Do you ever wake up with the best of intentions and the day gets away from you? Maybe it’s Sunday night and you think to yourself, “tomorrow I’m going wake up and be productive. I’m going to get my shit together”. Monday morning rolls around and you stay in bed too long or you go to work, come home and just veg out on the couch. Something happens and the day gets away from you. All of a sudden the day is lost and you’ve accomplished nothing. You wonder where all that motivation and determination went. You vow to do better tomorrow. I feel like I have been stuck in this cycle for months and it’s killing me.
I am having a hard time getting a routine going. Routine is key to success, especially for someone like me who is easily de-motivated by the idea of 30 Rock and my very comfy bed. Back in September, as I alluded to in a previous post, I left my safe office job to work in an altogether different environment. I make donuts for a living now and the while it’s a fun opportunity that gives me the chance to have weekday mornings and afternoons to myself for any number of things, it’s been a challenging transition. My schedule changes from week to week and I don’t get my new schedule until the Sunday of that work week. It can make it hard to have a regular routine and plan ahead. My brain has not been wired for living this way since high school, and then I wasn’t so much trying to get my life together as, just hang out with my friends whenever I wasn’t working.
The idea behind taking this job was to do something different, happier, and less stressful that might afford me more free time to work on myself and my writing. It was a change I am incredibly lucky to have been able to make and so far I have done very little with that opportunity. A lost morning or afternoon has turned into a lost week, a lost month, and now months have gotten away from me and slipped through my fingers. How is it that the momentum of accomplishing nothing, with all the bad feelings and self-flagellation it contains, is more sustainable and seductive than doing the things that are good for you, that you WANT to do, even things you LOVE to do? Perhaps it’s the biting off more than you can chew scenario. Maybe I should be starting small and building little accomplishment on little accomplishment. Maybe I’m simply not organized enough. Maybe, I’m making a whole lot of excuses, and spending time analyzing this weird purgatorial paralysis, when I should just be fixing it.
I tried making a bullet journal – a hyper specific method of breaking down your goals and time and covering it in washi tape. I went to Michael’s and excitedly bought all the supplies I needed. I started to put one together and can you guess what happened? I didn’t finish it. It was too open ended. I didn’t know what graphs and charts to make. How to set it up. Buzzfeed article after Buzzfeed article did not help. I don’t even know where it is now. In the end I bought a pre-set goal journal that just needs to be filled out. I was supposed to get it all together before New Years to be with it and together for January. Whoops. But hey, I did write today! That’s something! Please don’t give up on me yet! I DO have it set up for February. And man, when February roles around I am going to be productive and get my shit together.
Lola Writes the Wave 