The Internet in my area was down for three days. I haven’t been able to post to my blog. I haven’t been able to respond to my coaching clients. I haven’t been able to surf the net — my nervous habit “fix.” It’s awful to be dependent on technology when it has control of you. When technology goes down, panic set in.
I get up in the morning, turn on the computer and go to my email. I waste a lot of time reading and responding to email, as if that’s my work. So in a way, the outage made me rethink how I start my day. Instead of going to email, I actually had to go to the wordprocessing system instead. The only thing I could do there was write. So I ended up writing more than I would have if I was surfing the net or doing other projects.
Sometimes drastic measures force you to make changes in the habits of your life. What seems like a bad thing and very frustrating actually turns out to be a good thing. A Biblical verse says “All things work together for the good —.” Having a three day outage turned out to be a good thing. I think I’m backed up now and need to catch up. But in reality, I know I need to streamline my activities. I even came up with new ideas for doing my work while I had to sit away from the computer and THINK instead of look at ideas of other people.
What is your morning habit? What do you do automatically when you get to the computer? Do you write first or find a way to be distracted? The first step to changing any type of habit is to identify the habit. Tomorrow morning, be totally conscious of your steps. What exactly do you do upon awakening? Do you go first to make coffee? Do you pray or meditate and plan your day with care? Do you jump right into reading stuff, surfing the net, looking at email?
Write about this. Be detailed and specific so you can see where you time is going and what you could do to make writing more important in your life.