Every time I try to start eating healtheir, more fruits, and veggies, walking and running and yadda yadda it always turns out that I then feel guilty because I’m not doing enough. Maybe I’m eating veggies but are they from my local farmer AND organic? Am I juicing and meditating? Well then I’m not doing it right because I should be doing it better.
I get disappointed, and slide off back into the land of mac and cheese and french fries for every meal.
This always makes me think about writing, I get on a streak, writing every day and I’m proud of myself but then invariably I see someone writing more, doing more and I start to slide, thinking why am I not doing more? I start to feel lazy, and unproductive, and from there it’s easy to start slacking on my words, and projects.
Depression creeps in, and I start writing less and less because I feel like a failure because I’m not doing it ‘right’ whatever the hell that is. I worry about the ways I could be doing better and end up doing nothing for fear of not getting it right.
I still fight with this feeling, with eating healthy, and with writing. When I do something, I like to do right, and perfectly. But slowly, I’m starting to realize that I can’t be perfect and great at everything. I can find what works for me, and stick with that. Reading advice and tips that have worked for other people might help, but at the end of the day, I have to live with me and what I’m doing whether it works for someone else or not.
Some things that have worked for me:
Shiny stars!!
Keeping track of my daily word count. Every litle shiny star represents 1000 words written that day. It’s a little grad school, but it’s great looking at the calendar and seeing all those stars and knowing they represent words written!
CHECK BOXES!
I love to-do lists so putting my writing goals in a to-do list format is awesome! I really love this app Wunderlist because it syncs across all my devices, and you can seperate everything into seperate lists and add sub-tasks. (PS now you can see what I’m working on, exciting!)
So those are just a few things that work for me and make me feel like I’m getting stuff done. What are some things that work for you whether they’re ‘organic’ or not?