Getting Momentum – The Climb #883

Saturday July 24^th 2021

I’ve been thinking a lot about momentum lately.

A lot of the things I want to do are the product of habits, doing a little every day that amounts to something larger. During the pandemic I’ve been a little all over the place, and whilst I FEEL like I’ve not been consistently productive, I have – for example – written over 250k words so far this year as well as editing over 120k more.

My way through the lockdowns has felt a bit sporadic at times, even if on a weekly or monthly timescale I’ve been pretty consistent. But for some of the things I want to do, I need to be more consistent on a daily timescale. That might mean lowering my own personal targets. For example, writing 10,000 words in a week might currently involve one day of 4000 words and then the other 6 days of only 1000 words. Instead, I’d prefer 1500 every day.

I spent a bit of time today researching Youtube and Twitch. I’ve had exciting plans for these platforms and yet… I had a week where I spent days doing intros and putting systems in place to make videos quickly… and then… I’ve had at least 2 video ideas in the last couple of days where I’ve not acted quick enough.

And guaranteed, if I carry on this way, I’ll then have a day where I’ll make 7 videos in one day.

I’m all for task batching. I have set days for various tasks that makes it easy to do that, but I’ve not really been using that. I’ve also not been very good at recovering when I have a disruptive day. I need to be able to shake it off and recover, rather than letting the trail of destruction from that day’s productivity trail well into the following week.

Some of this is me trying to do too much at once, and (to a degree) micro managing myself. But I also think there’s this head flip I need to do to split tasks out from habits. Writing every day is a habit, not a task. Getting exercise is not something I can get away with once a week.

There’s lots I need to do that involve habits, and I really think this is a missing component of my system. Currently I have planning, review and tasks, but what I’m slowly coming to realise is that there’s another component for habits. I can kinda see how it fits in to my existing system, but I think the temptation would be to make too many tasks habits.

Making a video each week – is that a task or a habit? Or is it both? I need to work out for myself how to differentiate between the two otherwise I’ll end up with a billion habits and no time to do them all.

Well if nothing else, it’ll give me a new Youtube rabbit hole to disappear down. But if I get it right, I’m hoping it will help me maintain a bit more daily consistency when it comes to forward momentum.