Can You Balance 'Should' Tasks With Your Wants

I am on my third cycle of trying to make this work.

This week, I watched an Ali Abdaal video, and he said something that resonated with me. I used to watch his stuff, but I got fed up listening to him moan about his life as a millionaire. However, in this video, he spoke about the difference between tasks we should do and tasks we want to do. 

This video was extremely poignant for this week as I have hit a massive brick wall in my creativity. A mixture of my daughter's birthday, all my children being ill, and a continued health condition led to me wanting to climb into a hole and not come out. I haven't published for a week. I know burnout is also due to an imbalance between my should and want tasks. 

Should tasks, are those tasks we all know we should be doing, or rather tasks others tell us we should be doing? For example, within writing, we are told we should write every day, publish regularly, and interact on all social media to build a following. The irony is this is the advice I have given you all over the years. 

I go through a continual cycle of joining all the social media and writing sites, trying to make a presence on them, only to hit burnout and cut back on them all. This, I believe, is my third go-round on the cycle. I was told I should be on this site, I should be on that site, so I joined, and now I have no enthusiasm to carry on any of them. 

If this sounds familiar to your writing, let me ask you what you want to do with your creative life.? Take a moment and honestly think about what your wants are. Mine is simple: I want to write articles that interest me. I want to share those times when I disappeared down my rabbit hole. I second want to write this newsletter as I love documenting my process, and I hope some of you take something away from it. 

Do I want to be on social media? Probably not I am so fed up with all the politics and doomsday crap. If I am about to be hit by a nuclear weapon due to World War III, then I can do without knowing. People will tell me I should be on social media building my content, but I don't want to, so why should I? 

When you follow your wants, you find a new level of energy in your creative process, and hopefully, the burnout will now start disappearing from your life. 

What do you want to do? 

If you enjoy this email, please share it so more readers can find it. If you need advice or writing tips, I would love to hear them. Drop them in the comments or email me by hitting reply to this newsletter.

Until next week stay safe

Sam 😊

There are so many ways in which we 'should' ourselves but every 'should' has behind it some kind of shame and whip. - Carl Rogers

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