Everyone's mileage will vary, of course, but I notice a lot of advice around mental preparation, how to think about your work, etc. Some great tips. But, for m

Everyone's mileage will vary, of course, but I notice a lot of advice around mental preparation, how to think about your work, etc. Some great tips. But, for me, at least some of becoming productive has to do with not doing a lot of meta-thinking about my work. For instance, the more I think about a start time, how to start, etc., the more likely I am to just keep thinking about it vs doing something. The same is true for hitting the gym too. If I take time off for whatever reason and say, "I'm going to start again Monday" or similar, then I am less likely to do it. Instead, I have to just get up, put on my workout gear and go. In fact, it's like I have to do it as mindlessly as possible. There just seems to be something about planning, talking, and thinking about things that keeps me in a passive mode of inaction. I think that mode is decidedly "out of the zone". Also, along the lines of thinking too much, I read somewhere a while back that we spend too much time thinking about how we feel about things. The question posed was "what does that have to do with anything?", which struck me as very true. Sometimes things just are and we have to deal with it. That includes getting work done. I know that if I whine and complain to myself about not feeling like doing the work, it gives me license to slack off. So now I try to refrain from putting so much energy into thinking about how I feel and instead redirect that energy to just getting the work done. Not always easy, but a prerequisite for being productive at all, let alone approaching the zone.