Saturday, 11.04pm
Sheffield, U.K.
My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day. – Augusten Burroughs
There’s an exercise called the perfect day exercise.
Write down what you would like your perfect day to be, assuming you have no restrictions – you’re wealthy and unattached and have nothing stopping you from doing exactly what you want to do.
Start in the morning, from the moment you get up.
What you do, what you have for breakfast, how you spend your day, with whom, doing what.
Work through the entire day until you get to bedtime.
Then look at what you say you want to do with your life – what you want to achieve.
Say you want to be a writer.
How much of our perfect day is about writing?
If you want to help others.
How much of your day is spend doing outreach or social work or care?
The perfect day exercise tells you what you would do even if you didn’t have to do it.
It’s a glimpse into what you really want to spend time doing.
If you’re not doing the thing that you want to do it’s probably not because you don’t want to.
It’s because there are blocks in the way – systemic ones, structural ones.
If it’s hard to get started, hard to find the time, hard to find the resources you need – then before you can do anything you need to get those blocks out of the way.
Streamline, cut, remove – do everything you can to make it easy to do what you want to do.
It is, as you’ve discovered, the most important thing for you to do.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 