On comfort work

Some days I can't bring myself to do the real work.

Yesterday morning, I sat at my desk and spent 5 hours and 40 minutes doing not real work.

There is a key difference between the version of me that did yesterday morning and the me of five years ago.

I know what it is I need now. I know that I'm avoiding because I feel uncertain. Now I know that some days it's worth pushing through the uncertainty and other days it's not.

Five years ago, I wouldn't have known that.

Five years ago, I would have stayed in bed or binged a TV show or used many other things to avoid.

Yesterday, instead, I gave myself the gift of comfort work. When I feel uncertainty, there are other parts of my life that I can clean up. I updated my finances and finance goals. I emptied my in tray. I processed the brain dump notes I created over the past week. I zeroed my inbox. I let myself clear the decks.

After lunch, there was nothing left to do but the real work. And because every notification had been checked and every email was processed, I had nothing to hide behind.

And so I did it. 5 hours of deep no-distraction work.

Yesterday, I didn't follow my plans. Instead, I acknowledged where I was at, gave myself some comfort (the kind that happened to be productive), and salvaged the rest of it.

I couldn't have given myself that five years ago.

I didn't have the awareness, the mental tools, or the structure in place to know how to navigate that situation.

These things don't come naturally, I don't think. Maybe some get it through the culture they're in.

I had to learn from scratch and train in it, practise with it, stumble through it.

And I'm so glad that I did.