Tag Archives: Procrastination

Productivity

SCHEDULES AND ROUTINES🍅

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Take a pick my dear Sunday team- Coffee, tea or water?


In my last blog article I preached about my mini life reset I carried out in April. My main goal was to get a grip of myself and become disciplined enough to be active with my interests rather than mourn about how unproductive I was being and how lazy I was growing. It was about little steps away from my comfort zone.

In that post I stressed on my plans of designing a schedule and routine and hoped to share the process with you if I actually do it. Well, I did it!

Schedule baby

DESIGNING A schedule can seem like a lot of work at first but the key to overcoming that is not doing too much.

I made a simple paper and digital list of the activities I’ll love to do each day no matter how little and if that list of yours looks like a railway you might want to reconsider.
In that list I included the following activities in order of which came first:

Drink water
Study/school work
Bible reading
Financial book read
Planning and checking notifications
lunch
Read my current novel
Make dinner
Watch evening soap opera
Bath
Spanish lesson
journaling

Let me already mention that I had breaks between these activities. It wasn’t a do or die robotic program.

TIME BLOCKS🍅


I DECIDED my wake time should be 04:00a.m so I can study for two hours before the whole family was awake- that’ll be such a distraction.
Well you must have guessed right: I snoozed my alarm more than I woke up. That was just too early for goodness sake we are on a break, the whole world.
When I was tired of deceiving myself I moved my wake time to 05:00 a.m.
This time it was better, I felt better in the mornings. But it was still difficult.

PRESENTLY


SOON ENOUGH my body made a decision for us: it decided to no longer hear the alarm. I could no longer hear my alarm when it rang. Instead it woke my mom up every day at 05:00a.m. I felt bad.


When a schedule is obviously not working, it is okay to make adjustments. You should keep trying out schedules and routines till you find the one that suits the moment or season you’re in. If there’s one thing I know now, it’ll be the fact that you can’t have the same schedule and routine for so long… things change. Do not be afraid or ashamed of tweaking and adjusting your schedules and routines.

Tweak it till it fits

Adjusting is healthy

I created a digital document where I wrote about some days when my schedule was successful and when it was a total wreck.

We should be able to pick efficiency over extended work. Instead of doing too much and being so inefficient it will be better to do the little things and do them effectively DAILY.


After deceiving and torturing myself for weeks I decided one morning to just do what I can whatever time I woke up. Not minding the time, indeed my goal was to choose commitment daily and not to become the neighborhood rooster.
That was the best decision I took last week and this past week was really calm and effective. I noticed I was usually awake somewhere between 6:30 a.m. – 07:00 a.m. And that was the end of my morning disappointments.

ANY CHALLENGE?


Definitely. When staying in a house with your parents and siblings plans are meant to change most times. Most times you’ll need to leave your work and focus on errands or helping siblings. Yes, this has affected my routine most days but like I said before: your schedule or routine shouldn’t be untouchable. You should not feel bad for tweaking this list. Just make sure you’re choosing to commit daily no matter how little the time.
So currently whenever I wake up I choose my commitments no matter the time of the day.
My schedules did suffer daily but my evening routine became my source of content. It was the most consistent and effective; I never missed a day in studying Spanish. So that’s my pride… I keep tweaking the blocks that fail.

POMODORO🍅


Oh dear tomato unit. I represent my pomodoro time blocks with tomato emojis. Pomodoro technique is simply setting a stop watch for work and another for a break: I use 25 minutes for work and 5 minutes for a break and the cycle goes on and on.

As for Spanish lesson; it’s scheduled at 10:00p.m. Monday to Saturday for 1 hour.

On Sundays I welcome breaks from commitments and tend to writing. Did I mention my Photoshop course I scheduled for Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 9:00p.m.?


Side note: 🍅Praying has recently become the sweetest way for me to start my day.
🍅 I ditched school work for two weeks. Don’t be like me. But I’m happier this way.
🍅 I’m starting a new finance book because I finished the other one i.e. “Increasing your financial IQ by Robert Kiyosaki”

Schedules and routines are just guidelines not mountains…

This article has gotten too long… bye now x
Take it easy… baby steps.

