Day 3: FOCUS
Take three. I’m trying this one more time. Today I committed the crime of sitting down to write three separate times, and twice I have forced out a few paragraphs, deleted them, written a few more, gotten pissed off at what shitty shit I’m cranking out, gone to do something else while I thought about where to go with this piece, then sat back down and re-read what I wrote, deleted the whole thing, and started over again with a new topic. So: this is take three and I am going back to the first topic and I’m gonna FOCUS.
Sheesh. I’m actually sorry I deleted those first two pieces, because even though they were shit, there may have been a good idea in there somewhere that I could have saved for later. Oh well.
My biggest problem lately is that it seems to require superhuman force of will to stay awake while doing something quiet and cerebral, like read any serious research or write anything good. Could be that I have so much stuff going on right now that it’s pretty hard to focus on anything for too long because I start feeling stressed about the other stuff I should be getting done. Also (and I hate to admit this) I feel like my brain has softened to the point where I tend to gravitate to the stuff that demands the least of me; namely social media. So is this a sleep deprivation problem? Or a stress problem? Or is my IQ actually dropping at an alarming rate?
There’s a scary thought.
I’m gonna go with the aforementioned combination of sleep deprivation and stress, because it’s a little less alarming than the third option but also because it’s probably true: I have been carrying around a fair amount of work stress over the past month or so (what with the job change and the role change at home) as well as sleep deprivation (thanks largely to a poorly-timed and vicious man-cold virus that descended upon my husband’s upper respiratory tract two days after the actual transfer at work). Anyway, time to be proactive and do something about both counts, because enough is enough and there’s shit to get done: books to read, pieces to write, videos to make, and worlds to change! I had a long list of stuff I wanted to accomplish back in January when 2017 was a fresh new year to write on – time to shift out of survival mode and back into drive.