Laziness and Me
Jun. 29th, 2005 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynWhen I exercise, it's for 70-75 minutes, which usually stretches into two hours with associated activities (getting water, setting up music, adjusting the house temperature so I don't swelter while exercising, cooling down and showering afterwards, etc.)
This seems like a ridiculous amount of time to spend every day on one activity that I'm not getting paid to do. And yet I've been doing it for the last eight weeks. Over the last five, I've averaged 75 minutes per day of exercise (some of which is simply walking to/from work) and missed, I think, two days. One of which was the day I did the 24-hour comic.
It's getting a little monotonous, and harder to persuade myself to start. Think of all the other things I could be doing with those two hours! my inner laziness says. Missing just one day won't make a difference. Heck, it's not as though you can see any difference from all the effort you've put in so far..
I have to psyche myself out of this. True. But I don't have to exercise for the full 75 minutes. I can just get started. Do a few stretches, and then a few exercises, quit whenever I'm bored.
The lazy voice in me senses my appeal to its weakness and tries to counter. No! I mean, what's the point in just doing ten or twenty minutes? You can't tell a difference from seventy-five!
Ha! I respond. Nonsense. All the authorities on exercise say that any amount is better than nothing. Every little bit helps. Just because I normally do an hour doesn't mean it's pointless to do less.
Laziness surrenders before my logic. Fine. But this time you're gonna quit early and do something else with the time.
Oh, of course.
But we both know I'm lying: once I get started, laziness is lucky if it can shave the last minute off the last exercise, or get me to pause every ten or fifteen minutes for a drink of water. I'm too stubborn; I always go through the whole routine. (Y'know, it's like I exercise to spite myself).
I think Laziness holds the upper hand in this one. Someday, it's bound to get the better of me. When it does, it'll probably be all downhill from there.
But it hasn't yet.
This seems like a ridiculous amount of time to spend every day on one activity that I'm not getting paid to do. And yet I've been doing it for the last eight weeks. Over the last five, I've averaged 75 minutes per day of exercise (some of which is simply walking to/from work) and missed, I think, two days. One of which was the day I did the 24-hour comic.
It's getting a little monotonous, and harder to persuade myself to start. Think of all the other things I could be doing with those two hours! my inner laziness says. Missing just one day won't make a difference. Heck, it's not as though you can see any difference from all the effort you've put in so far..
I have to psyche myself out of this. True. But I don't have to exercise for the full 75 minutes. I can just get started. Do a few stretches, and then a few exercises, quit whenever I'm bored.
The lazy voice in me senses my appeal to its weakness and tries to counter. No! I mean, what's the point in just doing ten or twenty minutes? You can't tell a difference from seventy-five!
Ha! I respond. Nonsense. All the authorities on exercise say that any amount is better than nothing. Every little bit helps. Just because I normally do an hour doesn't mean it's pointless to do less.
Laziness surrenders before my logic. Fine. But this time you're gonna quit early and do something else with the time.
Oh, of course.
But we both know I'm lying: once I get started, laziness is lucky if it can shave the last minute off the last exercise, or get me to pause every ten or fifteen minutes for a drink of water. I'm too stubborn; I always go through the whole routine. (Y'know, it's like I exercise to spite myself).
I think Laziness holds the upper hand in this one. Someday, it's bound to get the better of me. When it does, it'll probably be all downhill from there.
But it hasn't yet.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-01 07:24 pm (UTC)I have to admit that it's a little frustrating to do timed exercises and know that there's no way to make it quicker. There's an upside, though: I know it's not going to take more time, either. Not like working on a novel or a piece of art, where vast quantities of time can be sucked up by fiddling with it or re-writing.
That was the big lesson of the 24-hour comic, though: it is possible for me to make something worth reading in a very finite amount of time. If I were disciplined about it, I could do an online comic at a page per hour and not have it eat up ALL my free time.
For that matter, if I were disciplined about it, I could do an entry for Unfinished Tales every day. :/
Unfortunately, there's a limit to how much of my available time I'm willing to devote to being disciplined.
Inertia, Laziness, Shiny Objects, etc...
Date: 2005-07-01 07:43 pm (UTC)I started (yet another) book, and had been working on it rather diligently over the past couple weeks. But it's already starting to slow down, and the doubts start creeping in, and I find myself wondering if I'm wasting my time, since so many good books are already out there. Of course, this has nothing to do with exercising, except maybe for my creative muscles.