When you work less, you worry more!
What brings you more joy? — the satisfying feeling after you complete a challenging task OR when you postpone it for a quick treat of dopamine.
Trusting the sanity of my readers, I assume you must have chosen the first option. But often times we give in to instant gratification sidelining the main job. While it is alright to push high-intensity work a little farther before you begin, regularly doing this can lead to an addictive ailment. The urge to delay the pain of an exhausting work for a short term pleasure is famously known as procrastination. I am too a patient of it.
To cure it, I had to dig deep into it’s root cause. Let me walk you down the road I took to sanitize my routine. Well, in my case, I had a task on high importance list, though not very urgent. It was not something easy that could be done quickly and gotten rid of. Apart from this, I had fuzzy goals, all running in different directions to make things more complex. With all these tasks on my to-do list, almost everyday I would open laptop and sit to binge YouTube mindlessly whole day. Needless to mention, I didn’t like the person who I was when I went to bed. It’s a bitter feeling to blame yourself for yourself. I wanted to improve but little did I know I was trapped into addictive vicious cycle.
Hence to understand my behaviour, I started viewing myself as a third person so that I could do an objective analysis. I took a piece of paper. Wrote my life mission goals. Below it, the exact things that need to be done to achieve it. Those targets were further broken into simpler actionable items which I could do on a daily basis to form a habit. This I call is a Top-down strategy wherein you begin with a bigger picture, and then create smaller goals to achieve the larger mission. Then using these goals, design habits that would help you achieve them. Once the main aim is disintegrated to habits, work bottom-up to achieve the aim. This exercise quickly brings clarity and gives actionable smaller tasks that are easy to do and appear less draining. Thus, lower are the chances that they will be sidelined for short-lived pleasure.
It is crucial that the ideas and goals are solidified by writing them down somewhere. Creating a simple to-do list in the morning sets the right direction to the day. I hope I am able to improve and get some real shit done in coming days. I have also been listening to “Deep work” audiobook, which stresses upon the power of doing deep work rather than shallow work. Creating a distraction-free environment makes it easier for things to get moving. I hope the insights from my experience were helpful. Do share you stories and results in the comments below :)
