Earlier today I managed to waste about 3 hours of time by sitting on my couch watching the tv show Spartacus. The time seemed to fly by and before I knew it, it was 3 pm already.
The night before, I had a plan of getting up and going to the gym, doing heavy bag work, stretching, and going in the sauna to start the day. I can remember sitting on the couch too lazy to move and make breakfast. Too lazy to pack my gym bag.
Time kept going.
At one point I just said fuck it and FORCED myself off the couch and put one foot in front of the other. I got to the gym, did a heavy bag sesh.
A funny thing happened at that point, I came back to my house and didn’t wait to do anything. I kept doing what I needed to do without hesitation.
I wanted to go to the coffee shop to get some work done on the computer so I knew I’d have to do a bunch of things like make a meal, take a shower, get dressed, and walk down there. I didn’t want to waste any more time so I just did what I had to step by step to get it done as fast as possible.
I’m here right now typing this article.
There’s a couple components to wasting time that work together to stop you. Your mission is to eliminate these obstacles.
General Laziness
It’s easy to be lazy on a weekend morning because you don’t have to do anything. You can sleep in and easily find yourself on the couch for hours.
This could stem from a few places.
You could be extremely tired from the night before. I usually get up pretty early in the morning, so sometimes if I’m out on weekend nights up to 3 am or something, it really throws off my sleep schedule.
You could be hung over. People generally like to drink on the weekends. Whatever the motivations, when you are drunk on a friday night, often times this will lead to being hung over on a Saturday morning.
If you are hung over, your motivation to do anything plummets. I’ve been hung over a lot and I’ve noticed that doing something like getting up from the couch to make breakfast becomes a herculean task.
The way to eliminate this is to stop associating weekends as “days off” and to treat it just like any other day.
If you treat the weekend day as a real work day, you’ll be less inclined to drink and be hung over. This will lead to having more productive hours as well as more hours during the day.
Distraction
We live in a world that is filled with every possible distraction that you can imagine. New tv shows, twitter notifications, having a party with friends, etc.
I’ve found that every time I say that I’ll get some work done, some form of distraction immediately flies in my face tempting me to stop.
Once you get caught up in some kind of distraction, you get sucked down a rabbit hole until you notice that you just lost hours of your day.
Understand that your mind wants you to get distracted. It takes incredible focus in order to do your work in the face of distraction.
There’s two ways to handle this: power through the distractions or try to get rid of the distractions in the first place.
Build an office in your house or find a place in which you can work without distraction. Turn your phone off and put it in another room. You don’t want notifications distracting you.
Momentum
It’s difficult to start doing what you need to do for the day because you don’t have any momentum. The hardest part of getting stuff done is right in the beginning because you know that once you start you’ll have to finish to the end.
I’ve found that once you start, you’ll build momentum that will easily push you past any barrier to the finish line. When looking back on a day of hard work, it’s laughable that all the was stopping me was the fear of starting.
The way I get around this is looking into the past when I’ve gotten a lot of stuff done and using it as an example. Clearly if I was able to do this much before, it makes the prospect of starting that much easier.
Having the knowledge that it’s easy once I start makes it much easier to actually start.
Sometimes breaking that starting point takes sitting up and saying “Fuck it” and just powering through with force of will.
Getting work done is fulfilling
Whenever I complete a day of getting stuff done that I need to do, I find myself pretty fulfilled. Armed with the knowledge that I’ll feel much better about myself once everything is completed, I’m better able to muster the will to start in the first place.
After a day of completing tasks is finished, you know that you conquered yourself for the day. You didn’t really want to do some of the things you did because of fear, but your conquered your fear and succeeded in doing what needed to be done.
There are demonic forces at work trying to stop you from accomplishing your tasks. These forces are both internal and external.
Defeating these demons on a daily basis feels very good.
Go and do likewise gentlemen.
-Tate
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