Lara had a question for the community that I thought many of you could relate to.
Folks! I have a quandary.
I’m in the opposite of a reading rut. Every book I’ve picked up over the last few weeks has been magical!
It has wrought havoc on my boring admin to do list. Every spare second I have, I want to spend with my nose in a book.
How to resist the temptation?? Chores! Errands! Boring life admin! All abandoned.
Any advice?
Ed. note: We’ll be discussing finding time to read next week, so don’t worry!
That sounds like what my brain does when actively in or recovering from some burnout.
When that happens and I want to be like F EVERYTHING JUST READ, but I also have Adult Responsibilities that must be attended to, I try to do the following:
- Identify the absolute MUST GET DONE tasks. Sometimes, the things I pressure myself about doing are not really that urgent.
- Audiobooks while I’m doing The Must Get Done Tasks. This is especially good for errands and shopping and cooking.
- Absolutely reward time doing Must Get Done Tasks with time just for reading.
Lara: Sarah! Audiobooks! I think I can get those through my library… time for some investigation!
Sarah: Yes! If I’m really struggling to do my grown up responsibilities because I just want to read and tune out everything, I listen to a book, or better yet, listen to a book I’ve already read.
I think situations like that are tough because the pressure to tell yourself to do more, and do all the things, and to berate yourself if you do not do more and all the things, is everywhere, taught from every direction and hard to break as a habit.
Lara: So hard!
I’ve gone through my to do list and broken it down into ‘actually important’ and ‘self-imposed obligation I can scrap’. The fun stuff I do without prompting. Audio books might just be my ticket through this!
Shana: I’m also team #Audiobooks especially if I don’t have access to a paper copy of the book and am forced to only listen when I’m doing productive things.
If I’ve gotten in the habit of multiple nights of joining the bad decisions book club, sometimes I’ll break the cycle by reading poetry before bed instead, because I’m less likely to get sucked in irretrievably.
Tara: Choose something a little more boring or something that you can’t read as quickly. For example, if I were going through that, nonfiction would slow me right down, so I might throw that in the mix.
Lara: These are awesome ideas! Thank you!
Sneezy: See if you can gameify the boring stuff.
“Can I finish doing the bed before this song finishes playing?”
“How many clothes can I finish folding in one song? Can I beat my record?”
You can also reverse pomorodo. This is good when stopping myself from fixating on something feels impossible for whatever reason.
Instead of working for 20-25 min and having a 5-10 min break, reverse that. Do what you want for the longer stretch of time, and work on stuff during the shorter time. Or maybe you do 15 min of each.
Susan: To add to what Sneezy said (she is right in all things, as usual): I find junebugging works for me as a system when other things don’t.
Junebugging, per the Tumblr link on Jumping Jack Trash, is a way of organizing the visual cues of tasks in a way that works for your brain:
have you ever seen a junebug get to grips with a window screen? it’s remarkably persistent, but not very focused. all that matters is location.
how to junebug: choose the location you feel you can probably get some shit done on today. be specific. not ‘the bathroom’ but ‘the bathroom sink’. you are not choosing a range, you are choosing a center; you will move around, but your location is where you’ll keep coming back to. mentally stick a pin in it. consider yourself tethered to that spot by a long mental bungee cord.
go to your location. look at stuff. move stuff around. do a thing. get distracted. remember you’re junebugging the bathroom sink and go back there. look at it some more. do a different thing. get distracted. get a sandwich. remember you’re junebugging and go back to the bathroom sink.
Susan: And genuinely: stickers.
I slap them in my diary when I finish a difficult task or something I’ve been procrastinating on.
The reason they work for me is because I want them, but I don’t want them so much that I go, “Well why don’t I just have the thing and NOT do the task” like I would with other rewards.
Ellen: I too love the reverse pomodoro method!!
I have a little game called PomoFarm that I frequently put on when I’m doing computer tasks and you can manually set the work and break timers.
So sometimes I’ll do, like, work 10 min, break 15 min, long break 30 min.
Susan: Tody is a housework tracker that does the prioritising for me. You can set how strict you are about cleaning and it’ll basically put all of your chores on a rotation for you.
And when I migrate tasks in my diary, I put a number next to it to mark how many times I’ve moved it. If it gets to 10, I need to make SOME progress that day or take a look and see if there’s a reason I’ve not done it yet.
What about you? How do you motivate yourself to do Super Boring Adulting Tasks when all you want to do is Read and Other Lovely Things?
I love these very practical ideas of how to make tackling real-life stuff more manageable! I think I often tend to fixate on the whole big picture, and that is very discouraging and in my mind it becomes a (false) all or nothing situation. I will definitely try some of these!
For me, I do try to reward myself tackling a task with reading, LOL. I also have been trying to remind myself that it helps to just get started–if I wait to try to either get the perfect approach or the have it entirely figured out, often it’s just a waystation on the road of procrastination.
Looking forward to seeing what other readers have to say too!
