If You’re Gonna Cheat, Cheat

Some particularly limiting diets build in a “cheat day”. One day a week of utter gluttony where you can shove any and every substance you want into your face. What kind of diet would do that? Well, if you’re on a diet that, say, severely restricts carbohydrates, the cheat day serves three purposes: (1) psychologically, it gives you something to look forward to and a reason to stay on track each week; (2) physiologically, it helps you lose your taste for whatever you stuff-yourself-sick with; (3) physiologically, it it may actually help keep your metabolic rate higher than going without binge days.

Lets apply this concept to productivity. There are some days when you’re simply not up to working. You’re tired, you’re bored, your head is someplace else, whatever. You could spend all day at your desk, aimlessly browsing the web, flicking back and forth between work, email, reddit/hacker news/other online snacks, chatting, wandering around the office and generally looking for excuses not to get shit done. At the end of the day you’ve done, what, maybe an hour or two of work? Huge waste.

Instead, if you’re going to cheat, just go ahead and cheat. Why waste the day and deprive yourself of whatever enjoyment could have been had during those hours?

Better solution: if it feels like it’s going to be a wasted day, pick one real task to work on for one hour. Make it something that will matter, something important that you can actually sink a solid hour into. Shut everything else down and concentrate on that for one hour, with the expectation that after that, you’re done. See you tomorrow. Then, take your cheat day and enjoy it, rather than waste it fighting to do work in 3-minute increments.

Bonus: Many times, after that one hour of work, you’ll find that it wasn’t meant to be a wasted day after all, and you don’t need the cheat day. But if you do, you’ll know you still got a good hour in on something that mattered.