Do this daily to sleep better at night.
There's little worse than feeling trapped in your life.
Maybe the job that you've been working at for a while has stalled, or it's a chore to get up in the morning to go there, for whatever reason.
Feeling trapped grinds you down a slow spiral.
Feeling trapped keeps you up at night.
Lazy evenings make for restless nights.
The days I consume garbage online or on my phone leave me in a mild panic come bedtime. Because I know that I should create something. Because I know I can be better and more productive than I just was the previous hours.
Regularly escaping to Doomscroll Land isn't the road to success. It's cheap dopamine hits that make any kind of productivity afterwards harder.
Hitting TikTok or YouTube or other things for too long is a time vacuum, and come 12:45 AM goodness isn't going to happen. (Might as well keep going on TikTok.)
It's demoralizing when it happens day after day.
I know this from experience.
The antidote is dead simple.
Make a conscious decision to do something — anything! — that pushes your work or yourself in the right direction.
It doesn't take long, or much, to get into a more productive state when you still have the energy to accomplish something.
Do some stretching while your lunch cooks in the microwave. Move those empty cans and coffee cups off of the desk to where they belong. Repost something interesting rather than just scroll by. Write that idea down.
Literally anything is better than nothing, and you'll have accomplished something.
And doing the next little thing will be easier. Rinse and repeat.
Come the end of the day, you'll have things you can point to that pushed the needle right.
This sets you up for a better night's sleep. Less panic and more relaxing.
Work for yourself building a platform that you can profit from.
These little actions you can do on your behalf fall into two broad categories:
- Working for yourself
- Working on yourself
Over the past two decades, I've spent most of my time doing things toward working for myself.
Developing a bias toward action wasn't something that came naturally to me, but over time I've jumped into a number of ventures and it comes much more easily now.
I started building a website in 2003 (in hard-coded HTML!) and have been learning here and there ever since.
I have over a thousand articles on my main website that I can harvest and repurpose going forward, even if they're not paying a whole lot right now.
If you don't have a body of work that you can truly call your own, whether it's articles, tweets, videos, tracks, art, whatever, then you can start right now.
Work on yourself by taking action to do the things you know you should.
This is where I admit I have more work to do. It's important because working on yourself — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually — feeds into the work that you do for yourself.
Things are catching up to me now that I'm in my fifties.
I just went to a conference and in talking with long-time colleagues, I said that I may have steam to try one more time to get some substantial success online.
To do that, though, I'll need to get my steam level up higher than it is now, and that will take work. Likely a lot of work, physically and in mindset.
I've known for a long time that I needed to do this, and I do know that it's not going to get any easier.
If you're in a similar place as I am, you can start little, just as I am, and work up.
Maybe resist initially when that bowl of high-end Halloween candy is right across the cube from you. Eventually work up to resisting the entire day.
Get on the ground and do a few easy push-ups on the knees. (I just dropped and did ten.) Work up toward doing a couple of harder push-ups.
Walk past the elevator and take the stairs.
Respond rather than react to that person who always riles you.
Start fighting for yourself to get on a better track.
And sleep better at night.
Good sleep makes magic happen. It really does.
Doing The Things takes away the restlessness of not having done them, which encourages getting to sleep faster and better.
This in turn makes it easier to get into a productive mindset the next day.
Change that grind spiral down to a rocket up!
All right, who's with me??
Hi, I'm John.
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Header photo by Alexander Possingham on Unsplash