WARNING: LAZINESS APPROACHETH

Can You Feel It? 

It's coming. It's that time of January. The moment when the dedication begins to waver and the laziness and apathy sets in. It's the "do I REALLY need to do the workout today?" or "what would one soda hurt, I mean really?" It's either the beginning of the end or the moment you start pushing back. 

I will admit to not doing the complete workout some days (an unfortunate side effect of waking up with severe acid reflux) but I haven't given up on that yet. Still haven't touched soda, for which I am grateful. The story is currently in the hands of a variety of editing friends and family. Admittedly, I haven't done much reading (the author of the book I chose to do next was the first book of an academic and it shows). 

In order to make sure I don't slow down, I'm going to try a couple different tactics. Firstly, imagination. Imagining that moment when I can buy a pair of pants one size smaller. Or my reaction when I receive that magical email saying the agent loved my book and I'm going to be published. Or jamming out in a car by myself as I drive down the highway. Or casually saying in conversation "Les Mis really is better in the original French". (Learning French may not be one of my official resolutions, but really how awesome would it be to say that and mean it?) 

The second trick I'm trying are deadlines. I gave myself the deadline to reread and edit the entire story in 5 days by taking around 25 pages a day and that worked out well. The next step would be to format the story for a novel (the snobbish writing sites all say that Microsoft Word is horrible for it, but not everyone can afford some weird, little known software so pbth) and get to reading. 

Thirdly/Lastly, my trick is to put things in my daily schedule. For example, I do the workouts first thing in the morning before I do anything else (followed by a showed for obvious reasons). But I also need to get in the habit of reading for an hour or so (maybe less when my work hours are increased) to stay on top of the reading challenge. 

More than anything, the trick is to fight the apathy. I didn't get my degree (oh, did I mention I have my degree now?) through apathy. I don't keep my job through apathy. And I'm not going to accomplish anything else through it either. Relient K was right: apathy's a pathetic way to be.