Drifting off October

DEALING WITH THE NEW

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THE BED AND THE HUMAN

Hello everyone! Thanks for joining The Purple Journal after that pretty long break.
Here’s the reason why I’ve not been writing:

I’VE BEEN IN BED

I repeat, I’ve been in bed.

Believe me she wasn’t prepared for this. Early on a new October morning, she gently rose up with the pace of dawn. A plain white sheet laid on her wooden table with plans ready to come to life.
She had invested the early hours into appreciatong the new greens outside her house, and fruitfully approaching the month.
She had carried some air from the previous month; the air of hope. A lovely way to start a new phase if you ask me but the rest of the days lacked the resemblance of dawn. It sure was quiet but it was too quiet. Adrenaline was always appreciated…

I surprisingly found myself in a situation where I was always in bed.
Thinking about it now, it obviously was and still is an escape.

FACING THE UNKNOWN

From this experience, I would say facing the unknown requires these properties:

  1. Self control
  2. Discipline
  3. Resilience
  4. Courage
  5. Faith, trust, hope.
    Love hovers over them all.

Facing an unknown beginning can trigger new habits in us. These habits can be geared toward striving to achieve, following a certain schedule or escaping failed actions.

Sleeping has become one of those habits that helped me escape the after effects of failed actions.

Sleeping too much?

I really had no idea what the problem was but I always felt the need to escape the bad feeling by sleeping. But here’s a little tip:

Bad feelings arise as an alert that we are not really doing the right things or we are generally making wrong decisions.
If we feel too optimistic and try to wave off the bad feeling, the problem remains.
If we find ways to escape the feelings when they come, we will definitely get away from it but not for long.
Maybe the best thing we can do is be courageous (with the knowledge that courage is not the absence of resistance and fear), face the feeling, analyse it, hear what it’s trying to say to us and get on with doing the right things (which turns out to be the core problem)

DOING THE RIGHT THING

Truly we all know the right things to do, how? We already know the wrong things we are doing.
The problem with doing the right thing is how uncomfortable it gets; the uncontrollable resistance and we are humans anyways.
This is why I can support the list above that discipline and self-control are very great and productive attitudes to cultivate and grow when approaching our very life (which is always an unknown).

In the main time, it will feel excruciatingly difficult (if not impossible), but when it’s over you will be more peaceful looking back at the suffering, rather than looking back at all the things you didn’t do.

BED EQUALS SLEEP

When I failed to do the things I was suppose to do, I found my legs moving to the bedroom. In a sunny, hot afternoon, I would cover myself up with my very thick blanket and hope to get away from it all by sleeping. I would put myself to sleep by convincing my gullible self with these words:
“I’ll do it when I wake up, maybe I’ll feel fresh, new and ready to restart the day.”
I was always looking for ways to restart the day, even though it’s 7pm. Sleeping was the best way to help myself realise this stupid intention.

So how do you actually get out of bed and do what you’re suppose to do?
Here’s a quick answer:
Grumble and hate it all while you actually make a decision and attempt to move your body off the bed. Move yourself, feet by feet (still grumbling) and place yourself on the area where you have your work. When you’re done, thank God later.

There is no how. Thing is, we all know how to; We just lack discipline because we hold on to our entitlement to comfort.

We are always choosing (I’ll talk about this in the next topic of this series).

We will feel way better after our suffering than we will feel after our comfort.

You see, the thing with comfort (laying in bed, scrolling through channels, surfing instagram, munching on junk) is this: it’s just an escape. It doesn’t actually make the problem go away. It just makes you get addicted and dependent on it. It makes you run away from the problem when indeed happiness comes from solving problems.

Get out of bed… Face the feeling.

It’s funny how the best things we desire actually come from doing the very things we want to ignore. It’s ironic how true comfort actually comes from being uncomfortable.
The make up of man is one of the most counter-intuitive system I’ve ever observed.

The best way to get away from uncomfortable feelings is doing the uncomfortable… It is simply doing the right thing, which we all know is hard to do (at first).

I am not saying it’s (that) easy, I’m just saying it’s worth choosing…

Here’s how I got to write this post after a long time of avoidance: I got out of bed and reluctantly sat on my work table. Period.