I did another Integrity Day today and two more big pieces of the Peaceful Productivity puzzle fell into place (nice alliteration!):
Context — When I’m working on a complex project with lots of parts and I don’t have a sense of the context I’m working in, I tend to experience strong ups and downs. For example, I was working on my website which has all kinds of inter-connections (links, payment gateways, confirmation pages, autoresponders, etc.), and on each Integrity Day check-in call, I thought I was an hour away from finishing. My mood would shoot up. But within the hour, I would discover another inter-connected piece that I’d forgotten about that needed work. And my mood would drop. This repeated several times.
If I’d had, let’s say, a visual map of the website and all of the pieces, I would have had a better sense of context — what I was working on and how it fit. Even if I forgot a piece, I could have added it to the map as soon as I discovered it. It would have given me an overview that I believe would have smoothed out the ups and downs.
So, there’s an upside to diving right into a project (energy and momentum), but it’s also helpful to know the size of the pool.
I was too focused on the finish line — I also noticed a tendency I have of focusing too much on the finish line. The emotional ups and downs were the result of seeing the finish line very close and then realizing it was far away again. Call that yo-yo vision.
Ignoring the finish line is not the answer because it’s too easy to go astray. It’s important to harmonize what I’m doing now with where I’m headed. I think passion is a part of the answer (passion being something you feel about what you’re doing NOW). I intend to explore passion proactively in these 100 Days.
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