Drove back from dropping the cat off this morning. Driving sometimes wipes me out, especially a difficult, pothole-ridden road like this, and added to that is the emotional burden of having said goodbye to one of my favorite creatures of all time. There is a mountain before me this week, consisting of the thousand tasks to make the move to Canada possible. I don’t want my Flow experiment to take a back seat, but the more I can get done this week regarding the move, the more I can schedule work sessions for the next without being weighed down by a mind drifting to all that is unaccomplished. Less than a month to go before getting on the plane.
One of the biggest problems when you have many, many small things to do in a limited time frame is knowing which order to do them in. I feel the pressure creeping up on me, and am a little paralyzed. In such a case, I only know one way to get momentum: do the easiest possible thing. It is of course common wisdom that the most difficult task should be done first, but that mindset only leads me to procrastinate. I prefer doing the easiest, quickest thing, which gives me a tiny nudge, building my momentum so that I realize I can get the next one done, and so on. Now, this does not work when you have only one or two major tasks for the day, because you might actually use the accomplishment of these small tasks as a method of procrastination. As I’ve said previously, you can do something to get into flow, like I’m doing with writing, it just should not serve as a means of avoidance.
But back to goals. I now have two, high-level goals that give me an inspired direction for my life. When I feel like skipping a morning workout, I can remind myself of the second one. When I feel like watching Netflix instead of reading up on my field, I can remind myself of the first one, and know that every wasted moves that goal further away from me.
That is still not enough. When your goals are lofty, it is sometimes easy to ignore them, especially when you’re not certain what the next step is. So we have to introduce the high, hard goals, as Kotler calls them. This is one step below the previous, and should be more achievable, but contribute to the purpose-related goals.
The Flow Diaries 