, that’s an accomplishments of sorts. You might end up a vegetable, but you’ll be able to clearly point at what you completed. It might also come with a pseudo sense of pudge pride and disgust.

To cultivate intention—pause. Leave a synapse after finishing this and starting that. When impulse pop-ups, make a note of it, then continue with your regularly scheduled success program.