All right, what do we got for question number two? All right, next question is from Avi. Some weeks I'm very motivated to do work and I feel so good. On others, I just don't feel like it. This leads to negative emotions and I completely lose the motivation to do work and indulge in pointless social media.

Do you have some advice on how I can keep doing the good work every day in slow but steady manner? Well, this is another prime example of why just focusing on productivity is not in itself a sustainable strategy. So if all you're working on is I'm doing the right organizational things, I have my multi-scale plan, I'm time blocking every day, strategic to weekly to daily, you could be doing all the things, have all the tools, have all the rules.

That alone is not going to make you fulfilled and feel like you're accomplishing things and being excited about work every day. That's what's happening with Avi here. His extended answer or his extended version of the question, he talked about, "Hey, I do all your things, all your productivity things." But he still will just fall out of like, "I don't really want to work on this," and lose whole weeks in the spirals of self-doubt as he spends more and more time on social media, et cetera.

So again, this is the sort of necessary but not sufficient precondition type situation. Productivity, these tactics are going to really be a nice precondition for a sustainable, accomplished deep life, but they're not sufficient on their own. So Avi, let's try to go forward and fix your problem here. I think the issue is either your mind doesn't trust your plan or your mind doesn't like your plan.

I mean, this is what causes people to just stop working and get lost for three days on social media. Either the thing you're working on, your mind says, "This is not going to work. We're spending all this time on whatever, like our influencer YouTube channel, and it's not good.

And we're not going to become famous, and it's not going to pay our bill, or we're writing this novel, or there's business ideas. I don't even know what this is. We're just jumping on calls all the time, and it's like a simulacrum of business. We're not actually doing something or producing something." So your mind might say, "This work, I'm not going to do it.

This isn't going to lead us anywhere." You know that. You're just spinning your wheels in a highly performative way. Or your mind says, "Okay, maybe this will work. I just don't like the plan. What we're working on, what this job is, is grinding and boring or against my values.

I just don't want to do it." So it is your mind against whatever plan your productivity system is saying it should be doing. So if we're going to fix that, there's two things we can do. The first thing we want to do, of course, is focus on the craft portion, the craft bucket, and your overall deep life buckets.

That requires some work here. It requires some work to think through, "What am I working on and why? What are the projects I'm taking on? What is my workload? Is there something in here I just really hate? How do I re-engineer around that? Is there something in here I think is really important?

All right, so how am I going to do that work?" Let's start thinking that through. Let's not be so haphazard and just see if we're in the mood for it and what our mind says. Let's take that a little bit out of the picture, like we talked about with Andy in the first question.

Maybe we'll set up a location for this work and it's different than what we do that. Maybe my workload is out of whack. I need to take things off of my plate. Maybe I need to more radically shift what I'm doing, but we want to get the craft bucket in order.

So you've got to know what you're working on, why you're working on, how you're working on it. You want all of those pieces to come together. And that might take you about six weeks of really thinking and tinkering and trying to optimize that part of your life. The second key then, maybe a little bit more surprising, is looking at the other buckets of your life after that as well.

The other areas that make a deep life deep and start systematically getting your house in order in each of those other areas as well. Constitution, your health, community, how you're serving or leading on behalf of others that are important to you. Contemplation, how you're making ethical, philosophical, and theological concerns, something that you're engaged with and at the core about how you structure and live your life.

You get these houses in order. And even then, when you're in a hard part or a hard phase in work, you're much less likely to fall into, let's go on YouTube all day. Let's go on TikTok all day. That spiral of activity, the self-recrimination that comes out of the spiral of self-recrimination that comes out of you falling deeper into activities that you know are ultimately shallow and not useful to you or your vision on earth.

When you have the other buckets tuned up, even when work is hard, they're going to support you. Even when, okay, I have this whatever, I'm in year four of med school, my residency, and I think this is important, but it's just so hard and it's exhausting. They support you.

And you say, I want to lead other people. I want to be, I'm exercising, I'm outside, I have the celebration bucket, I have this hobby, I'm really into film. I have these other things that are more meaningful and quality, and they're there to fill my time. And even if I have to take a break from work for a few days, what I'm going into is something else that's important, something else that I think is useful.

So these are the two aspects of what's pushing to the spiral. One is that your relationship to work itself needs some work. The craft bucket has to be overhauled. But the second piece is you don't have other options for when work is getting you down. So it's, I'm being pushed towards, I need a break and I have nothing else quality to do with that break.

So I end up on TikTok looking at ASMR videos, which I think is what people do on TikTok. So those are your two options. So you got to get the whole deep life in order and it's not going to get rid of hard things. It's not going to make your job feel good every day.

It's not going to solve all your problems, but I think that's what's going to be your best bet for getting out of this cycle of self-doubt and self-recrimination.