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'Feel Better' Lists Lifehack

This is a technique that I've devised that's helped me tremendously.

There's a certain state of mind I find myself in sometimes, where I'm not getting any work done, I'm not getting any sleep in, and I'm not particularly having much fun or even relaxing, and, by my definition, I'm wasting time. Basically procrastinating, reading sites, sitting around, it's icky.

So what I did is I made a list over a few weeks of all the little tiny things that contribute to getting me in that state, and the actions I can take to reverse them. My list has a few categories with things such as brushing my teeth, cleaning up my desk, stretching, bathing, organizing a list of tasks for the day, using the bathroom, getting proper nutrition. All of these things are incredibly mundane, but they're very easy to forget, and not doing them contributes to that feeling.

What I do when I'm feeling all nasty like that, or any time I need to get work done, is I flip to that page in my pocket moleskine, then get out a post-it note and copy down all the items that are relevant. Usually there are a small handful of em, and it'll take me about fifteen minutes to get in a nice state where I can approach my work comfortably.

The trick here is that doing any one of those items on the list doesn't do a hell of a lot. But in a ten minute dash, suddenly my desk is clean, I've organized my list of tasks, I've changed from the clothes I've been wearing all week, and I've got a nice cold soda. It feels good, because there's a good chance that most of those things were subconsciously bugging me.

Anybody use a tactic like this? I've found it helpful, thought I'd pass it along.

TOPICS: Life Hacks
pooks's picture

Quite simply, when I...

a11en wrote:
Quite simply, when I procrastinate: "I'm choosing short-term pleasure and long-term pain, over short-term pain and long-term pleasure."

I know I've seen this before, but it's such an amazing statement -- I need to print it out and stick it somewhere so that it's in front of me all the time.

Something similar to the "put things on the list that you can cross off the list just to have the pleasure of it" hack --

Back when I was doing SHE-cards, a long time ago, there were some suggested tasks in their book that (perhaps I should be embarrassed to mention) never ever crossed my radar. Stuff like dust/wash window sills. There were other things that are the kinds of things that can be kind of a pain, and also fall into the "nobody will notice that you do them, but they'll notice of you don't" file.

So I made a special mark on those cards that meant, "Do these when Sam is home."

In other words, if I'm going to wash the freaking window sills, I want credit for it. I want to be SEEN washing the freaking window sills. And if I am going to wash out the interior of the microwave on such a regular basis that nobody will ever notice it needed it? I'm going to do it when somebody is there to watch me.

I know this may seem petty, but it really was a motivation. Because truly, it doesn't take long to wipe down the window sills or wipe out the microwave, but I felt quite smug doing it with my husband watching, agog.

 
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