For years now I’ve been developing a very simple tool to help evaluate one’s day so far. This used to be called DaySCOR, but I’ve renamed it to DSF, for “Day So Far.” You can find it in my latest journaling template.

According to my experience in developing DaySCOR / DSF, one of the biggest mood-gifts I could give you today is tractability. By that I mean the power to affect and change things around you. This seems to reliably affect one’s perception of how things are going.

Even better if those things intrigue you, excite you, or help you overcome emotional burdens.

Hopefully there are some things around you that you’d like to affect. It can be a lot of fun to plan various ways to do this. To me it’s amazing that you can invent a good mood by inventing new things to do:

• I think I’ll visualize a schedule that is nimble, flexible, and exciting. It will result in my having accomplished things that are meaningful to me, yet also appealing to work on right now.
• I think I’ll take a new and different route on my hike today.
• I think I’ll set a huge boundary with my time today and do some planning on a personal project.
• I think I’ll try a new research organization method today.
• I think I’ll call this friend who almost never lets the conversation get depressing or boring.

Even just a big-picture plan for this kind of thing starts to look like an artist’s sketch. It’s simple, but effective.

With this kind of basic idea or plan in place it’s easy to find oneself slipping right into the work. That’s tractability. There is no “procrastination” there.

This kind of activity can also have an addictive or compulsive property, IMO, so some restraint may even be called for.

Lately I use the taper-down time, the wrap-things-up time, to prepare gifts for future me:

• Here, I got you started on your work for Monday.
• Here, I planned you a fun experience for Saturday.
• Here, I made you a list of difficult feelings so they wouldn’t follow you into your walk with your daughter.

Making time for this kind of thing is a bit frustrating, when there may be other things I could finish now. But starting things is sometimes way more powerful given the availability of such energy. Especially if you just spent hours finishing other things.

I’ve mentioned some of this before, but sometimes I re-draft a bit, updating details, connections, and personal experiences. I hope it’s not terribly boring to read things like this, because the implications seem really exciting to me: The difference between DSF ratings of “4” and “8” on a single day could carry forward to affect days, weeks, and lifetimes of a given subject or individual. But that difference will also radiate away from us to affect those with whom we relate, which is an oft-neglected aspect of productivity and self-improvement.

Filed in: Control /110/ | Relationships /78/ | People /74/ | Productivity /119/ | Therapeutic Practice /144/ | Procrastination /23/