It's One of 'Those Days'

It’s one of those days when I have no strategy in mind. No grand Machiavellian scheme to set the world on fire. No Rube Goldberg plan to make me millions.

I get these days every now and then and have been getting them for long enough to recognize them for what they are. Extended coffee breaks in the jingle jangle euphony of life.

On these days, my mind floats over the landscape like a hawk looking for a vole. That vole would taste good right now. But if I don’t catch one, it won’t be the end of my world. There’s always tomorrow.

I review all the things that I have to do and realize that they can be put off a day while I just sit here and muse.

In today’s world, having these days tends to create more guilt than satisfaction or recreation. We have become so inured to the ‘weekday as workday’ syndrome, that we will, more often than not, just waste the opportunity to cool our jets and take a deep breath.

How I Came To Terms With ‘Those Days’

Back when I started to get these days, around 1989 when I went on my own after 20 years of pulling an oar in the advertising agency business, I used to call them ‘mental health’ days. Mainly because my principal occupation wasn’t doing work but finding work, which was exhausting.

But after I started getting busy, the words of a good friend and associate rang in my ear. His name is Denis Kane and he is an incredibly talented marketer, who was my first real client.

Denis once told me that that there are only two states of being for entrepreneurs, and both of them were stressful. The first was finding work, and the second was dealing with too much work. He believed that they were cyclical states of being, and that in order to get through both, you really needed to jump on any opportunity that presented itself for you to take a break.

Since I had a lot of respect for Denis, because he was a smart guy and tended to walk all of his talk, I took that to heart. And that was the key to dealing with days like this…one of those days.

Today, besides writing this, to hopefully help you understand that a hole in your schedule isn’t something that you should be obsessed with filling, I cruised around on the Internet, read a very interesting article  from the Boston Consulting Group on the future of business and work in general, posted a few memes, wrote a few short posts and basically just did whatever I felt like doing in the moment. In fact I’m still doing that.

Do These Days Really Help?

I have no idea what they would do for you. But I have always found them a good way to declutter my brain, which, for me is a very easy thing to fill up with all sorts of crap.

I believe we all live in a state of barely controlled chaos, and the need to declutter and get rid of a lot of the ‘useless and pointless knowledge’ that builds up in our brains from all the impressions that hit us on a daily basis is not just necessary, but critical.

So today is one of those days when I do just that. Now I don’t do this consciously. It really happens more by relaxing my brain and letting the useless and pointless stuff drop away.

Tomorrow I will wake up with, hopefully, only the most relevant thoughts in my head, and that will for the basis of my doing for the day.

I realize that this all sounds rather simplistic and I can’t disagree. It works for me because I have had more than 25 years to figure this out and come to terms with it. And my brain is where most of my work actually takes place.

But I do believe there is something to it…even if you were to just start tomorrow. You know what they say…the journey of a thousand miles, (or 1609.344 kilometres if you’re Canadian) starts with a single step.

jim out

He has published more than 1100 long format posts over the past 20 years, and never seems to get tired of writing new ones.

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