You are smart.
You are hard working.
You are constantly striving.
You are optimistic in your planning and your schedules.

So how could you ever finish a week feeling like you “won”?

The default behaviours in general won’t do it for you - they will actually make you feel worse! And the pressure to work on the weekend to “just catch up” will be intense!

“If only you had planned better” - your productivity coach says.
“If only you had blocked off more time” - your deep work book says.
“If only you had been more intentional” - your intentional timer says.

Arg! Not helpful right now.

So what can you do?

I struggled with this a lot myself this week. I thought I had a project ready to push to completion, only to find a major error in it. But I had so much else planned, and the pressure I put on myself (and on those around me) was intense and mis-directed. I haven’t found it very useful to spend a lot of energy in stress and worry. And sadly both stress and worry seem to be contagious!

In my coaching this comes up a lot as well - especially on Thursdays and Fridays! This week it started on Wednesday for me.

I explore techniques I used to end the week well in this MakeTimeFlow article but the key point is to:

• Help yourself with your two inner advisors (I know this could sound hokey - but it seems to be able to engage more of your thinking brain when you are stressed out - give it a try)
  • what would your “ideal loving parent” say to you?
  • what would your “ideal boss” say to you?

I found the exercise helpful, and calming, and I could think straight again, and actually ended up feeling good about all that was done, and all that I learned this week. I’m even a little excited about next week (but I’d like the weekend first please!).

I’m not working on the weekend.

And next week I’m going to be clearly differentiating between “solid” goals and “stretch” goals, giving myself enough time to do a good job on the solid goals, and not feeling bad about not hitting every stretch goal.

Finally I wanted to share with you this wonderful quote from Marcus Aurelius which really spoke to me, especially this week:

“When obstacles get in your way, the obstacles become the way.” ~ Marcus Aurelius