I use a “15 minutes on/15 minutes off” method. I start the task with a timer set for 15 minutes. As soon as the timer goes off, I stop the task and go relax for 15 minutes. Rinse, repeat. Here’s the thing: you HAVE to take the 15 minute breaks: knowing that you have a 15 minute break coming up soon makes it easier to stay in the moment with the task at hand. (I used to have my daughters use this method when they had big school projects to work on. After a few rotations of work/break, they’d often say they could continue working more than 15 minutes at a time, but I’d explain to them that one of the reasons they felt motivated was the 15-minute time-frame.) Obviously, this can’t work in every situation, but I find the “15-on/15-off” system can allow for work AND reading (or other relaxing activity) to get done.
While you do chores—or are on your way home to do chores—listen to the audiobooks of How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind, Decluttering at the Speed of Life, and/or Organizing for the Rest of Us: 100 Realistic Strategies to Keep Any House Under Control by Dana K. White, whichever one seems most appropriate… or you can get your hands on easiest.
She also has a podcast, A Slob Comes Clean (and a blog of the same name), in case all her books are out on loan. She’s very entertaining and down to earth about her advice.
I do a lot of these and I love some of the tweaks I haven’t thought of. My husband only allows himself to reread before bed b/c otherwise he will be up all night. That can help with bad decisions book club. Sometimes I plan a special, extra long reading session as a treat (evening out on the hammock, Sunday afternoon in the tub with wine, etc) to look forward to and that helps my focus.
This is a very specific situation, but one time I was able to use a book I was dying to get back to, to get through a very boring task. I had this huge stack of papers I had to read in grad school and they were so dull, so I told myself, for every paper I read, I can have one chapter of the book. So when I was at school during the day, I’d get through three or four papers, knowing that that entitled me to three or four chapters of the book that night. I could see doing this with a chore list, too.
I have 2 things that help me.
1) When I’m stressed or overwhelmed I tend to make my to-do list longer, not shorter. So I try categorizing things into Must Do, Should Do, and CAN do. The musts get the most energy and priority. Shoulds happen IF I can handle them. Cans are often things that my mean girl brain is making up.
2) Highly recommend the book and patreon Unfuck Your Habitat. The patreon especially has great resources for doing SOMETHING which is always better than nothing
Ummm, have you considered NOT resisting? I’m being totally serious. Enjoy your books and let the chips fall where they may if you drop the ball on something. Let natural consequences do their worst. There just aren’t enough ways to experience joy in this world and your life may not always have this same level of elasticity or this many books that appeal to you. If this is the worst habit you indulge, I think you’re in good shape!
Read the book, drink the tea, life is short.
I am one of the lucky ones working 99.9% remote, which means my workday is only 7.5 hours instead of 11 the way it used to be including commute, which means I have a ton more time to use however I want to. Also there are usually 5 or 10 or 15 minute gaps in the workflow where I can start a load of laundry, etc. So I pick away at chores over the course of the day, and by the time I sign off work I can generally do Nothing But Read all evening, if I so choose.
I am also one of the lucky late-middle-aged ones whose domestic time is almost entirely my own. My husband mostly feeds us; I *might* do something resembling cooking once or twice a month. We have no pets, kids, or tenants and if I don’t feel like doing a particular chore … I don’t. Thus I average a book a day. 🙂
I love the June bug metaphor. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing that all day anyway.
I’m self-employed and work from home, so if I hit a wall and just want to go read, sometimes I do. Other times I need a break, but a small one is enough. I might make some tea, wander outside to see what flowers are blooming, etc., and that’s enough. (Because if I actually sit down on the couch with a good book, who knows how long it will take before I can convince myself to stop!)
As for bedtime, I try hard to stop my living room reading around a certain time to do yoga and other getting ready for bed activities. Once I’m in bed, I mainly read comics borrowed from Hoopla. Since comics don’t typically have as much story, it’s easier to put them down after 10 or 15 minutes.
@chacha1: That sounds amazing! My only concern with working from home would be the sense of no work/life separation with work intruding into my home space.
The Tody app sounds great, and the reviews in the app store seem positive. My struggle is always sweeping/mopping the floors in the kitchen and bathroom areas. That, and the creeping clutter that seems to land everywhere. I’m single with no kids and 1 feline, so I can’t really even blame it on anyone else! It’s like 95% me and the rest I can feasibly blame on the cat.
I’m highly motivated by ticking off tasks in a gameified way (that’s why the research in Pokemon Go is so addictive to me – I want to complete it all!). Maybe this app will help with my chore struggles.
My struggle with reading is that I’m almost perpetually distracted due to smart phone/computer use, and pair that with fatigue when I get home from work at the end of the day and I just can’t focus long enough to read anything. Maybe I need to do a “Phone-Free Friday” or something. Pretend my phone is the old school house phone and not use it for anything else for a whole day and start trying to get my ability to concentrate back.
I have no perspective on this…if I’m into something I just enjoy the ride. Eventually something is gonna spontaneously combust so putting the book down comes sooner rather than later anyway. I just wanted to show some love for Susan’s comment on planner stickers x) ngl stickers often get me through hard days at work. They are just the right amount of satisfying.
“Well why don’t I just have the thing and NOT do the task” — the eternal dilemma!