7-40 Challenge | Planning Week, Day 3
Yesterday I had plans. I was going to grab a cup of coffee, sit in the shop for a while, and think. Instead, I fell asleep for an hour and a half.
When I woke up, I was frustrated. I’d lost time. The thinking I wanted to do didn’t happen. The coffee didn’t happen. The afternoon was already sliding sideways.
But here’s the thing I had to sit with: any thinking I would have done would have been undercut by the fact that I still needed more sleep. My body made the call my brain wouldn’t.
I called Round 3 three days early. Not because I failed — I delivered everything on my lock list — but because I was running on fumes and I knew it. I could feel it in my writing. I can look back at certain posts from the last two weeks and tell you exactly which ones were written when I was sharp and which ones were written when I was just trying to get something across the finish line.
That’s not the standard I want.
Here’s what makes rest hard for me. It’s not that I think rest is weakness. I don’t. But inaction has a cost. Things don’t get done. Momentum stalls. And old habits — the ones I’ve spent 137 days replacing — don’t need much of an invitation to creep back in.
Rest feels like opening the door to backsliding.
I’ve spent most of my adult life in a corporate world where there’s always another thing to do, always another deliverable, always a reason to keep pushing. You get a limited number of weeks off, and you learn to treat downtime as something you earn in small doses, not something you build into the structure.
So even when I build flexibility into my own system — and I did, from Day 1 — using it still feels like I’m getting away with something.
But here’s what I know now that I didn’t fully feel five months ago: the most productive year of my life is going to require the most discipline about rest.
Not discipline about pushing harder. Discipline about stopping.
If I want to reach the people I’m trying to reach, if I want the writing to be sharp and the ideas to land, I can’t be the guy grinding out a blog post at 11 PM with nothing left in the tank. That’s not documentation. That’s just stubbornness.
So Round 4 is going to look different. Not in what I do — the seven habits aren’t changing — but in when I do them.
Bible study and BiblePictures365 go first thing in the morning. Walking happens before lunch, every day. Reading rides with the walk. Gratitude goes early, because starting the day grateful changes the shape of everything after it.
That leaves the afternoon and evening for creative work — writing, music, strategy — in shorter, cleaner windows. I’ll still be in the gym with Trey three nights a week from nine to ten. And after that, I’m done. No heavy thinking after the gym. No trying to squeeze one more thing out of a brain that’s already checked out for the night.
The goal isn’t to do less. It’s to stop pretending I can do everything at any hour and have it all come out at the same level.
I built this system to fight backsliding. Every habit, every streak, every daily post — all of it exists because I know what happens when I stop paying attention.
Now I have to trust that system enough to step back from it. That might be the hardest habit of all.
David Willis 