The Plan: yet another fresh start

I haven't posted a Plan post in a while, because I've been slacking. Well, I've still been mostly doing the important things, like exercising and working more than I used to and eating vegetables. I haven't been doing everything every day, though, and as time went on I was getting more and more slack. Last week, after several above-average weeks, I only worked 26% of the time... Clearly, I need some discipline back. I think the 30-days-in-a-row plan was better than the 90% goal, which very quickly became out of reach. I'm out of sync with calendar months already, so I can just restart if I miss a day.

I posted about an especially productive week when I worked 71% of the time, so I know I can do a lot better than I did last week. I only got that high, though, because I had a terribly unproductive day and hadn't given up on the whole star thing, so I wanted to make up for it. The Official Star Arbitrator agreed that I could get two stars the next day by not using internet before 3pm, I think, and I tried to work as much as possible before then. I ended up using only 15 minutes of internet all day and was surprised at how easy it was (well, maybe not easy, but it was possible) , so I continued doing that.

It worked pretty well until I ran out of stuff I'd already planned to do. My worst problem comes when I have to think about my project and decide what experiments to do. I can only think about that at a very superficial level before I get too anxious and have to distract myself to stop myself from freaking out completely. Last week, I spent a lot of time distracting myself.

I'm not sure what to do about that, except force myself to think. So, back to The Plan. I even found an incentive this time so that I won't just give up when it gets hard again. This is where the rainbow-coloured yarn I mentioned yesterday comes in. I couldn't justify spending $30 on a pair of socks, but as a reward for working, it would be worth it. I was going to make it that if I got 30 stars in a row, I could buy the yarn, but I didn't want to get to the end and find someone else had already bought it. Plus, losing something is supposed to be a stronger disincentive than forgoing a gain, so I bought the yarn and will have to give it away if I don't get 30 stars.

So, what I need to do each day is:

• exercise
• eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables
• leave home by 9.30am
• not use my computer for anything non-work related until I've done half an hour of work and have a list of things to do that day
• no blogs until I've done another hour of work
• only selected blogs until I've done another hour of work after that
• work at least 50% of the time
• go to bed by midnight

I just added the rule about working 50%, which seems like it could be hard, but I'd really like to do a lot more than that, and I know I can. Maybe I should have bonus rewards or something for getting that percentage higher, but it was hard enough to find one incentive.