I’m doing a “Play October” challenge this month, to run learning experiments on how to inject more play and joy into my work. I got lots of goals set up that I want to achieve, but tunnel vision is making my journey getting there much too serious and stressful than I would like. So in order to enjoy the ride as much as the foreseen destination, I have to seriously figure out how to have more joy in my work, in the daily processes and tasks, even if I recognise that there are unpleasant tasks that need to be done from time to time. I want to enjoy every f**king working day.

So far, the most useful thing seems to be doing body scans. I wrote about how my body was my harshest teacher, with regards to my physical health. But it seems the body is also quite apt at teaching me about emotional and mental states for my work. If I’m struggling or just plain having a bad time with something, the body is the first to signal that. Whether I have the presence of mind to catch these signals is another matter. 

Fact is, the body shouts first. And it tends to shout out things to avoid.

Goals of avoidance can still be useful. After all, joy can be a slippery concept to hold on to. It’s fleeting, circumstantial and emergent, a result of a complex system of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. As a lag measure it’s hard to get to, but I could use avoidance goals as lead measures, that adds to joy via subtraction, via removing what brings me ‘not-joy’.  

So that’s what I’d been doing lately, since the start of October. I’ll do an ongoing body scan throughout my morning routines - yoga, meditation, exercise, shower, commute. I follow what my body needs that day. By the time I get to my workplace of the day, I kind of roughly know what work I need to be doing. I took it easy on my Rails app project last week, as I was feeling a bit tired from pushing myself the last month. Meanwhile, switching context can help to energize me, so I switched to working on a productized service idea which I’d been interested to start on concurrently. Avoid what doesn’t bring me joy, follow the motivation and what brings me joy. This works as a temporary measure, of course - I’m concerned that this might make me jump around all the time and get nothing completed in the end. That, I want to avoid for sure. But in the meantime, I will let the line loose somewhat, so that I can bounce back stronger when I do. It’s a balancing game now.