Healthy Productivity – The Climb #904

Saturday 14th August 2021

It seems almost typical that the week I start focusing on consistency, I feel a little burnt out and end up taking a break. However, it made me realise how good my system is.

In the creative space, there’s a lot of talk about the muse. Some talk about it as if it was a Goddess that needs to visit and impart divine inspiration on a person and their project. In recent years, there’s been a lot about ignoring this concept and powering through… that the days you struggle to find words are indistinguishable on the page to ones where they flowed.

However, I think they’re missing something here. You shouldn’t suffer to enter what is essentially a flow state. Yes, if you have a deadline or have the odd bad day here or there, you can power through. But, much like having a day when you feel a bit under the weather to days when you feel ill, you have to learn the difference between having an odd bad day and your body telling you to take a rest.

I’m big on productivity, but in recent years some people have taken it to the level where it’s harmful. A good system should aid you when you are productive, but it should also tide you over when you’re not.

Personally, I think after the battle I had to get my Twitter back, only to then be met by a new mountain of problems to try and get my desktop fixed, has been what has burnt me out a little. And yes, a long weekend of playing Minecraft might not be the most ‘productive’ thing to do, but it does allow my brain to take a bit of a rest.

But things are still happening.

Despite most of today consisting of playing Minecraft, the daily log still got updated, writing data still got recorded, tasks still got ticked off.

Now there’s additional work that hasn’t been done. I need to do thumbnails for The Climb (my spare backlog is on the broken desktop) and get those posted. My writing data needs to be added to the writing metrics database. There’s stuff that needs to finished off, but it can wait until Monday and then be caught up on then.

I’ve often said that a productivity system is like a safety net. My system allows me to have a break, and whilst projects might stall for a few days, they don’t fail. It’s a bit like one of those SciFi movies where the starship captain shuts down all but essential systems. Air still continues to be pumped round the ship. Gravitational and navigational system continue to work. But the holodeck is offline.

That’s me right now, as I stop trying to do 101 things and focus on the essentials.

Now, if I’m honest, would I like a few more things to be in those essential systems? Of course, I’d like everything to be in there!

However, what’s important is that my entire productivity system doesn’t just crash. That’s where a lot of productivity goes wrong… the systems are designed to burn you out and then when your body says it needs a rest, they collapse because they can’t scale back.

I’m hoping that by Monday I’ll be back on track, and most importantly, there will be very little in the way of admin backlog, because that’s ticked away automatically. At some point, I need to dive into that to understand how that fits into habit building, and see what I can learn from it. But for now, I’m going to just recharge myself by doing something easy on the brain like Minecraft.