Hi, dear readers! I don’t have any analytics tool in this blog, so you could be two or two hundred (I’m leaning towards the first one, but why not dream with the latter?). Starting today I have decided to post a new blog every two weeks (so every other Friday). Why? Because if I don’t try to build a habit around this, I will just procrastinate a lot about it. That means there will be posts with fewer words and less preparation, but also, I think I will get better with practice.
So I’m setting a new recurrent task on my Todoist every other Friday to write a blog post. I will try to write from what comes to my mind, but I also will have a list of blog ideas just in case. So this week I’m writing this for two purposes:
- Letting know my vast amount of readers that they will have access to my incredible wisdom every two weeks (hehe).
- Using this blog as my own Ulysses pact.
What the heck is a Ulysses pact? Well, the story is that Ulysses wanted to hear the sirens sing, but he knew that would make him want to jump into the water, so he put wax on their men’s ears and asked them to tie him to the mast. So when he heard the sirens, he would not be able to do much. He also gave them orders to not deviate from the course of the ship and attack him if something went wrong. If you want to know more about the Ulysses pact, this Wikipedia page is great. I would have loved to read this New Yorker article about it, but the paywall didn’t let me.
The Ulysses pact is indeed more about self-control than productivity, as a way to stop bad habits. But there are two great things that we can learn from Ulysses here for our productivity journey:
- Changing the environment
- Accountability
These two things are always mentioned when trying to be productive. “Turn your notifications off so there are no distractions”, “Let’s set up a weekly meeting to share our progress”, “Close the browser tabs that are not related to your task at hand”, and more. The strength of the Ulysses pact is that he covered those two areas at the same time.
If you want to do something that you are procrastinating a lot, why don’t you try this? Set up the environment to make it easier for you to do it (in my case, that task in Todoist and the list of possible topics work like that), and then make it public: tell your manager, your mentor, your partner, your millions of readers (like I did here 😉). It’s not that hard.
Returning to my blog. Every other Friday! I will post something about productivity, video games, Kubernetes, and DevOps-related stuff (the blog is called Kubernesto, so I should), and anything that comes to my mind!
See you in two weeks!