Writing off the day.

[00:00:00] You're listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? I'm a big believer in playing the long game, but in order to play the long game, you still need to have a considerable amount of, I don't know, wins? Successes? In the short term, right?

[00:00:32] A few episodes ago I talked about how if something goes wrong in our day, we shouldn't allow that to ruin our whole day. We should give ourselves some grace and then demand better from ourselves. And I think that that is generally the right attitude to take, where you have this good balance of being forgiving with yourself, but also,

[00:00:58] you know, [00:01:00] getting up and trying again because we are playing the long game. However, there are still gonna be days when that's just not possible and a few days ago I read a newsletter from one of my favorite YouTubers, Ali Abdaal, and he was talking about his fancy made up term called the "Reitoff" Principle.

[00:01:29] written and spelled out in a very fancy way. Uh, and it's really just the write-off principle. Sometimes what happens, and I've experienced this too, you just don't feel good. You don't feel good, and you don't wanna do the things that you feel you should be doing. And on those days when it sucks really bad if you try to make yourself do stuff anyway, [00:02:00] usually it comes out kind of crappy, or it doesn't make you feel better, you just feel bad, and it continues for a few days,

[00:02:09] once in a while, it's sort of like – Ali described it as like a cheat day. You know, sometimes you need to give yourself a cheat day because it makes it easier to follow the diet or whatever thing you're doing on every other day. So I think that for those of us who think about work and side hustles and have all these goals, you know, the weekend should be when we are taking a break, but we usually don't, which means that once in a while we need to allow ourselves to just not do stuff. Once in a while, we do need to take a break.

[00:02:53] And if calling it a fancy term like "Reitoff" principle where Reitoff is spelled R E I [00:03:00] T O F F, if that helps you, then you should do it. I, that's what Ali does. And while I don't wanna use that word, I definitely understand the sentiment behind it. And so what happened yesterday was I pushed myself through work and I got

[00:03:23] just the very necessary things done, the things that absolutely had to get done, I did them. And then I wrote off the whole day. I lay in bed, I had a migraine, I closed the lights. I listened to music. I hung out and did nothing. And because I did that, because I allowed myself to take care of myself and you know, deal with my migraine, deal with my feelings of

[00:03:52] just blah that I was having. I was able to wake up this morning and still [00:04:00] do the things that make me better, you know, be 1% better. I'm still doing that whole wake up one minute earlier than yesterday thing, and I'm still here in the morning recording a podcast episode because, we play the long game, and what that means for me is that I never give myself more than one day where I broke the chain.

[00:04:27] If I broke it yesterday, today I get up and I start again. I feel like that's the right balance to make sure we hit our long-term goals and have something good in the short-term too, you know? So that's what I'm thinking about today. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.