1. April — The Book Album

Update

Hello hello Panopti-Blog! It is getting close to bed time already for me today, so I am going to do the best job I can at updating you on my happenings for the last few days as I’ve settled into my home and my new routine within a reasonable writing timeframe.

Something I’ve mentioned over and over again for the past two weeks has been my lack of productivity. I feel that a large part of my identity is tied up in my being productive and consistently overachieving the goals that are set in front of me—and, it’s all self-imposed to boot.

My strategy to combat my potato mindset at first (i.e. starting 2 weeks ago) was to start small, because I thought that if I only had around 5 major goals per day (as opposed to the usual 20) it would be more likely that I get a larger percentage of the list done because of the no-pressure situation. As we saw in late March, however, the plan majorly backfired and I ended up getting 3/5 things done over the course of three days. What I did with the rest of my time, other than the three or so hours spent tutoring per day, I have no idea.

A lot of the last few days for me have been spent devising my second major strategy for combatting potatoness, which I started from a mental angle by telling myself over and over: you will have a productive day tomorrow. You will have a productive day tomorrow. I even wrote the phrase down several times over the course of the day so that I really had it ingrained in my system for when I woke up the next morning.

I would be remiss not to mention and also link here two youtube videos that were tremendously helpful for me in creating the right mindset for productivity. I honestly might watch these again in the next few days, just to solidify the principles that Graham Stephan and Matt D’Avella experimented with in adapting their schedules to this new normal.

Today I am pleased to report that I hit my goal of completing 16 of the 20 items on my to-do list.

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Hurdles

As always with situations like these, adaptation is rarely perfect on the first try. I have had a few hurdles with my newfound productivity, and one of them is…you guessed it: my cat.

She is very distracting on her own, as she likes to jump on top of whatever you are paying attention to at any given moment, but another unforeseen problem is that I’m bad at recognizing that I’ve allowed myself to become distracted by her.

A lot of this process of readjustment is just about noticing what I usually wouldn’t notice.

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Conclusion

The experimenting that we are all probably doing at this stage in the pandemic is ongoing and will continue for some until June.

Things that I am going to start thinking about from this point forward are diet and exercise regimens, as well as breaking my lent sacrifice of online shopping (I know, I’ve already prayed about it) to buy some clothing that is appropriate for warmer weather. (One would think that after living here for 18+ years that I would be prepared for the heat, but I definitely am not #TrueChicagoan). Edit: Just purchased four items to get me through the heat from Everlane, which is my all-time favorite clothing brand because the brand is sustainable and chic. 25% off sale ends on Friday, 3. April if you want to check them out #NotSpon! Business casual clothing is my sweatpants, my most comfortable look, so the brand has been perfect for helping me dress beautifully yet comfortably for years at this point.

I’ve started some other Masterclasses in my newfound period of productivity and have been really enjoying what these other fields are bringing to the table in terms of artistic conversation. It may be a few weeks until I get enough info to write an episode on the platform, but stay tuned, it’s definitely coming!

A picture of some strawberry heads to close:

Cheers,
Mackenzie