Focusing Through Exercise

Day 234 of writing every day.

The desire to procrastinate is strong when on your own without someone holding you accountable. I don’t need someone looking over my shoulder the whole time to be able to stay focused, but when I’m the only one responsible for checking my output, things have a tendency to remain unfinished or get put aside. I’m sure the struggle is familiar to many people. Those who love being alone and removing the unnecessary and superficial attempts at socializing with coworkers probably have less of an issue with this though.

One thing I find about my particular room set-up is that I seem to be getting lower back pain on the left side, perhaps because laptops just aren’t designed to give you a balanced left and right side use of your body. I check myself to make sure my body isn’t twisting itself as well as it’s likely the main culprit but it’s related to the slight turn of the body to use type on the keyboard.

In order to learn on my own, I spend time watching instructional videos. While the quality of the videos are good, the feeling of being at home and not a space for work and study has proven to be unmistakably detrimental to my learning. I have a hard time focusing even for half an hour and that’s just watching videos alone. There’s none of that tenseness you feel when you leave home and assume your identity as a hard worker.

So to deal with the issues of one side experiencing discomfort from how I’m sitting, and the inability to stay focused, I’m going to try incorporating simple movement exercises as I watch videos. This will keep my body engaged so I’m not just sitting there waiting for the talk to be over, and I’m balancing out my body to a more natural position by moving both sides of my body and even giving myself much needed stretching.

Thanks for reading!