Day 15: Some days just don’t work

I spent the latterly chunk of today despairing of getting nothing done, on account mostly of our youngest’s new habit of being an angel during daylight hours and a shrieking, sleepless imp by night. I’d call it teething, but that would require her to be producing teeth; at the moment she is keeping all but two of them safely — and, one presumes, painfully — in her gums.

The problem with being zombified with lack of sleep (at one point today I put Ms Rachel on to babysit the kids and lay down on the floor for a bit) is that you are still running over your undone to-do list in your head, and being in your head with regard to tasks that you know you have to do is, I find, the least helpful way to get things done. The longer you’re in your head the less chance you have of getting the thing done at all, until the anxiety crests a breaking point and you either do it in a panic or autoclave whatever project is causing you mental anguish.

Because I’m not sure how coherent that was, I made a graph.

The problem is that being very very tired and avoiding work because you are worried about it occupy similar mental spaces (I assume, non-neuroscientifically, that both are redolent of a lack of easy dopamine) and both produce the same kind of craving for both distraction and ice-cream. Which is to say, you feel lazy, even when it’s not your fault.

It hits me like this: I have a business I am starting, and it requires time and completed tasks, several of which would have been rather useful to have done six weeks ago, and here I am burning nearly an entire day on almost cleaning the kitchen.

I said as much to My Wife and she said “Some days just don’t work.” And she’s right. So we took the kids out and got takeaways for tea and we are now calling an early night, ideally to rack up as much sleep as possible before getting back on the wheel in the morning.

Thank you, as always, for reading.