21 days to go (again)

This past week I've been on one of those "motivation" missions again where I decide its time to get my life in order and I develop a strategy for myself to get back on track and being proactive with things such as my writing. Over the years I have tried things like this so many times to combat laziness and lethargy, and over the years, I've become more frustrated with myself when I fail to make a permanent change and I frequently begin to wonder if I will have succeed in changing myself and my ways for the better.

The plan for change this time involves borrowing two different strategies for combating motivation and combining them together. The first one is what is known as the 21 day principle. According to some, if you can do the same thing everyday for 21 successive days that thing will become a habit and be ingrained into your daily routine. The 21 day principle is often used with people combating an addiction as the task would be to go that many succesive days without whatever it is they may be addicted to. So I'm using the 21 day principle to combat my addiction for doing nothing day to day.

The other thing I'm doing is what I read in an article called Lazy productivity. It takes the attitude that if you're not a particularly productive person (like me), or may only every once in a while and sit down and bash out chunks of work, you will hugely increase your productivity if you just limit yourself to doing 3 simple, and relatively short tasks everyday. So like I said before, I've combined the two together so my goal has been complete 3 tasks everyday for 21 succesive days so that it becomes a bonafide habit.

Would you like to know how well I've done so far?

I failed on my first day... I completed my morning task easy (get up early and do an hour of writing on a feature script at 7am), but the other 2 tasks had to be done after work (no big deal), but unfortunately I put off doing them until late then my housemate, Sophie, returned home from Kent, and had brought another friend Emma around to have some wine... I was halfway through my 2nd task at this point but predictably I stopped. I beat myself up pretty hard about it and had to reset my 21 day counter to zero and start again (well, I say reset, but really I hadn't even completed one day so it just stayed at zero). Oh yeah, it might be worth mentioning that I'm recording my progress using this desktop program called sticky notes. It's a bit like having post it notes, but on your computer desktop. I have three notes up with each of my tasks on then another fourth one which I'm using as my 21 day counter.

On the 2nd day (well, my 1st day again after the reset) I was still feeling bummed out by my failure, and again I became fretful and anxious that I will never conquer my laziness and will be continuously met with failure after failure in my attempts at change... Then I read something in a book that I was reading on overcoming procrastination (one of my tasks that day), and it helped me change my perspective on things. It talked about reslience and the ability to get up and trying again being a character trait diametrically opposed to procrastination, so even though I go through periods of what is typically called "volitional depression" and retreat into negative and addictive behaviours, I'm always bouncing back with new attempts at conquering laziness.
It is quite possible that I may never fully conquer laziness and become a proactive writing machine, but always during my frequent attempts at asserting proactive behaviour for myself, I achieve a lot. As long as I'm always fighting inaction it will in itself prevent me from being inactive.

So I stopped looking at my first day as a terrible failure but instead chosen to see what I could learn from it. One of the things I learnt from that first day is that some of the tasks I set myself were too large and needed to be more specific in their duration. So if I need to read something I'll set a page limit, or with writing something I might set a fixed time limit of an hour. From doing this I managed four completed days before I manage to miss two of my tasks yesterday. Like before I was initially upset about it but then I took a step back and realised that I did achieve a hell of a lot yesterday, even though it wasn't on my list of things to do, such as finishing most of the filming of the Dan & Eye comedy show - that is an achievement.

Today I didn't even have any tasks written down but it doesn't matter. I'm setting tasks for tomorrow morning and I will see them done, and yes the counter may be resetting back to zero again but it's no big deal, so long as I don't stop fighting it, I will make it to 21 days some day.