There’s always a temptation to attempt to salvage a bad day with a bit of extra work to get this or that done.
Resist it.
Just as we ought to write off bad investments and ignore sunk costs, end bad days quickly and get rest.
We often overestimate how much we’ll get done on a day that just hasn’t been productive. On such days, aim to do less, say lesser, and take the break we need.
The beauty about this approach is that we also underestimate just how much we can get done when we’re on a roll. That will happen tomorrow.
PS: A post on this is both a recurring theme (there’s probably been one per year for most of the last decade) and a reminder of how long it takes to actually learn something – i.e. to put a lesson in action. It took a while to understand this concept and a while more to implement it once I had identified the day as one that wasn’t great. Now, the challenge has shifted to identifying such a day as quickly as possible…
