Find a New Habit

Today’s prompt in Natalie Sisson’s 15 days to Freedom Blog Challenge is Replacing Bad Habits and Negative People in your Life. I feel like I’m okay with my people, but I have a ton of bad habits that keep me from being productive. The people I admire most are super productive. For example, I love Aisha Tyler. She is a comedian and actress, as well as a writer, a bad-ass cartoon, and a podcaster. In her podcast, Girl on Guy,  she’s always talking about how driven she is, how addicted she is to being creative and productive. That is my dream. My dream is to be as driven and productive as Aisha Tyler. I bet Aisha Tyler does not sleep in or spend entire days in her sweats poking around on Facebook and eating cheese and playing with the cat. I would love to weed out all my lazy procrastinating ways and replace them with everything Aisha does that makes her so fabulous.

Unfortunately, there’s this thing that happens when I am too hard on myself or try to change too many things at once. I get overloaded and all my good intentions go off a cliff.  I need to rewire my puttering procrastination without putting myself into Overwhelm Mode. One thing that worked for me during NaNoWriMo was to set a timer for 25 minutes of writing. It was long enough to get into flow, short enough to not be overwhelming. I could usually get in one or two sessions a day.

There’s this other thing I do when I give myself too many rules and schedules. It brings out my inner bratty teenager. I call her Madeline. She’s one of my Flowers in the Attic. Madeline is a wannabe rebel and her favorite activities are drinking wine and watching reruns and faffing around on Facebook. (Faffing is a word I’ve heard Natalie use, and I think it perfectly describes what Madeline does on Facebook.) Madeline does not take orders from anyone and she definitely does not want to change any of her bad habits.

Madeline, why can’t you be more like Aisha?