Good morning from Milano. What’s on my mind today is walking my talk and asking myself what it is I would say to a friend in trouble. What happened to me was on Monday (and you all know I love my Mondays) I had all these ideas of what I was going to do. But once I finally got myself to the office – way later than I had expected and hoped to be there – things started going sideways. I knew right away I wasn’t going to get a thing done and it felt really bad to me.
My first thought was you didn’t do your list. You’re not clear on what you’re here to do today. I started going down that dark alley of self beratement before I stopped myself. I thought wait, what would you say to someone right now if they called you and said they were feeling distracted, they couldn’t focus or something along those lines? What would you say?
The answer has multiple parts and it’s very simple.The first thing would be, okay, go ahead and throw your hands up in the air, but don’t throw the day away. That’s where productive procrastination comes in. Let’s make this a day of productive procrastination. What is that mindless thing that you’ve been wanting to do, but really never get to? In my case that was going through old photos and screenshots to make space on my hard drive and deleting hundreds of emails So that’s number one for me, productive procrastination. I completely turned my day around by just giving myself permission to let it go. It was not going to be a worky work day.Worky work on that Monday was about feeling good about letting myself do those unimportant mindless tasks. That’s how I turned my Monday around.
The other thing I would say, and I’m not sure how well I did at it but I think it’s an important thing, is drop the judgment and drop into curiosity. Hmm. Interesting. This isn’t what I expected today, but I guess we’re going to go with it. Lastly I would say make a list for what I wanted to do the next day. I did that and it felt constructive to me and it was a way to set the intention for what I wanted Tuesday to look like.
Another thing I was thinking about related to my Monday gone sideways is the fact that this is January, and January’s always a bit of a weird month. We all know that. We have a lifetime of experience of January’s. We’ve come off the holidays. Things are slower. In many parts of the world, the days are shorter. It gets darker and it’s colder. So it’s a really good time of year to be gentle on ourselves, wouldn’t you agree ?
I’ll leave it at that. Until next time, from my heart to yours.
