They tell me that doing the task that I hate the most will get it off my list of things to do and make the rest of the day great.
But there is a reason I put off this task.
It usually isn’t just a thing I don’t want to do but will push my business forward. It’s a thing that I like doing but I don’t like doing all the time.
Recently, (aka this week) I’ve been trying something new. My mother called it the two bites rule*, I’m calling it a twenty-minute rule.
For all the things that I don’t like doing, they usually take an hour total to finish. But I promise myself that if twenty minutes pass and I’m not making progress, I can move onto another project.
Now, this is not like my practicing as a child where I said I was practicing and I for sure wasn’t. Yeah, Mom, I know that you know that now. I think I admitted it in a call some time back. Anyways, diving into something and knowing that I can back out shortly after gives me that caveat I need to get into it.
I’ve been doing some upgrading to my website programming knowledge lately, #teamtreehouse y’all.
I hate sitting down to watch videos and do the practices. Not because I don’t understand the material, but because I really hate watching videos that are teaching me something. I read almost four times faster than the average person speaks. Most people speak between 110-150 words per minute. Lawyers can average 170 in a courtroom (fun factoid) which means that I can read nearly 600 words a minute and understand what I’ve got in front of me.
But I really hate sitting down and watching those videos. The instructors are fine. I like how it’s broken down, but logging on and making progress is an effort.
So I bribed myself with twenty minutes.
Just twenty minutes and I can go back to do the fun things or read something fun.
Of course, when I sat down and started doing what needed to be done, it was forty minutes later and I was this close to finishing this chunk. So I did.
And then I wrote a blog post about how I bribed myself with twenty minutes of working on said blog post.
And then I realized that I only had one thing on my list of 14 to-do’s today not done and there’s a part of me that wants a 100% completion day.
So I’m going to go scan some of my journal pages so that I can cross that off, too.
Because we all need days that we strike out of the park so that the next day, we spend less time beating ourselves up and get more done.
Because we are our best selves when we don’t waste time tearing things down** and spend that time making what we’d rather have in the world.
*I was a picky eater and I didn’t like things that felt wrong. My mother learned to just warn me and I could keep my reactions to a minimum. I’ve since learned more about why but that’s a discussion for another day.
**Crafters ignore that statement. I was ripping out stitches earlier and I have a much better execution the second time around. I assume you have the same feelings as me about projects.
