Office Time

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Well, nearly a month ago in the hope to find a way out of this never ending blockage of words, I decided to put Sams office hours plan into action. The goal was to set a specific time-frame of the day, which we named the office time and force our lazy ass to treat writing as work.

At the very beginning, it was quite clear as day that no matter how hard I try, keeping up with everyday writing is just too hard to achieve. With time, the desire to find words will slowly dry out, but at least by then, both of us were hoping to turn this office time into a habit.

A simple trick, played on the lazy mind.

But, before I could even dive deep into this new potentially disastrous plan of ours, the major headache came from the task to select a suitable office time. Like what should be the appropriate time-table to set-up this mind trick, should I set-up it in the morning to get you know, that 9 to 5 real job experience, or should I throw it in the afternoons lazy brainstorming or better/worse middle of the night in the depth of silence.

Well, I gave it some thoughts and then realized no better way to decide than experiment. So with the smaller headaches out of the way, it’s time to follow through the plan of ticking the lazy mind. For starters, I decided to go with the afternoon brainstorming, thinking it would be a good start to experiment writing in the fallen lights.

I would light up the first cigarette while taking in the afternoon lights through the window, the silence would calm the nerves while the mind would try to find something to write. It generally took one full burnout cigarette to finally be able to land on things I wanna write down that day, and from there, the fingers will do the rest.

It was going surprisingly well, I was having quite fun with such an experiment. But then the next major headache decided to enter the show. Construction work. Well, the situation was bad enough to drive me away from the house and I ended up staying over at Sams until the situation got under control.

Now, unlike me, her office hours starts from 6 to 9pm, not the routine I made myself used to. But the situation did manage to offer some new experience, going to the office together while sitting apart from each other and trying to find any topic of interest, the three of us did manage to make things work out fine in the end.

However, like always, all the sleepless sleepovers stacking up with continuous going out of the house for three days straight ended up breaking my introverted body to borderline exhaustion. So, when I came back from that trip, I had no other choice but to say goodbye to the office trick for a few days and unsurprisingly that was the downfall of my precious mind trick.

You see, when you are trying to set up a habit intentionally, it should be having a continuous repetition for at least a month. But now that I took a much needed break, my mind began to notice the crack of procrastination and took the bait to get into hiding in that world of laziness. And now that the mind is aware of such trick, it's even harder to force the same method on it again with the hope to get any success. Which is just unfortunate as I really used to love that afternoon brainstorming.

Well, so now I decided to stretch the office hours in more flexible shape. Instead of fixing a specific time-table like Sam, my office hours will be set in clusters around the day. Write whenever the mind wants to write, but the editing must be done before midnight.

For now, that’s what I am trying to achieve, but judging by the splash of tiredness and lack of interest every now and then, only time will tell how long this set-up will work.