Day 408: Laziness?

I’m still in the process of trying to set myself up for success. Recently I’ve been blogging about eating my “frogs” first, and my experiment in putting some of those “frogs” off until later in the day didn’t work at all. For my Japanese study (one of the “frogs”), I lost motivation to do it later in the day since I was too tired, and although I haven’t mentioned it lately, I have to confess that I’ve completely stopped doing my daily exercise (my other “frog”).

The exercise doesn’t always happen even when I do it first thing because if my IBS is acting up, walking only makes the pain worse. So if I’m having a bad IBS flare-up, I usually will forego my exercise.

But since my iBS calmed down from its last flare-up, I’ve been feeling well enough to go walking, except I haven’t. While I went back to doing my Japanese study first thing after I wake up, I never got around to doing the same for my exercise. Partly it was because at the time, I was still doing my walking later in the afternoon, but that soon stopped.

So today I moved my walking back to first thing after I wake up, and before I do my Japanese study. It was much easier to get myself to do it, and I moved right into doing my Japanese when I got back.

Doing all my “frogs” (home chores, Bible reading, exercise, Japanese study) first thing after I get up, however, usually takes several hours, and after finishing the last frog, I'm typically hungry and need to eat lunch (which is typically actually mid-afternoon since I get up late). So then I don’t start work until after lunch.

I need to practice and work on getting into deep focus when I write, as per the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. When I really concentrate and I’m not distracted, the time just seems to fly by. But getting into that state is hard for me, and I’d like to get better at it.

I know that part of the reason it’s hard for me to get into that focused mindset is because thinking hard about my book is difficult. And when I get to a really hard place where I have to decide where the story is going, it can become very frustrating for me. So naturally my brain doesn’t want to get into something so hard to do. I suppose at heart, I’m super lazy.

But I also really love this book and I love writing, so I need to get over my laziness and Just Do It.

I’m continuing my blocking and filling out the scene spreadsheet for book 4 of my Regency series. I spent a lot of time on two scenes yesterday, and it seems at first glance that I didn’t get a lot done. But when I looked back at my blocking notes, I realized that those were both very emotional scenes. That’s probably why they took so long—I tend to have more difficulty with emotional scenes, so they usually take me longer to both block and write. (In contrast, I can whip out a fight scene in less than 1/4 of the time as an emotional scene.)

***

I did good work for about 90 minutes, but then I was hit by a wave of tiredness that I just couldn’t explain. It was really intense, I was yawning so hard my jaw hurt. I then remembered that I only got about 5.5 hours of sleep last night, for some reason—I just woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep. So maybe that was why.

It was almost time for me to cook dinner, so I stopped work, but I was so exhausted that I ended up deciding to put off cooking until tomorrow and instead go to bed early. There’s plenty in the freezer for the husband to eat so he’s not starving. I hope I can get up early and feel more refreshed and energized.