Getting Stuff Done by Not Being Mean to Yourself (2010)

> that is very ambitious if not pathologically ambitious.

I guess that's what many parents are then? Meditating in the morning is one thing, for an hour, everyone can find their window. Same goes for an hour of journaling, and an hour of eating breakfast. The steps are OK, but the duration might be different for me.

I'm a life long night owl, now morning miracling. It's different, waking up that early feels like still being up before anyone is like late at night, plus a clearer head from a full sleep cycle.

Sometimes you accidentally fall asleep at 9, and wake up at 3-4 without issue.

I think I'm about to join the 5 am gym club, I don't even know who I am any more. That's the fun of continuing to discover things that weren't thought of as a possibility.

This has actually worked well for me in the past, but the trick for me was to wait at least a month after an idea was written down before starting on it.

Basically, while working on one thing, I would jot all my 'newer and better' ideas into a journal so that I could finish the current thing. After finishing the current thing I would read through my journal to decide what to start next, realizing that most of the ideas I had written down were pretty lame.

The delay in time saved me from starting work on things that I would have abandoned soon after (albeit for good reason) and I developed more confidence and determination in finishing the things I started, since those ideas had proven themselves over the others.

Another approach I take is to breakdown a large task into smaller tasks that I can complete in less than one or two hours since I deal with a lot of interruptions during the day. This allows me to recognize my progress on a task and makes it easier to remember the state of things at any particular stopping point.

One day I was making nasty fun of myself for being really good at starting things, and something clicked. "Sticking to" something is functionally same as starting it over and over again. Which I'm good at. Am I ever going to stop starting to work out? No. My only problem is that sometimes there's a significant interval between "stopping" and "starting." What am I doing during those intervals? Hating myself on one hand and also trying to whip up irrational confidence that the next time I start will be the time I actually stick with a schedule. I could dispense with those things and reduce the interval.

It turns out I can reduce the interval between starting and stopping to basically nothing.

This approach isn't systematic enough to produce amazing results, but I'm happy to now be working out 3-4 times per week, and more importantly, I'm happy that if I miss a few workouts, I'm back to normal right away instead of spending weeks or months licking my wounds.

Later I made a connection to how people say that great athletes have short memories, in the sense that success and failure don't leave a lasting emotional mark on them. When a great athlete completes a difficult pass or gets it slightly wrong, strikes out or hits a home run, hits a shot or misses it, they process the information, but any sense of triumph or failure has to be gone in seconds by necessity because it can't be allowed to affect the next shot they take.

I apply that attitude to a lot of my daily life. I'll have time to feel proud or downcast after the game is over. Right now I have to take my next shot.

For me, I feel like that's a better emotional cadence. I don't instantly drop the judgment hammer on myself for a mistake. Not only does that stop knee-jerk emotions from wrecking my subsequent decisions, but my reactions at the end of the day are usually more moderate, thoughtful, and productive.

Another good option is a uni gig in their tech department. You’ll have to put up with absolutely scads of incompetence, probably a change control board, crap pay plus you’ll get pay freezes during downturns, but the lifestyle and benefits are absurdly good — I know people who show up for a couple meetings in the morning, leave for a three hour lunch and then go home every day — and you’ll usually be getting a pension. Highly recommend going this route when you’ve made your egg and are ten years out from retirement.

In which country is this? Where I live now in Europe I've never seen jobs that let you get away with that. Maybe those people you know are well connected with the bosses that they're allowed such lax work behavior.