Grand Productivity Experiment Phase Four: Exhaustingly Successful!

It’s a wonderful feeling to know that no part of your life is about to burst into unmanageable flames. But keeping it that way, it turns out, is rather tiring.

Dance with spinning plates2(js)
Last week went something like this.
Day 1: did something in each of seven areas and had energy for more!
Day 2: did something in each of seven areas.
Day 3: did two errands, two loads of laundry and nothing else.
Day 4: did something in each of seven areas, trying not to overdo it.
Day 5: did something in about five areas, but very slowly
Day 6: (people day) full of people, busy pretty much all day.
Day 7: (rest day) rested – and boy was I ready for it!

So on the one hand, I’d call the Seven Areas (Seven Spinning Plates?) Method a roaring success; on the other hand I’m either going to need to scale it back a bit or build up some more stamina. Or maybe only do 15 minutes in any one area.

This week, I’m trying another of my own inventions, which I call Inculcating the Right Frame of Mind. (Really needs a catchier name. Suggestions?) It came about as a reaction to my usual habit of bullying myself into doing whatever needs to be done (or more often, not doing it at all, because I don’t respond well to intimidation).

Chongqing yangjiaping 2007
I won’t and you can’t make me!
In Dorothea Brande’s excellent little book Becoming A Writer, she writes that, “in changing habits, you will find yourself getting your results far more quickly and with less ‘backwash’ if you engage your imagination in the process instead of calling out the biggest gun of your character equipment [the will] first.”

I’ve written about this before, or something like it. But there are more possibilities than, say, looking at a houseful of chaos and asking oneself What Would Jeeves Do? A picture of a garden might inspire one to go out and hoe into the weeds; a book or fantasy movie might inspire one to change how one lives in one’s home; reading about one’s personal heroes – whether individuals, groups or societies – might inspire one to have another stab at emulating them. For some people, music might be the thing that inspires them.

So this week, instead of browbeating and bullying myself into doing what is needful, I’m going to set about cultivating enthusiasm for the task that lies ahead.

What inspires you to joyfully go about the tasks before you?

Grand Productivity Experiment: Phase Three… Partially Indigestible

Here’s the thing about frogs: there is no shortage of them. Life is, in fact, frogs all the way down. But I must confess that some of the frogs I ate this last week in my Eat That Frog experiment didn’t go all the way down.

Keelback eating a Dahls Aquatic Frog (8692590510)
I had three problems with it. First: how do you know when you’ve eaten enough frogs for the day? If “there’s always a bigger fish” then logically there is also always a smaller fish, and therefore a smaller frog. When do you stop?
Second: if the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, how many bites should you take out of an elephant-sized frog in one day? (And how big is a bite, anyway?)

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Grand Productivity Experiment: Phase Two, Um… Over?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this week, it’s that Unexpected Stuff Happens. Always a useful lesson, and one which we humans are surprisingly prone to forgetting, considering how often life provides reminders.

I thought this week’s productivity experiment – using the Master List and Daily Lists – would be a piece of cake. I’ve done similar things before, and they worked ok. Well, this week’s major events were certainly not something I had on my Master List. In fact, very little that happened this week was.

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