Alexandria’s Adventures with a Project Pause

So when I heard Dr Amantha Imber, host of the “How I Work” podcast, and author of Time Wise and The Health Habit was looking for volunteers for eight weeks of energy experiments for her new book, I was all in.

You can find links to all the experiments at the bottom of this post.

This week, it was all about the project pause.

The Project Pause Experiment

My first experiment was titled the project pause, which involved ending the day with a win!

Achieved by writing down the answers to these two questions at the end of each work day.

1. Today I made progress on… (a tangible activity).
2. Today I made a difference to… (a particular person or group).

I found it made a tangible difference.

• By writing out the main achievements I could see I’m progressing towards my goals, which is not always evident. Not to mention that sometimes the most important tasks never make it to the to-do list, so don’t get checked off.
• The main person I made a difference to was Future Me, which feels like cheating. But, sometimes we do tasks simply so we don’t have to do them later. At the same time, we often berate ourselves for not getting tasks done. So, Future Me seems a valid person to made a difference for.
• And those two statements of fact, made me happier, and gave me more energy to start the next day.

In fact, it reminded me a little of productivity journalling.

Productivity Journalling

Once upon a time, I used a productivity journalling system. At the end of the day, I noted:

• what went well
• what didn’t go quite as well as hoped
• miscellaneous things to remember for later
• leading from the above, three tasks to work on the next day

I also added stickers to represent the day, and without those, note, I wouldn’t have been able to complete all those monthly reports.

But, sometime around the pandemic I started stopped productivity journalling and started doing morning pages.

Morning Pages

Morning pages, as popularised by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way, are three pages of writing down whatever occurs to you first thing in the morning.

The purpose, is to write out all your fears and doubts before you start working on your art, though an internet search tells you loads of people use this technique.

I have to say that during COVID, morning pages were useful. Perhaps even necessary.

But these days I find they seem to take up too much time, and I don’t remember much more than a cloud of doom from the previous day.

Project Pause Outcome

I was well satisfied with the outcomes of Project Pause.

Unexpected outcomes include:

• waking up the next day wanting to get back to work.
• that problems in need of a solution were fresh in the mind at bed time, so I often woke up with avenues of investigation.
• highly correlated, was sleeping better, perhaps because I knew what I’d achieved, or felt more satisfied with the day.
• also correlated, less brain fog, and more mental dexterity.

In fact, I was so satisfied I’m going to abandon morning pages for a while. And try productivity journalling again instead.

Luckily I (coincidentally) rediscovered my small pencil case of stickers. So many stickers! So exciting!

I just can’t wait.

And if that’s not worth a sticker of a cat in a cup singing karaoke, or a sticker of a dog rolling over, I don’t know what is!

Except maybe both!

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