Momentum

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:16] I've been thinking about momentum today. Momentum at a macro level and momentum on a more micro level. To be more specific, momentum that builds over multiple days, and the momentum that you have to kickstart every day. I'm coming out of a four day weekend, and I've been planning for this weekend for at least the last five weeks.

[00:00:40] I had a very specific project in mind, which I realistically knew I wouldn't be able to finish, but was also pretty sure I could make some seriously intense progress on, and probably get it to be about 80 to 85 percent completion. The raw part of it, anyway. But it's a type of project I haven't tackled in a long time. About a year or so. So I had absolutely no momentum to help me.

[00:01:08] On the first day of the weekend, I sat down to start the project. I made a plan. I listed the tasks. And then, I should have gotten to work. But that is not what happened. I filled with my desk. I started to notice every speck of desk and had to clean it off my desk. I angled the lights so they wouldn't bother my eyes so much. I debated if Notion was the right place to capture this or if I should give Obsidian a proper try. I noticed my water bottle was empty so I thought I would fill it. Then I got an Amazon delivery and decided to open that. Between all these things, I kept resettling back into my chair and telling myself to get to work.

[00:01:49] And I would open up a document, write a few words, and then get distracted again. This happened for five hours. Not an exaggeration. And then at some point, I even left the space entirely and then complained to my spouse about how maybe I'm just not up for this and I can't do it and maybe I should just give up because if I haven't been able to do this for the last five hours, then what makes me think I can do it now?

[00:02:13] And he said to me, "You're scared, you're worried you won't be perfect, so quit worrying, decide you'll throw away the first draft and just go start." So, I obediently went back to my desk and proceeded to stare at a blank page for another hour, having written a mere 15 words in the last six hours. And then, I remember centering myself, doing a bit of box breathing, turning on the dictation, and just starting to say words out loud.

[00:02:42] In case you hadn't noticed, I've been recording a lot of audio these days, so I tapped into that to get myself going. In the next three hours, I churned out about a third of the work I needed to create, after having accomplished nothing in the first six. But by sticking with it, feeling frustrated, accepting my feelings, not letting them defeat me, and of course, with a little bit of help from my excellent spouse, I got some momentum going.

[00:03:09] Four days later, I have about 90 percent of the project complete and so much momentum that I know I'll be done before the week is out.

[00:03:17] On a high level, the momentum I built that first day carried me into the second, which carried me into the third, and then the fourth. On a micro level, I really did have to start again every single day.

[00:03:29] But it got just a little bit easier every single day too. Today, it only took me an hour of fussing over my workspace before I got to it, and I became focused and flew through the work. Hard work. Work that hasn't been easy to produce. Work that I will continue to edit and toil over for many days to come.

[00:03:51] But the bulk of the raw work is now done. Because I stuck with the amount of time, an excruciating amount of time, if you ask me, that it took to kickstart my momentum, and then I built upon it and didn't let up. Sometimes I think in a lot of things that we do, we give up a little too quickly because we just want to be able to get started and we think it's all going to go great and there will be no hiccups, or even if we have hiccups, they're not going to be the kind of hiccups that we end up having.

[00:04:22] But sometimes you need to just sit with it. You have to feel uncomfortable and just Ride it anyway, until you get to whatever that point is, the breaking point, perhaps, where you somehow decide enough is enough and let's actually just go do the thing. Yeah, it's a funny and beautiful thing, momentum, but once you have it, it's quite the ride.

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?