January Review
January is coming to an end and I have somehow managed to remain sober, do my stretches, floss my teeth, write here, and post to my foto blog every single day. I have written an article for the New Escapologist, performed at OMG, and finished a couple of websites. I have watched Fritz Lang’s fantastic M and read lots of Shakespeare, including The Comedy of Errors and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both of which I greatly enjoyed. Overall, it has been a pretty good month.
However, the biggest revelation I’ve had has come from limiting myself to checking my (personal) email once a day. Previously I would check email (or read a feed or check the football news or whatever) every time that I reached a knot in my thought. It was compulsive. Since giving it up, I realise that what this did was to make me lose my thread entirely so that I would have to work my way back to the aforementioned knot. By allowing yourself to do things uninterruptedly, you avoid procrastination and usually find that there wasn’t even a knot in the first place.
My method for overcoming the compulsion has been ultra-simple: I make an agreement with myself not to check my email until I get home. What I like about this quite severe information diet is that it impels you to answer emails straight away because you know you won’t get another opportunity for 24 hours.
February lies ahead and a part of me wants to surrender myself to debauchery, but I probably won’t. The Jerry Seinfeld Productivity Secret of building up a chain of actions that become a chain of habits, makes the chain difficult to break.
Of course, this may just be hubris and I could be face down in a ditch come Sunday. We shall see.