There are absolutely days when you have to admit to yourself that you just aren’t feeling it. The words aren’t jumping off your fingertips, the inspiration isn’t coming, and every sentence is a prison. When these moments happen, we must get to know when it’s time to take a break, and when it’s time to push past.

Fatigue is very real, dangerous, and not to be played with. Doing too much or stressing yourself out is like trying to walk on a broken leg. At some point, you are doing more damage than creating, and you are setting yourself up for a longer stint of ‘failure’. We get tired, we need breaks, and we don’t need to make excuses or beat ourselves up about it.

That being said, procrastination is also very real. In some cases, even more dangerous, at least to productivity. With some many distractions around us, it is easy to get caught up in social media feeds or YouTube spirals. You might even explain it away as market research. This is where the excuses start to trip us up, because -as we make these justifications- we make idling that much easier to fall into.

We need to take lessons from professional athletes and start treating our time like we are in training. Marathon runners don’t practice by always running marathons. There is a whole inventory of workouts that help them with pacing, stamina, footwork, etc. But they also don’t let themselves fall short. They push past the wall on race day to complete the run.

Sometimes our writing will go better than others. We should take notes, certainly, and constantly try to improve. Part of that knowledge is recognizing real fatigue vs procrastination and learning to break that wall, whether we are feeling it or not.