I have stopped pushing

Lights out Alice!

Oh how delusional we can become in our security and past lives. Although life could let me atrophy further by letting me sink deeper into the delusion that I was still functioning at any acceptable level of efficiency, it had some pity on me by serving a reminder through a colleague that I was not even remotely at the level I used to function. The worst part is that I was justifying it to myself by claiming that it wasn't that I was slacking off but more of the fact that there wasn't any real objective or work that needed me to push myself hence it was okay to put my feet off the accelerator. Oh how wrong I was. More importantly, oh how delusional.

I know that I know that I am justifying laziness. Hence, there are days I get up and take the first step in fighting it by creating a to-do list. Don't worry, it all goes downhill from there. I spend an inordinate amount of time in finding the "perfect" plan that would take into account practical realities and any curveballs the day might throw at me. Life still wins. Procrastination beats me to a pulp. I get such a high creating the plan that I actually start slacking off in actually completing the work, citing the fact that I accounted for the fact that I might take longer on the first task. The delay keeps piling, work barely gets done until it is too late, at which point in time I scamper and get something done, but not to the level I would like or the quantity of things I would have liked. I almost always fail to deliver on my plan which feeds the negative feedback loop wherein I take more margins and account for more of my procrastination when creating the next plan and fail to execute it still. A pretty bad spiral that ends up with zero relevant work done in any reasonable amount of time.

Work inflates to fill the time one has. Efficiency or the need to take frequent breaks is just all in my head. I am not working hard enough to actually warrant those breaks. Yes, frequently turning my mind off the work I am doing helps me have a better objective view of the situation and it was a superpower around the time when I was choc full of work and needed to get things done. This strategy however fails miserably when my schedule is sub-optimal or I do not have my day packed end to end. 

I hope I do better Alice! Action over words or plans