There is No Spoon

I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels. Forever.

This is not a new feeling and seems to run in cycles where I feel more and more mired in the routine every day crap until finally something comes along to shake me out of it. Then life rolls on again until the next cycle of stuck. I should probably be careful about complaining about this because there are all kinds of bad things that could shake things up and that’s not what I’m going for.

I thought the NYC trip would stir me up a bit more but not really.

I’m having a hard time articulating myself this morning. This week has been extra long. With one car I’ve been leaving earlier and we’ve had something going on after work every night this week. And I have a couple of huge projects at the office that require a lot of brain juice that I’m trying to keep reeled in.

What happens on these longs days is I start to think about all the things I want to get done on the weekend when I have time. Then when the time finally rolls around I’m tired and my brain is squeezed dry and once I’ve run an errand or two and run the laundry then my motivation vanishes and I end up organizing my envelope collection in front of the TV.

I was going to go into a thing about the big rocks first and blah blah blah being productive. But really, productive compared to what? I have too many internal rules. I should spend all day Saturday finger painting. (Even just joking about it is giving me a small coronary. Finger painting? But how will all the stuff get done?)

Just now when I plugged “big rocks first” into a search engine to find a link to that story I got a bunch of hits on productivity articles. Does anyone else find it funny how many online sites are devoted to ideas for productivity? You could spend all day doing nothing except keeping up with the latest on productivity.

The reason I bring up productivity articles is that I can never resist the urge to read an article that promises to teach me the secrets to be more productive. It’s sort of like all those articles I read between the ages of 15-35 that promised to teach me the secrets of losing weight.

I already know: There is no secret. You have to do it. Weight loss? Burn more than you take in. There is no secret formula of grapefruit and cauliflower that’s going to make it easier. It’s not like pie crust where there might actually be a secret like chill the butter or roll it out between two sheets of wax paper (which totally didn’t work).

I already know if I want to get stuff done I have to do it. My big productivity tip, which I have trouble implementing: want to do less stuff.

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