It's been lingering in my head for the last few months. I've been wondering why, despite loving what I do, getting started or spending hours on a task without being distracted has been quite the challenge. At any given moment, my mind starts to look for "breaks" after having done something "hard." Over the last couple of weeks, I have been observing this pattern. I might have an explanation as to why there is such resistance when doing something hard. The first thing I had to understand was: when does something feel hard? Hard is a relative measure. Let's take the example of squats (because I love squats). Four years ago, I would have considered squatting 80 kilos as hard, and at the time it felt hard because it wasn't as easy as 60 or 20 with just the barbell. Whereas just a couple of days ago, 120 kg was just my warm-up; it does not even register as hard, it's just the thing I do before the actual hard set, which was 160 kg. A bit of a flex? Indeed, I am a petty human sometimes. Now, where was I? Ah yes, why am I finding it so difficult to sit down and do deep, focused work for hours on end? I might have learned something about myself. I think I know.
You see, in my "breaks," I usually watch some YouTube on TV. These breaks may be the reason I'm finding work hard. These breaks have been embarrassingly long. If I were to take a guess, I spend on average about 20 to 30 hours a week on YouTube. That is insane. That is about 1,400–1,500 hours a year training my brain to be amused. No wonder I have been finding it so difficult to love work. How can I, when I spend so many hours training it to be a little bitch? All is not lost; luckily, the mind is elastic. It's crazy to think how far I've come dragging a few tires around. This is going to be my prime focus. I want to live my life and not vicariously through other people on the Internet. I want my own pain, problems, wealth, losses, love, the fucking lot. This might be the hardest thing I have done in a while, but it's necessary.
How?
There has to be a plan, right? This is years of training to be distracted; how am I going to let it go? I had to go on a tangent and look for what James Clear had to say. His book helped me get my life back together and on track. I think I know what step one is:
Cut out as many triggers as possible. If you smoke when you drink, then don’t go to the bar. If you eat cookies when they are in the house, then throw them all away. If the first thing you do when you sit on the couch is pick up the TV remote, then hide the remote in a closet in a different room. Make it easier on yourself to break bad habits by avoiding the things that cause them.
My thinking is that I will take back some of those hours and spend them building things, making improvements on my product for the users. It's not a very concrete plan, but the first thing I will do after I finish writing this is to fix my environment. This should be easy; I just disconnect the Android TV thingy and leave it in storage or something. Okay, I think that's it for today. I've got work to do.