Is your self-isolation becoming like groundhog day?

In the US and Canada, according to a tradition, on February 2nd, when the groundhog emerges from hibernation, if it sees its shadow, it returns to its burrow for six weeks as a sunny day indicates a late spring, while a cloudy day would mean an early spring.

Groundhog day is the same day over and over again.

The term was made famous by the 1993 movie of the same name (Groundhog Day) starring Bill Murray.

In the movie, Bill Murray is a weatherman who gets stuck in a time loop and wakes up every morning on February 2nd – Groundhog Day. He tries everything but he can’t make out of the town or get on to the next day.

No matter what he does, he still wakes up in the same bed every morning to face the same day.

In a moment of despair, he turns to a couple of drunks at a bowling alley bar and askes them, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

Is that how you feel about your days?

You wake up each morning and do the same things over and over again. Nothing seems to progress and you feel like getting stuck in a time loop like the weatherman.

You want to find a way to get out of this loop.

You want to make your day count. You want to be productive. You want your work to matter.

Surprisingly your problem is your answer.

Productive people don’t have a magic wand, they have a routine they strictly follow. Their days are groundhog days. But they use the monotony to accomplish whatever they have set for themselves.

Going to work gives you a routine, that is the reason you are able to achieve more when you get out of your house and go to the workplace where you deliver output.

Working from home takes away that structure.

You need to bring that structure while working from home to be productive. You need to develop a daily routine.

Productive people have a repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure, and the chaos of the outside world. They have all identified what they want to spend their time on and they work for it no matter what. Whether their latest thing is universally rejected, ignored, or acclaimed, they know they’ll still get up tomorrow and do their work.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard

We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it.

It might seem like a stretch but the best thing we can do is to make our own version of Groundhog day.

We have no control over tomorrow and yesterday is gone, but today is in our grasp. We can do what we want to do, today.

Richmond Walker wrote in his daily meditation book Twenty-Four Hours a Day, “Any man can fight the battles of just one day… Let us, therefore, do our best to live but one day at a time.”

Photo by Abigail Lynn on Unsplash