Day 640: Learning to focus better in the midst of discomfort

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I hate it when I get a late start to the day, but I was up late last night with some pain and discomfort, which made me get up later today, and then I had a bunch of house chores that needed to be done before I could start work. I’m also still feeling some IBS pain, but I took some medication and I’m just waiting for it to kick in. 

Once again, I’m practicing patience with my health. I don’t know why I’m the type of person to throw in the towel so easily when I’m feeling sick, but that’s how I am. When I feel really terrible, I want to just quit and not think about work for the rest of the day.

But I’m trying to learn how to be patient and wait to see if I feel better. So far, I usually only need to wait a few minutes or at most a couple hours before I feel well enough to get to work. I haven’t had a really bad day recently, so hopefully all this practice will help me to do the same when one of those hits.

I realized that I’m also learning how to work through a little bit of discomfort. Before the IBS, I never had to try to work when I wasn’t feeling 100%. And honestly, until I started the writing streak, I just didn’t work at all on days I felt bad.

But because the IBS isn’t going away, I’ve been learning how to focus when the discomfort is there but isn’t too bad. I’ve realized that it just takes a lot of practice. Before, this level of discomfort probably would have distracted me, but these days, I’ve learned how to concentrate enough to ignore it as long as it doesn’t get too bad.

As I read in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, learning how to focus intently just takes practice, over and over, day after day. It’s unglamorous and really hard, but I think the practice every day has been helping me develop a bit more discipline in my work routine, too.

I also think that my Surrender statement ritual has been helping me to mentally prepare before I start work and try to focus. I see now how a ritual can be developed to trigger a certain mental preparedness. It’s not quite a mental “state,” but it feels like stepping in front of a mental door and getting ready to open it.

I don’t know how many hours I’ll be able to work since I got started late, but I’ll try to get as much done as I can.

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Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 5 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 25 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 749 words

Writing streak: 119 days

Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 27 minutes

Blocking streak: 113 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 0 (I didn’t have time to get to my Hawaii book today)

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 0

My takeaway for today: I need to continue practicing deep focus so I can get used to working through a little discomfort.

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