Formalizing the Figure of my Funk

07/03/15

Right before my vacation last week, my ability to be productive fell apart. Up until about two hours ago, I was still in a funk, lacking all motivation and self-control. One hour ago I feel like I realized why.

I do not have well-defined tasks that I can simply churn through. I have to think about what I'm doing and why. This epiphany led me back to David Allen's Natural Planning Method from Getting Things Done.

1. Purpose and principals
2. Outcome vision
3. Brainstorming
4. Organization
5. Identifying next actions

I realize now, I think, that on the onset of the creation of using this blog as my main medium for productivity, that I laid a lot of groundwork such that I just had a long list of identifying next actions that I could then do. As that well dried up, however, I needed to refresh it by doing the work needed further up the list.

Having not done that, and not having a system to identy the need to do that nor how to do it, I ran out of the work I had developed a system to do. Leading to this... apathy and lack of wanting to do anything, really.

Though, it's possible that I just go through stages of apathy, and I'll just have to learn how to deal with them. I think this is a good way to deal with it, though, feels like I'm doing something, at least.

I'll go down the "it's just apathy" path if this train of thought doesn't work.