If you do nothing else

How daily habits can rescue a bad day

Like everyone, I have days that feel frustrating. Sometimes that is because I lack the energy to do anything of consequence, and sometimes it’s because of other circumstances. There was one particular day recently when I had a number of important conversations scheduled and all of them got canceled or didn’t feature the people who were needed to make a decision because of various illnesses going around. Like I said, frustrating.

But I do have a few things I do every single day as steps toward long terms goals. This year, I’m reading Anna Karenina at the pace of one chapter a day. I’m listening to a little Beethoven according to the Complete Beethoven calendar. I write two lines of a sonnet every day, which means I create a new sonnet every week.

So, even on a day when nothing else has happened, I know I will have read some Tolstoy, listened to some Beethoven, and written one-seventh of a sonnet. It’s not much, but it isn’t nothing. I’ve made progress on some long term things. The day isn’t a total loss.

Productivity is mostly mental

Much of life is mental anyway. Whether you’re productive or not is mostly a matter of whether you feel productive or not. In the grand scheme of things it probably doesn’t matter what any of us do. But when you feel a day hasn’t been a total loss, you might be more inclined to make a little more progress on lots of things, or at least be in a more cheerful mood.

So, with that in mind, perhaps you’d like to start some sort of daily habit that could give you a baseline sense of accomplishment. For something to become a successful daily habit, it needs to be pretty doable. It can’t take much time — ideally, just a few minutes. It has to be something you find reasonably enjoyable. And it can’t be logistically complex, or you won’t do it while you’re traveling or on weekends, or any other time when you might not be around your normal tools and environment, or have your usual schedule.

You can always do something

But if you write a thank you note to someone every single day, you know that even on a day that feels terrible, at least you wrote a thank you note. If you listen to 15 minutes of Bach’s music every day, then even on a terrible day, you will have listened to 15 minutes of great music. And if you’ve listened to something amazing, how terrible can the day really be?

So figure out what you could do as an every day habit and you’ll be able to find the bright side of even a really dismal day. Now obviously, if the day is truly horrendous in certain ways, you might not be able to do your daily habit. But for most run-of-the-mill bad days you will. And then, maybe, the day won’t seem so bad.