Focus

The challenge I always face in doing the things that I want to do at the pace that I want to do them is maintaining focus on the right things at the right time. It's very easy to just drift, or get drawn away by some irrelevant detail or some debate that I don't need to be having, and lose a lot of energy.

The flip side of that is having realistic expectations and giving my brain a chance to relax, which is what some of those distractions are actually doing. And that leads to a desire to pick the right sort of distractions: ones that lower my stress rather than increase it, that are calming and interesting and aid in transitioning from one task to another.

The other trick I'm working on learning is making decisions about how to spend my time and both remembering that I made them and accepting the consequences without rethinking them. For example, I didn't get very much done on the computer today because I made a conscious decision to read instead, and those four hours are a fairly substantial amount of the hours I have in a day with enough focus to accomplish things. But I feel a subconscious niggling of "not doing enough" until I think back on where the hours went and remind myself of that.

Changing entrenched thought patterns is hard and takes a lot of time.