Good news on two fronts. This morning I hit the ten pound mark. After whining and feeling horribly dejected about my lack of progress a couple weeks earlier, I for once did not let it get the better of me. I stuck with it. It paid off.
R.I.P., Ten Pounds. I won’t miss you.
In other news, I’m still plowing ahead with the book work, but it isn’t easy. One of my constant psychological hurdles is the mere thought of the hours and hours and hours left on this project. I already spend some ten or eleven or more hours a day at the day job. Then there’s home and family stuff going on nearly every single nigh. If I’m lucky, I get to start book work between nine or ten each night. And by then I’m so wiped out I could be making all my edits in Pig Latin and not realize it.
I only have one trick to get me over humps like this. It’s the “Twenty Minute Rule” and it goes something like this. Faced with the prospect of several hours of work, I get overwhelmed and just give up. It’s easier to grab a box of Cheez-Its and pass out on the couch for the short remainder of the evening than to push this stalled project up and over another hill. But I tell myself, “People who pass out eating Cheez-Its rarely make history,” and I make this compromise: Just work twenty minutes, and then call it a night.
Twenty minutes is my threshold. It’s long enough to write a good paragraph and short enough that I can squeeze it in at any time. It’s not a daunting unit of time and it’s infinitely longer than zero minutes, the likely alternative. And here’s the thing. Once I hit the twenty minute mark, I’m usually on a roll and so I just keep on rolling.
It’s lucky I’m stupid enough for fall for this simple trick every single time.
