Making Re-Decisions

You don't need a turn of the calendar or a brand new day to give yourself a fresh start. You can do it right now in this very moment.

I had one of those perfect starts to a day. At least on paper. I was coming off a long weekend, feeling refreshed, having a good night of sleep, and kicking off the day with the kids being chill over breakfast and a steady run before the work day started.

 My work calendar was forgiving too. I cleared out a few meetings we didn’t need to have on our team. I had a rare entire morning of focused work time.

 And I couldn’t get it done. There wasn’t an apparent reason. I just felt like piddling online. Reading things. I created a nice to-do list of great intentions to start the day, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

 I’m sure nobody reading this has ever felt that, right?

When your day starts sluggish, it’s mentally easier to throw away the day. Count your losses and move on. Tomorrow is a new day. Just let future Drew pick up the slack.

But today could still be a new day.

I went to one of our family’s favorite restaurants down the street for lunch for a change of scenery. I opened my laptop and worked with a different ambiance than my typical WFH setup. I came home and made a re-decision to have a productive day. Sure, I didn’t have the same allocation of hours I did when I started the day – but I could make the most of what I had at that moment.

My high school cross-country and track coach used the term re-decision in the middle of races or at the end of a brutal speed workout. There would come a time, whether during a workout or a race, when your body wanted to falter, where you may not be where you want to be position-wise or from a time perspective.

 He would yell at us from the sidelines, “make a re-decision!”

It was a moment where you chose if you were going to be satisfied with having a garbage race and mentally throw in the towel…or if you were going to pull yourself together and put together a race that made you proud.

This could apply to many things outside of a bad start to a race or a mentally sluggish start to a work day.

Maybe you had a great first month of sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions…but fell off the wagon in the past month. I know I have.

Maybe a project at work isn’t going as well as you’d hoped and seems off-track.

 You can hit the mental reset button at any time. You don’t need to wait for a calendar to flip or a clock to strike a particular time of day. We can reset whenever we want.

We can’t control what’s already happened - or maybe what hasn’t happened in terms of productivity. But we can direct our efforts from that moment moving forward and do the best we can with what we have.

 We just have to make a re-decision.

Originally posted on Brain Wads | February 22, 2022