And then, I find myself in a rut for no apparent reason. I’ll go months, if not years, where everything runs smoothly. At least until I don’t have a choice because I’m running out of time. It’s the opposite I want to start these projects. I’m not consciously deciding to put things off or procrastinate. But these ruts I’m talking about are not the same. I like to think I work best under pressure. If I have a deadline in three weeks and know that it will only take me a couple of days to do the task, I’ll often put it off until that third week and then plough through it. It used to drive my manager crazy when I worked at the print shop because I often waited until the last minute to start a project. I feel that procrastination is something different. Do you ever feel this way? Lazy, I mean? Do you ever stall or delay getting things started for no good reason? And I’m not talking about procrastination. But once I did start, I kept going and saw it threw to the end. As long as I didn’t start the website project, leaving it be was easier. Newton’s first law of motion says, “An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion.” There’s more to Newton’s law than that, but we’re talking about laziness and work motivation here, not physics. Once I worked on it, I would find the motivation to keep going. Maybe I should have called this post “Starting Is The Hardest Part.” I know now, as I knew then, that everything would be fine once I started the website.
I had gotten into the behaviour of pushing off the big things on my to-do list because I was feeling lazy and unproductive. A Rut is a habit or pattern of behaviour that has become dull and unproductive but is hard to change. And honestly, I don’t think that’s what was happening. It’s as if I knew how much work was involved with designing and building the website, and the laziness that had overcome me wasn’t motivated to get started. And you know what? I didn’t start it on Monday either. So I told myself I would finally start it on Monday. To me, Friday is never a good day to begin something new. So Monday went by, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and I still hadn’t started the website. But for some reason, I found other things to do. It was a big project, and I planned to get ahead of the timeline. A few weeks ago, I needed to start a website project. But then tomorrow rolls around, and, for some reason, it happens again. And tell myself I’ll work twice as hard tomorrow.
I’ll chastise myself at the end of the day for my lack of drive, my laziness. When I get in a rut like this, it could last days. And everything would be fine if this was a sporadic occurrence. As long as you get the work done, it doesn’t matter how or when you do it. Luckily, one of the perks of working for yourself is you don’t have to answer to anyone. Not enough to compensate for an 8-hour work day. But actual work, the thing that makes me money, not so much. But at the end of my work day, I look back and realize I didn’t accomplish any of them. I’ll sit at my computer in the morning with the best intentions, having thought of everything I wanted to work on that day. Some days, no matter how many things are on my to-do list, I don’t feel like working. What I find myself struggling with from time to time is motivation. I don’t struggle much with finding clients or design projects. Plus, I started my niche side business, Podcast Branding, just over three years ago, and it’s doing better than I ever imagined. After all, I’ve been running my home-based design business for 17 years. And even though I consider myself a successful entrepreneur. Even though I’ve released 297 episodes of the Resourceful Designer podcast, a show I created to share tips and strategies for running a graphic and web design business.
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