Motivated...but lazy
There's always more to do
People who follow my blog will probably think that I am quite a motivated individual. I run every day, I enter a lot of races, I practice two martial arts, I have a job, and I just generally have a lot of things going on in my life. I generally get a lot of things done with the time I have but, there’s always more that could be done. Sometimes that makes me feel like I’m being lazy.
I eat well, sleep enough, exercise a lot, work hard, write, and have a decent work life balance going on top of this. Recently, demands from my job have also had me traveling quite a lot. In the past 3 months I’ve spent about two weeks in the US, and a week in Thailand, and I’ve still been been managing to keep up with things…MOSTLY.
The “man cave” problem
I am very lucky in that I have quite a lot of opportunities to work from home. I do spend some time in the office and I go on quite a lot of business trips, but I do spend the majority of my time working in my home office.
My home office has a desk, a couple of bookshelves, and an area of three standard sized tatami mats that I can use to train in. It’s not a huge space, but it’s enough to swing a kettlebell in, do full home workouts, and stretch when I feel motivated to stretch.
The problem is that my “man cave” needs upkeep, and I have recently been having trouble keeping up with it.
“I’ll do it later”
Over the course of a few months junk started accumulating in my “man cave.” Some of this came in the form of paper (pamphlets, unimportant letters etc), random knick-knacks (stuff picked up at conferences), out of season clothing (stuff I put in a corner last season and never put back in its right place), assorted race items (race information, race numbers, safety pins, etc) and lots of other random crap that have been accumulating over quite a while.
One of the big problems that I had was that I was neglecting this accumulation of stuff because I was being active and motivated in different areas. Going for a run somehow felt like better use of time than clearing up some papers. Planning my next trip felt more important than returning a scarf to a draw. Writing a report felt like it needed to take priority over putting a race number on my race number shelf. There was always an excuse not to address the elephant in the man cave, and “I’ll do it later,” became a regular mantra.
But later will never arrive if you don’t set out when later is.
Choosing your later
Before I set off for my most recent business trip I made an ultimatum with myself. I resolved to start addressing the issue as soon as I arrived back in to Japan and stick to it.
I’d say it’s going well, but still a work in progress. But what exactly did I do.
Do ONE thing
When I got back to Japan I set myself a rule that I would do ONE thing to make my office tidier every time I left the room. Even if it was picking up one piece of paper and either filing it or throwing it away, the act of doing one task would eventually restore order. I go in and out of my office quite a lot in a day and so one act of cleaning up every time I moved meant that after one day of doing a bit of passive work my tatami space became usable again, clothes that weren’t in the right place were washed and put into storage, and I was throwing away large bags of paper for recycling (or shredded documents for proper disposal).
I think we all have a tendency to not want to throw certain things away, but realistically, do we need tax documents from 2020, credit card statements from 2018, and even documentation from student loans that we have already fully paid off?
This “do ONE thing” strategy has been working quite well for me over the past couple of weeks. I’ve found things I thought I’d lost, thrown away things I thought I needed (but really didn’t), and shifted my way of thinking to other rooms in my place as well. Everything is getting cleaned up quicker.
Habit triggers
I am a fan of James Clear’s Atomic Habits. There are a lot of things from this book I actually practice in my daily life, including linking habits together such as running and listening to audiobooks. (I only listen to Audiobooks when I run, so if I want to advance the audiobook I need to run. This re-enforces both habits).
In the book, environments and locations are described as powerful habit triggers. If you set up your environment in certain ways, and have it so whenever you are in that environment it triggers a habit, you can get a lot of things done. Right now I have it set up where my office door is a trigger for me to clear something up. But in the past I have done things like set up a kettlebell on the way out of the room, so whenever I pass by it, I do some exercise with the kettlebell (some swings, some squats, etc). Once the habit trigger I am using has totally cleared the room, I could perhaps use the same habit trigger to do some additional exercise again.
This whole situation could be a great way to get things on track again.
Final thoughts and take home messages
Generally people who practice martial arts and ultra running are very motivated people. They are at least very motivated to engage with the kind of physical activity they are interested in. But being motivated to be an athlete doesn’t necessarily transfer to every other aspect of your life. This is my excuse of my (up until recently) messy man cave and I’m sticking to it.
This happens with other people as well. I have met some very very smart people who have huge motivation to be involved with academics and solve incredibly difficult problems, but their office space looks like a bomb has hit it.
Sometimes if we want to solve issues like this, we need to start setting up new habits to get it done. I chose coming back from my most recent business trip as a trigger to start cleaning things up.
I am now in a habit of doing ONE thing to make my room better whenever I leave the room. As a result my room is getting better little by little and my thoughts are clearer.
Even with the best intentions in the world, we can all end up a bit lazy when life gets in the way. The good news is, we don’t need to stay like this forever. Choose a point to make the change, then start making gradual changes.
(Also, if you haven’t done so, read Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s a great book).
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