My last post was 3 weeks ago. What happened? Why am I so behind? Because I ran ahead, stumbled, and fell out of my habit.
I have been reading at least a book a week for the past two months. 3 weeks ago I finished "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" mid-week, grabbed "A Thousand Splendid Suns" which I finished by Friday night. I was stoked! I had finished 2 books before the weekend. I write these posts before bed on Sunday night so I had plenty of time to do my #sketchnote and post. Only I wasn't.
I know that my favorite authors have posts in the can, that is they don't write every post the day they publish it. I was hoping to build a backlog of completed posts so that I would always have one to post on Sunday and I could sprinkle the rest throughout the week. However, I had not been writing every day, I had only been writing on Sundays. My reading workcenter was ahead of my writing workcenter. By finishing an extra book, I flooded myself with extra work I was not ready to handle. I was my own bottleneck!
What happens when a machine on the factory floor is overworked? It breaks down. Instead of making sure that I sat down to write every Sunday just to make sure I got something out the door, I patted myself on the back for doing extra reading and took a Sunday off. That was all it took to break my newly formed habit. That is the power of the process.
The good news is that I've kept up my reading and sketchnoting, though I've slipped 2 days on the sketchnotes. Back on the saddle. I'm writing at least every Sunday and I will get my sketchnotes done on Saturday so I'm not doing double duty on Sunday ... except for this week ... I need to finish my Sketchnote for "Hero with A Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell tomorrow.