Time Management Tuesday: New Energy

"If we can perceive some upcoming time as something new, as something different, a change, it's far easier to believe that we can make a change in how we're going to behave in that new chunk of time..." "If we think about the unit system...and the research that suggests that people are productive for the first 45-minutes that they work, there may be some logic to our love of new beginnings. Experience has taught us that we're more productive when we start something new, and we like feeling productive. We like the surge of starting something new."

Who said that? Yeah. That was me.

Ready To Work

Indianapolis

"Excited" is too strong a word for how I'm feeling about getting back to work after vacation. However, because I pretty much finished a draft before heading out of Dodge earlier this month, I feel as if I'm starting something new now that I'm back. Because I am. I'm starting a revision. The fact that a new month starts on Thursday adds to that notion that I'm starting a new unit of time. Because a month is, indeed, a unit of time. In addition, my May Days group is getting ready to do an October project, which I'm going to use for that revision. Another new beginning.  Then here at Chez Gauthier we're planning to do another October purge, getting rid of unnecessary material things so we don't have to spend time taking care of them.

Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan

What I'm feeling is...maybe...confidence. As I said before, experience has taught me that I'm more productive when I'm getting started on something new.

How Do You Keep That New Smell?

Newness doesn't last. But can we keep getting that renewed feeling somehow?

Maybe we can by using big units of time, just as some of us use short ones in our work day. Breaking our day into short work increments helps to make us believe we're starting our day over and over again, tricking the old mind into thinking it has as much willpower at two in the afternoon as it did when we got out of bed. Breaking our months and years into short-term work units could help us feel we're starting something over and over again, too. It could be why National Novel Writing Month works for many people. It's only thirty days, not the months and months I worked on that first draft earlier this year. I was dragging at the end of that.

As it turns out, I have those two October projects I'm starting this week--revising with the May Days group and trashing whatever I can in my house--to use to give this a shot. I'm tinkering with a plan for December, too.