One of my new favourite productivity/work flow/improving myself generally bloggers, David Seah, has just started a challenge which I’ve been struggling with for months…making early rising into a habit.
In a post today about feeling totally crap in the initial few days of being an early riser David wrote something that I’d never realised before, but really, totally makes sense:
The impulsive side of me enjoys the quest for knowledge as it is happening, so the reward is immediate. The application of that knowledge through process takes time, and the reward is deferred. For people that enjoy the mechanical process side of things, the reward would be immediate. In my case, I have to be aware that my brain is going to try to distract me with more immediately-gratifying things.
This is me down to a tee. I’m easily distracted because I enjoy the quest for knowledge. Just Doing Things (JDT)[1] (as opposed to Getting Things Done) is totally my weakness. My brain will easily and joyfully slip into reading the news, or something on Wikipedia about which I previously new nothing or which I don’t yet quite understand.
Things that require me to just do some work are harder; especially when I know I can do the work and won’t have to research a bit of something new first.
- Ok, that’s totally tongue in cheek, but why the hell not make up random acronyms? [↩]