Tricking Myself :)

There are times when I feel the need to trick myself. Yes, dont give me that look. I do trick myself often. I'll mention one trick I experimented and found that it worked!

It was a heavy-hearted rain-swollen Wednesday morning. I'm sure you know how professionals feel on week day mornings like these. Not to mention, I was sleepy (that's just an understatement, unwilling to move out of bed, absolutely irritated at the thought of having to go to work! Nevertheless, I pulled myself out of my sheets, got ready for office and got back to bed, waiting for my cab, and hoping to make the best use of the wait time.

Sometime later I was a zombie at work. Like all other days, I made a to-do list, though lousily. It included lots of things topped with some boring procastinated tasks from the last week which had to be sent out asap. And I was least in the mind to work.

Un-determined to finish my work, I facebook-ed for sometime. 'Sometime' turned out to be exactly an hour because you dont realize how much time you have been jaywalking on facebook visiting the viral strings of profiles and innumerable links! Looked at my to-do list. Screamed a "NOOO." It didnt work. It didnt make me any more kicked up to work than even an hour ago. Finally, rubbing my hands together, I geared up to trick myself. I pulled out the to-do list for the previous day (Tuesday) which had all pink-highlighted to-do's. Pink for me means done. Pulling out a bigger post-it, I wrote down all of Tuesday's to-do's and all of today's in one sequence. Marked each of Tuesday's to-do item broad pink and kept the list right in front of my eyes.

8 hours later. I rechecked my list. All of today's were marked pink too! Ruminated on how lazily I had started the day, and now all my tasks were done! Yep, I had managed to trick myself by saying this to my mind: 'See all the tasks in point # 1,2,3,4,5 are done. Wow. Just 10 more to go for today. Take baby steps, one at a time, and see you will have all 15 pink soon.'

It worked. Tried it many more times. Figured this out of the whole thing: The sudden unprecedented pleasure that the mind gets on seeing strikethroughs on to-do's or tasks marked 'done' is immense, and it keeps you going for the rest of the list.

Try it. It works wonders! :)