I woke up at 5:30am this morning, well-rested, energized, and excited to get to work.

I sat down at my desk. I couldn’t decide what to work on.

Here’s what I did.

I opened up my daily journal, something I haven’t done in 2 months, and I started to write stream-of-consciousness. I realized that I’m anxious about something I’d like to finish for a client today that I’m a bit behind on. I COULD work on that, but something about it doesn’t feel right as the thing that should occupy this slot of early morning work—what I’ve typically called “mission work.”

It dawned on me that I’ve spent the last few months focusing on the urgent stuff—hence the 2 months of not journaling—and almost no time on important stuff. I decided I should use this time to work on important stuff, even though there’s a ton of urgent stuff looming.

My auto-generated daily journal note template contains my quarterly goals, and I realized I haven’t looked at that in weeks. I realized it’s the first week of the quarter, so it’s a good time to assess last quarter and recalibrate for Q3.

I set some pretty ambitious goals last quarter for Design System University in terms of both revenue and student enrollment. I ended last quarter at 52% of my revenue goal and 63% of my enrollment goal. It felt a bit crummy from a percentage standpoint, but, when I looked at the actual dollar amount and number of students enrolled, I’m super pleased! I have some ideas as to how I want to recalibrate those goals for this quarter, and I’ll save that for later in the week.

I glanced up at the one post-it note I have stuck on my monitor, which says, “Am I being creative right now?” I realized I haven’t done something creative in a while, and it dawns on me that doing something I consider important and doing something I consider creative are probably more tied than I was aware of.

So, I’ve carved out some time to do 2 things: record a set of videos I wanted to make for a while and design something I’ve been thinking about for months now. The thing I want to design is going to take some time, and I normally wouldn’t start it unless I’ve already blocked out the calendar time to know how and when I’m going to finish it. But I’ve realized that that’s been blocking me from even getting started.

So I’m gonna start today without knowing when I’ll be able to pick it up next. That’s uncomfortable and unusual for me, and maybe that is the reason to do it.

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