Operation Achieve Anything: Day Thirty-Nine, Dateline 2-8-2018

When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.
— Henry J. Kaiser

Hey Crickets. Time for another Operation Achieve Anything update! Today’s day number thirty-nine, I’m still sick but feeling much better, and once again I’m annoyed with the book because it’s back to delving out recycled assignments as filler. The new trend that the Achieve Anything… book seems to love to do is to offer an alternate lesson with the same message from the day before then tell you to keep on doing the same task as the day’s assignment.

I guess this is acceptable for those people who get more out of the lessons than the actual assignment but for me, I need to feel challenged by the actual tasks to feel the value of the lesson that the book is trying to get me to learn. Plus, with better assignments comes better content for these post since it’s hard to keep coming up with different ways to say, “Yeah…  I just continued to do the same thing that I was assigned to do yesterday.”

Speaking of which, yesterday’s assignment was pretty much a lesson of less talk, more rock, meaning, stop just talking about what you plan to do and start actually doing it. Once again, this has never been a real problem for me when it comes it comes to my writing ambitions but I do struggle with this hard when it comes to things like health and living space maintenance, where I will put off a diet or cleaning routine until things are out of control. Then again, I never really talk all that big about conquering either of these areas of my life.

Oh well, yesterday’s assignment was to pick a neglected item from my to-do list that could easily be done in one day and get off your ass and do it. The book said it could be even the simplest of thing, which was great considering that I was still sick enough that I didn’t have the energy to get through anything that might require heavy lifting.

The task that I took on was making my bed since with was thrashed from days of tossing and turning while restlessly trying to sleep. I had been meaning to make it each morning while I still had enough energy to make the effort but then opted to write instead (which is a common theme in my life.)

I knew that I would sleep better with it made because psychologically it’s easier to relax without a chaotic mountain of pillows and blankets behind my back that I have to fight with while rolling over or to cover myself when I would randomly get freezing cold. I’m not saying that my illness was purely to blame for putting this off because I look past this type of tidying all of the time, but since I felt that having a well-made bed would help me to relax, I determined that, this would be the task for me to work on.

So, I simply made my bed. It didn’t take much time or effort at all, and I spent the rest of the day comfortably resting with far less tossing and turning than when the bed was a mess, proving the point of the lesson. Aside from the obvious benefit of a more relaxed state of slumber, even when I wasn’t in bed, I didn’t have that one little annoying task running around in my head justifying when I will get to it.

I would have felt that this assignment was perfect if it wasn’t followed up right away with a reboot assignment asking me to do the same exact task. Today’s assignment was to simply find another item on my to-do list and work towards crossing it off. That’s it, now added bells and whistles to make the assignment feel like an extension of yesterday’s goal, nope, just another day of more of the same that comes across as filler.

I’m still sick so this will probably end up being just another cleaning task that I’ve been putting off, but we’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to find out what I end up committing to. Until then, it’s time to wrap this thing with my usual saying of, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.  

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.