Outcome: "Loss"
Record: 118-10
Streak: Lost 1
Summary: No pages and then a raspberry mocha. Also, I was feeling sorry for myself all day and finding ways to tell people about my condition in a way that I was seeking sympathy.
I am now committing to doing my morning pages every day. I have excused myself in the past, and I was going to write today off as an excused day since I was up late doing virtuous things, but then I realized that 45 minutes of writing my morning pages gives me more vitality than 45 minutes of sleeping, no matter what, so I need to do them, no more excused days.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
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2 comments:
It's a huge problem determining whether something should be excused or not. For example, if I have a dentist appointment and then I am left in a state where I can't eat a proper dinner, it throws things off. So should I excuse that? I guess it depends really on the question, "Could I have possibly exerted myself any more?" It seems like you asked this question and determined you could have sacrificed sleep. But we'll never know if that 45 minutes extra sleep would have had a much greater positive impact. I guess the lesson is to stay on point as much as possible else risk a loss or a 0 or however it is measured.
Yeah, this is a tough, and frequently recurring, problem. This is my (admittedly unscientific) way that I try to deal with it: when things like this happen, often, or perhaps always, the root of the problem is the conflict of two or more goods. In your example, going to the dentist and eating a nutritious dinner are the goods. They are in conflict. First I try to figure out which is the greater good. I would say going to the dentist is the greater good because a skipped meal means poor performance and a degree of suffering, whereas not going to the dentist could mean high financial costs and a far greater degree of suffering in the future. So the first thing to do is to commit to the higher good, i.e., going to the dentist. But then you need to figure out the excusable extent of interruption that your choice causes, and to get as close to sufficient without being excessive. So maybe you could say that a normal energy exertion attempted without dinner would be detrimental to your ability to sustain a long-term drive, therefore you would need to lower your energy exertion. Maybe you could do shorten the time of each task and add the remainder to your sleep time for that night. Or, maybe you determine that you can reasonably expect to do all your work even with less than 100% energy, since it's just one odd day, and that to do so won't compromise you in the long run, therefore, just tough it out. I would say that whichever you choose, stick with it and don't beat yourself up too much about it. Not making the perfect allowance doesn't result in a loss in my system--a loss stems more from doing things that I know for sure are detrimental, i.e., given the same circumstance as above, except, instead of a) going to bed earlier, or b) toughing it out, I c) sort of conclude that I should be excused, not define that allowance precisely, fuck around on the internet for a while, and then end up staying up later than normal. That would be a classic "loss" scenario.
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