you know that thing where you spend a lot of time NOT doing something? like you can't actively do anything else (spontaneously nor decisively) because you're supposed to be doing the thing, but you're also not doing the thing because of some conflict/resistance
Spending time not doing the thing, and self-energizing motivation
14 tweets · November 2021 · 261 likes · 6 retweets · read on Twitter
I don't have a simple answer the main solution I've found is getting out of the situation, either by committing to doing nothing else until I've finished the thing (works for one-off projs but uhh not fulltime job) or by just deciding "not gonna do that"
in fact, usually this situation is caused by some part of me believing something to the effect of "if I wait long enough this problem will go away" eg • "I shouldn't have this problem in the first place" • "this should be someone else's job" • "this problem doesn't matter"
@fvathynevgl replied to the first tweet "yes, work" and yeah, this situation is kind of a definition of "work" in the negative sense as @AskYatharth so brilliantly puts it, "Work is whenever you’d rather be doing something else."
Transcending the "wasting time not doing X" problem is why self-energizing motivation is a core principle of my company. Free to do something else if I don't feel like doing what is supposedly most important.
Then, organizing the environment so that what people feel like doing will take care of everything that needs taking care of... is the puzzle.
I talk about the puzzle in this video, exploring how what feels important to do can come from external prompts or can sort of bubble up from within (if we give it space). youtube.com/watch?v=aLn6Ue…
"if we give it space" points a bit at how it's hard to be self-directed and operate from self-energizing motivation if you're stuck in a situation (eg a boring job) where it feels like you need to force yourself to do shit in order to create enough space to listen to yourself.
a frame-shift is possible here tho: if you *really see* that continuing to work your job is the best way to bootstrap to more freedom (which it may not be! but if it is...) then you may suddenly actually have intrinsic motivation to keep doing it for now
in fact, if you *don't* have clear unconflicted motivation towards something, that's a sure sign that part of you thinks it would be bad (at least in its current form) maybe multiple parts!
if you encounter this, the thing to do is to find a way to create dialogue between these disagreeing parts, which may require first acknowledging that they don't really trust each other the obstacle is the way malcolmocean.com/2021/07/intern…
Complice is a fascinating piece of this whole puzzle too one way to think about the core workflow is "given what you care about long-term / big-picture, what do you feel like doing?" try it out at complice.co (is this marketing? 😅🦋)
This 👇 by @prerationalist is also great advice. Latest update to Complice is a NOW page, that just asks "what now?" You pick something, from a list or whimsically, then there's just 3 buttons: ✅ Done 🅾️ not now ✖️ not today Repeat 🔁
This is a blog post now, with a whole additional section on PCT: malcolmocean.com/2021/11/knot-d…