Being okay with 60%.
I'm about to tell you something radical. Get ready.
In my experience, the goals you set, the plans you create, the schedules you obsess over, the systems you use, are less important than this:
Being able to be okay with a 60% day.
I have seen clients finish their dissertations under a variety of conditions - teaching or working full time, navigating a family, working through serious health conditions, having restarted halfway through - and not one of them used the same skills. They used different software, different schedules, different workspaces, and different workflows.
But they all decided to release themselves from needing to use any of those tools 100% of the time, or to 100% of its efficiency potential. They got comfortable with a 60% day, feeling good about what they did do, paying attention to what could be better and working towards a better flow all the time without tying their emotional state to that 100% benchmark.
Use whatever structure works for you. Do you love goals? Go for it! Set as many as your heart desires, but I encourage you to not let the structure overwhelm the reasoning. The goals are there to give you something concrete to focus on, but it's your commitment that actually moves the project forward.
100% is amazing, but difficult to sustain. Life, invariably, happens. So if you have a tendency to always strive towards the 100%, and lapsing into frustration, avoidance or anxiety when you don't hit it, try focusing instead on seeing the good in a 60% day - What did you accomplish? What did move forward? What made you feel good? Conduct an experiment where you track how you feel over a few weeks where you focus on smaller, more focused bursts of work - are ten 60% days better, overall, at moving you forward than two 100% days? Commitment, not the perfect work day, is what moves you forward. Commit to showing up, and maybe even learning to value, for a 60% day.
Things you can say yes to today.
It is so easy to believe that we have to wait to start things - I'll start that in May, or when the semester is over, or when I get back from my fieldwork, or when I feel better, or when this is more in hand. So consider these a gentle invitation into today, into this week, into this pom. You might not resonate with all of them, but any time we try something different, we get new information. And information helps us make the best decisions we can about how, when, and where we spend our time and energy.
Take a deep breath.
Try a website blocker during writing sessions
Ask a friend or colleague to read an early draft
Make a special playlist and only use it when you're writing on that project you're stuck on.
Get out your favorite pen and write a whole page of things that you're curious about
Experiment with keeping your email closed until after you do one pom of work on your own project
Remember that when you set boundaries in a clear, professional, and kind way, it gives others permission to do the same.
Clean up one of your work or living spaces
Make one or two decisions ahead of time, to save yourself some decision fatigue
Call someone you're missing to say hello (or text, I'm not a monster)
Set some time aside to do something completely fun, even if it's for 2 or 3 minutes.
Write your favorite motivational phrase on a post-it, or even on your hand, so that you can see it.
Send a friend, colleague, student, or loved one a message saying how proud you are of how hard they're working.
Set up an informational interview with someone whose job you're interested in.
Update your CV, feel good about your accomplishments while you're doing it.
For every 10 books or articles you request from the library, check one cookbook out. Or comic book. Or book you loved as a kid. Even if you only read a few pages, fun!
Set a new goal, or increase your goal target, for your writing or reading.
Make a bunch of celebratory doodles in your planner on today's date to remember that this was the day you started [x].
You don't have to earn fresh starts. You don't have to do everything all at once. You are allowed to feel good about what is working even when there are things you want to improve or change. You are allowed to be proud of effort that only you can see. You can always try again, whether it's a new pom or a new day or a new month or a new year. The truth is that we very rarely regret the things we start, or try - but the things we wait on, the things we never attempt, those can start to add up.
Just 1%
Yesterday, I woke up feeling overwhelmed by my to-do list, and an old pal of a thought pattern showed up:
"If you had been more on top of things last week, you wouldn't feel like this."
"If you had started that [new plan that was definitely going to fix everything] when you first thought of it, you'd be farther along now."
"If you had just been better earlier...."
And when these thoughts come to play, I often don't want to do anything at all, because obviously, the only solution to feeling better now was to start weeks ago, and I didn't do that, so what's the point, bring on the Netflix and chips!!!!
But as I scrolled through Instagram, I saw this post from Karamo, king of my heart, where he said:
You just have to be 1% better today.
And pals, I promise that this is good, useful advice.
You do not have to, in this session, this month, or this week, fix everything that you want to be fixed.
Just do one thing that gets you closer to where you want to be.
Haven't opened your dissertation in a while? Open it up.
Feeling like you haven't gotten enough movement lately? Go for a short walk around the block, or park farther away than you might have otherwise.
Have one vegetable or fruit.
Write just one paragraph, or one sentence!
Go to bed a half hour earlier, or get up 15 minutes earlier.
Clean up one area of your office or house.
It doesn't have to be big. You just have to be 1% farther than you were when you started. Because the magic is that the first 1% is often the hardest, but it can unblock you. Once you open the file, you read it a little, and then maybe you see a sentence you want to fix, and then you fix it, and then you read the paragraph, and then you see where you want to go next, and....
And even if all those steps don't happen at once, you've started down the path. And you've countered the voice that says: "if you started this a week ago!" because you've started it now.
And then, maybe, you'll look back in a month, or in three months, and say, this was the day I said yes to trying a new way of thinking about my work, and the scale felt laughably small at the time, but look where I am now....