+1 #868: On a Roll?

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. You know how I'm all about oscillating and recommend that we pretty much never work for longer than 90 minutes straight without at least a 10 to 15 minute break. Well, I just violated that principle twice today. Oops. I had some aggressive targets with getting ahead on these plus ones and plan to create a large quantum of time to focus. So I got to work and I got on a roll and I kept going and this is actually the 20th plus one I've written today. I hammered a big batch this morning when I went on an epic 3.75 hour deep work binge. Then I hammered another batch after the trail in another 3.1 hour deep work binge. Of course I did oscillate via my 1000 second countdown thing, but still I kind of broke my own rules on purpose. Now I rarely go that hard for that long, but I always have some of Lanny Basham's wisdom in mind when I choose to do so. As we've discussed, Lanny wrote with winning in mind. He's a gold medal winning rifle shooter. In his great book he tells a story about another world class shooter with whom he was training. I'm pretty sure it was before he won his gold and this guy was currently even better than Lanny. So they're training together. My recollection of the story goes like this. The plan is to shoot for X period of time, then take a break. Lanny does his regimen, the agreed upon time has elapsed, but his buddy just keeps on shooting and shooting and shooting and I think Lanny might have gotten some lunch and then came back. And then the guy finally stopped. Lanny asked him something along the lines of what was that all about? I thought we were stopping after X minutes. The guy says something along the lines of I was on a roll, I keep shooting when it's all flowing. I want to let that success pattern groove itself into my consciousness. So yeah, that's what I was thinking about as I got on a roll and kept shooting today. Important note, I would never personally do that past but my shutdown complete time for a couple reasons. First, my brain tends to be mush that late in the day, so I rarely try to do super challenging creative work then see the plus one on matching energy to task. And second, I'm not interested in going all manic on myself and then getting ungrounded by violating my family time and great sleep habits, etc. I'm all about diligently patiently and persistently showing up and doing silly things that unnecessarily expose me to burnout isn't that appealing to me anymore. So that's today's +1. Feeling inspired? Keep your micro 1000 second oscillations and consider hammering your creative shooting well past your normal stopping point. But do honor the old shutdown complete. Leave some in the tank for the next day and shoot again. Plus one plus one plus one.