Sometimes You Just Need To Give Yourself A Break.

The month of August is a funny one - fun and funny.

Disrupted schedules with long weekends away, client holidays and kids back from college.

I find it harder to have the clear focus that I’m sure September will bring. And some days it’s easy to produce nothing.

Which is when the question creeps in, ‘if I'm not making something happen, what am I actually worth?’

That question takes up the space which could be taken up with multiple more positive things.

That's what’s taken me time to recognise. The fear of not producing isn't a sit-there-and-do-nothing kind of fear. It's active. It takes up the time that could be spent doing something that becomes output: thinking, dreaming, reading, learning, letting things settle. All the stuff that doesn't look like work and yet things don’t happen without them.

So chasing the reassurance that you're still worth something ends up costing you the very thing that could have made the next bit of work better.

I don't have a tidy answer to who I am on a day without the output, though I’m sure it’s not too far from the one I am with. But I've noticed that time spent wrestling with the answer, on a day that was already unproductive, can start eating into the next day.

Sometimes You Just Need To Give Yourself A Break.