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Hello Friends,

After reading too many articles about how AI has lowered the barriers to writing code, I decided to do a small coding project.

The little experiment was born out of a frustrating hour spent on Amazon looking for visual timers. At the end of the hour, disappointed that most timers were either too expensive or poorly rated for reliability, I figured this would be a nice little AI-assisted coding project.

I powered up ChatGPT and asked it to give me instructions on how to create this app on my iPhone. After an hour of installing simulators, debugging errors and adding new features to the app, I ended up with a working prototype. Hurrah! I created my first app.

But I had originally switched on the computer to write this newsletter edition, and instead I spent a few hours playing with code and creating an app. This project stimulated and warmed up my thinking system. By the end of the two hours, I opened up my writing software to draft this edition.

Were the two hours frittered away on productive procrastination or did they give me the much-needed momentum boost to confront the blank page and finally start writing?

Today, we’ll explore how we can use productive procrastination as initiator energy to kickstart your ‘cold’ projects.

Enjoy the read!

Siri🌱🌀

Newton’s First Law of Motion

Time for a quick recap of high school physics, featuring Sir Isaac Newton’s famous Laws of Motion in today’s edition. Newton’s First Law of Motion states that

This law is written in perfectly coherent English and gives the illusion that it is really simple to understand. However, I must admit that watching this particular law in 'action' through this amazing YouTube Short brought it to life for me. (Yes, scrolling through YouTube is a secret guilty pleasure of mine!)

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I wrote the last edition of this newsletter on 3rd November, and as I write this edition on 15th November, my writing system is an ‘object at rest’. It has perhaps gone into deep rest as I try to get back into a full-fledged coaching schedule and bring my brain back from a lovely weekend in Wayanad.

As you have probably experienced, an object (or human) despises being woken up from deep sleep. So did my writing system. It stalled. I have been trying to write for the past week, but without much success.

Tapping Into the Power of Initiator Energy

Today (Saturday), I decided that this would be my sole focus. I fed myself a delicious meal and, with a cup of tea in hand, sat in front of my computer. I found myself unable to type a single word. I realised that my thinking system was also in deep sleep, and it needed to be woken up.

I figured that the best way to wake up my thinking muscle was to do something that had a clear end result, and I remembered my frustrations from the morning when I couldn’t find a good visual timer.

I booted up ChatGPT, followed some simple instructions, and in less than an hour I had a functional app with a perfect little timer. By then my brain cells were on fire. I added feature after feature, crashed the app, and then decided it was finally time to write my newsletter.

That coding project gave me initiator energy that was required to warm up my thinking and writing system to write this edition.

Was it terribly inefficient? I don’t know.

It takes me about two hours to write this newsletter, but I can’t do those two hours in one stretch. I usually need eight hours to generate two hours of real work. That’s the law of creating and producing anything. A human baby may take only a few hours to be born once it’s ready, but the gestation period is still nine months.

This is why you might have noticed that when you finally get down to doing a task you’ve been dreading for months, it often takes less than an hour or even just a few minutes to get it done. And on those days, everything clicks and you are incredibly productive. One thing leads to another, and you find yourself tackling several challenging tasks in a state of flow.

I use this with my clients in coaching sessions to identify leverage points that provide the initiator energy. Once the leverage point has clicked, the client is then able to make massive leaps and bounds on something they were certain they could never make progress on.

Here’s how you can tap into this in your own life.

Try this out, and let me know what you were able to accomplish with the power of initiator energy.

Siri’s Picks

This is a topic that author KC Davis touches upon briefly in her book, which I revisited last week after four years. I tend to procrastinate on folding clean clothes, which usually sit in a pile on the sofa.

One day, quite by accident, I discovered my initiator activity. I realised that I fold the entire pile almost immediately if I start by folding only the pants. Somehow, the act of folding the pants magically energises me to fold everything else. It doesn’t work in any other order!!! So for the last four years, that’s how I’ve kept my sofa free of that pile, by folding the pants first.

See you next Sunday! Bye for now.

Siri 🌱🌀

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