Focus on Today

Wanna know what I did this morning? 

Come on; I know you do. It's not like you're doing anything important, like work or something! 

Kidding. Just kidding. Seriously. 

I want to tell you what I did this morning because it's kind of a big deal. In the last two months, life has caught up with me. Like it does ever so often, there's been some shit glommed up in my fan. It is what it is, but the hardest part when life happens is maintaining a consistent and predictable routine, despite the chaos. Wouldn't it be nice to have a business that could and should keep on running even when you have to step off the treadmill?

I'm the kind of person who craves predictability and needs it desperately to function at a high level. I need peace, clarity, and basically boredom in many aspects of my life to allow creativity to fill the empty space. That creativity is what puts dinner on the table, keeps my bills paid, and my work fun and interesting. 

I protect that highly regarded peace and space fervently through dedicated blocks of time on my schedule for things like writing, content development, and designing new businesses or service offerings. I've not protected that space as much as I need to lately, and as a result, it's thrown me off. I lost my pace, and I need a consistent rhythm to produce something valuable. But the good thing is, I have at least three businesses designed to keep on running even when I'm not there.

And in times like these, I'm thankful that I had the foresight to design them that way. 

This morning at 9:30 am, I put my AirPods in my ears and turned on Taylor Swift for the first time in two months. Now, you may be thinking, so what? That's no big deal. But that, my friend, is where you're wrong. 

You see, I wrote the first draft of Fix This Next for Healthcare Providers in five weeks. Five weeks. Sixty thousand words, plus a workbook and all the supplemental content in approximately thirty-five days.—1,714.28 words per day to be exact. I did that by finding a pace, a rhythm, and being loyal to it. 

I did that by honing in on two albums with a relatively standard set of beats per minute (BPM). I know that may sound crazy, but in my determination to make it work, I discovered that there's a specific BPM range that keeps my brain focused and keeps me in the moment. It keeps me in my words. Add just the right amount of emotion and substance, and voila, I'm inspired. 

This morning, I turned on Taylor and went right back to the first chapter in my second book that I've written and rewritten now for the last six months. I made some changes, added a few things, and gained some clarity about how much more alike my Big Granny Sylvia and I are than I ever realized. 

I did it.

I found the pace, my BPM, and my words again. Let's all cross our fingers that I can do it again tomorrow and forget about everything that happened right after I finished writing this. But for today, I won't be too hard on myself. I'll give myself grace and tell myself that today, I did it. And when tomorrow comes, I'll try again, and hopefully, do it again. 

Until tomorrow, just focus on today. 

#kaseycompton #fixthisnextforhealthcare #fixthisnext #inspiration #createspace #businessdesigner #creativity #focusontoday