Disturbed Productivity

In my experience, there are two emotional states that can disturb productivity more than any other.

The first is a stressed and anxious emotional state. In this state, there’s something on your mind and you can’t stop thinking about it or worrying about it. It’s worse when you can’t really do anything about the thing that’s bothering you.

The second is when you’re so excited that you can’t pay attention. Like a kid in a sweetshop. You just flit from one place to another without being able to sit down and focus.

Essentially they’re too sides of the same coin. Either way, your mind is working too fast.

I’ve experienced both in the past two days. On Friday night, there was trouble within my family, and I was stressed and wasn’t able to finish the post that I was working on because I was so stressed and anxious. After it was resolved, I felt so drained that I just had to go to sleep after staring at my screen for all too long.

Meanwhile, Today, despite waking up feeling terrible, I had a rush of adrenaline and excitement as my post Starting Many Things hit the front page and stayed there for most of the day. I was too excited to concentrate and kept finding myself on the analytics pages. I’d liken how I was feeling to trying to work whilst a horse that you’ve bet on is currently mid-race. Actually, I’ve never gambled so I wouldn’t know, but it seems very similar.

Given that the post in question was discussing a post about my friend Pat, I think it’s appropriate to share another post by him where he talks about becoming addicted to analytics. This happened to me all within the space of a day. Pat would have had to resist it for much longer than that, and for him, every view means a little money in his pocket!

But yes, I wrote this post to explain why my post from yesterday is coming out a day late. :)