481 words.
I pride myself on someone who gets things done. The more tasks that move across progress statuses, or the more notes generated, the more convinced I am of my productivity and self-worth as a member of society. The problem with being outcome-driven, is that factors out of the internal locus of control get involved, the sense of self-worth take a plunge.
This is written after a day of a massive headache. It was near impossible to concentrate on anything other than taking a walk and sleeping in an attempt to stave off the pain. Since the following day was a non-working one, there was no stick to drive me into productivity. So, nothing was achieved.
And what’s inherently wrong with that, comparing to a day filled with busywork and non-value-producing tasks? To be outcome-driven is to look at the final output at the end, and evaluate or not whether all that effort is worth it.
Till now, there is restlessness at not having completed a certain task, or constant rumination at how something was not done quite to the standard I would like. Compare to the previous streams when the vicious cycle of guilt was brought up, I think I know better what is the way forward: get the task done as soon as possible. This cuts the mental cycles spent on the issue. The underlying problem is: why is taking so many mental cycles in the first place?
There is some form of resistance in peeling that layer of the onion; an urge to refer to a note or to go back to one of the many distractions. This conversation does need to be more frequent though. Even learning about this resistance is valuable. There is a danger of distracting myself from this layer of the onion, by trying to peel another layer.
Is there an answer available? Maybe there is some indication when I peel this all the way back to my childhood days, finding some justification for this vice that seemed to be always present. Although that’s not quite true too.
If I had to split my phases of life, I would have considered my army days as a significant checkpoint. That was when I started reading and learning from people outside my immediate circle. The most important was to find out from wildly different people what shape their lives took on. I need to be cautious about how that did not change the personality that I had, merely masked it in a more knowledgeable and worldly facade.
Perhaps the more productive activity (and even now I’m focused on productivity) was to have these conversations as such, to learn what went under the facade. Even though the resistance can’t be seen or defined, the conversation still serves to feel around it. Eventually we will find its shape.