There seems to be a certain restraint each time you set out to work, but you see there are levels of this restraint. Such as manageable ones, and not so manageable others. There are helpful strategies and worldviews which help you mitigate this effect of resistance, and can make you even feel rewarded. But lately I have come to discover these are quite subjective endeavors. For instance one of those strategies is a way of creating this image of resistance as a force in your head. You imagine how it causes all your worries which suddenly appear when you start to work. Examples of what it might tell you: “you do not know enough about this topic to make a lecture”, “you are not good at singing”, “you can’t start this business with no experience”… You recognize that the fight with it will never stop, that you need to show up every day and face this resistance. Resistance takes on any form in order to distract you and get you away from your work. This work which you are about to do is not a work for money, but such that will fulfill you regardless of success. Only to work on something like this can make your life ultimately fulfilling. Also there is no grudge that you hold towards the task. You only need to care about overcoming resistance that day. Don´t care about any final product, it doesn’t matter what you produced, just that you overcame resistance was enough. If you think about resistance in this way, it allows you to separate yourself from all the bad influences of your mind on your actions, it is no longer you that says these things, it is the resistance which tries to influence you and sway you away from your work. These all are helpful beliefs that will help you tremendously when applied.
But there seems to be a problem with this outlook. The thing is that, in order to realize this worldview you need to be able to focus on it. And that is quite impossible to do when you need to focus 100 percent on your work. And if you are going to use this, you will shift your focus from the work on these ideas in order to feel less tired, less disgusted, and by this very act, you will tire yourself more, and will put yourself in a position to start the work over and over again, which means overcoming the resistance over and over again. This will lead you to focus on the reasons why you don’t want to do the work, even though they are completely manufactured placebo. There is a trick to mitigate this effect. You shall only do the task for a limited amount of time, without focusing on anything else. You will not be getting yourself into self fulfilling cycles of worry anymore.
First you take away your overwhelm associated with the length of the task, then the amount, importance of it, the standards which you hold for your work. You will put boundaries on your time, and you will not be getting yourself into self fulfilling cycles of worry anymore. By reducing these things you subconsciously allow your brain to focus on the task at hand for the given time period. This approach is good for people who overthink and analyze a lot.
It is really important to put a time stamp on the work that you are doing. Why? Because, without the timestamp, you get overwhelmed by the amount of work that you yet have to do. The approach is no more simple than looking at the clock, and saying to yourself: “I will do this for 30 minutes, then I will stop.” By doing this you put yourself into a frame of mind which rids you of the uncertainty and overwhelm of having to do the work for the whole day. The task ends, and you do not know if there will be any more work or not afterwards. Also this reduces the pressure put on you by the external deadlines, or issues. The knowledge of this boundary, will reduce their validity, because in essence they will lose their importance within this limited frame of mind. Very important part of this is to focus only on the task at hand, and not any external achievement, or progress. When you start to focus on this achievement, you start to get overwhelmed and you will quit.
There is one possible mistake which can sabotage this strategy. That is, if you plan ahead much, you again manage to overwhelm yourself. Let’s imagine you start to implement this idea of mine which I have presented here. And you say to yourself, well now I am going to do 30 minutes of writing, then 30 minutes of running, and then 4 hours of other time increments. At this point if your brain is the same as mine, as you get to work, it starts to think precisely about everything else, than the work, and will focus on the amazingly overwhelming amount of work that you have to do that day.
If it feels like a dreadful slow death of your brain to do the work, then something is wrong some kind of belief, or the system that you use to do the work, does not align with the way you work, and you are trying to knock in the nail with the sharp end of the axe.
A certain misconception arises when people say, do what you enjoy, which may prevent you from doing your work. It is quite a silly concept to ever regard enjoyment as a reasonable measure for your work. You enjoy a movie, but how could you enjoy article editing, or making excel tables? There will always be something that you will not enjoy doing about the work which you want to make your living. It is more dependent on your interests, what you value, not about what you enjoy.
Also this strategy doesn’t have to work for everybody, everybody has his own nature, and a deadline might serve him much better than to see meaningless work which doesn’t put any requirements on you. This is all preferential, and individual, and you need to figure it out for yourself. You need to consider your weaknesses, your strengths, and based on those identify what strategy might work for you, and search and find such a strategy, implement it into your schedule.