Track Your Daily Wins

I just had this happen to me, and it isn’t the first time, so I wanted to quickly write something about it. If you’re like me, there are plenty of times during the week (or day) where you don’t feel like you’re accomplishing anything. It’s early afternoon as I write this and I was just in the kitchen feeling like I hadn’t gotten much of anything done today. It kind of depressed me a little. What they heck have I been doing all day while things dry on the work table?

I got a little bummed out because at first I thought all I’d done was idle away the time between steps of making my panels and letting them dry by watching YouTube or even less useful things. It made me a little sick to my stomach to think of all that wasted time, and my inner critic immediately stood up and walked to the microphone of my inner monologue with a smug look on his face.

Thankfully, before he got to into his whole “you’re such an idiot, it’s no wonder none of the big goals you have aren’t happening”, I looked at my Todoist list and saw that I checked off some pretty important items today. Not least of which was some of the bookkeeping that I’ve been avoiding. If I didn’t use Todoist and RescueTime to keep me focused and track my time with meaningful labels, I could be sitting here really depressed about sabotaging my goals and eating too much ice cream. Thankfully I’ve kept up the discipline of using those apps as part of some good habits I still sometimes struggle with.

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Being able to look at those daily victories kept me from spiraling even a little down a less productive and more unhealthy path. During something a wild and unknown as a global pandemic, I feel like it’s totally fine to give yourself more slack than you normally would with regards to getting things done, especially big goals. It’s also nice to have a tool to prevent your inner critic from filling your head with negative thoughts and BS when you’ve got every reason to feel accomplished, like I do after seeing what I actually did today.

Lesson: we could all use a little less stress and a little more forgiveness with ourselves.

P.S. Here’s my list of victories today. Notice how they don’t have to be giant/major things!

• Split Square transactions for accurate categories
• All bookkeeping for April
• Wash dishes/clean up kitchen
• Laundry
• Build panels