The Art of Ending a Bad Day Before It Gets Worse

What do you usually do when a day goes completely off track? 

I thought I had a quick blog post and a free afternoon ahead of me — but things took a very different turn…

A few days ago, I had one of those days.

I had decided not to spend too much time on a blog post — just a couple of hours — so I could go out and enjoy the beautiful weather in Bagheria.

Everything was going fine. I sat down at my laptop, and the thoughts started flowing… it almost felt like the post was writing itself. Those are always the best kind of posts.
It’s as if the reader can feel it when you’ve really had to struggle to write something. Ironically, those are often the hardest posts to read as well.

I was happy with how it turned out.

11:00 AM

The post was done!
That meant an afternoon walk to the beach, or maybe just a drink at the local bar. Either way, good enough. I was really looking forward to going outside and enjoying the day.

Just a quick half hour left to program the text into the blog…
I asked AI to generate the ready-to-go HTML code for me: copy, paste, done!

But no…

Something went wrong.

I thought: I’ll just feed the code back into AI and ask it to fix the error.

And then things got even worse.
AI didn’t understand me and only made the issue more complex.

Then I looked at my watch.

3:42 PM!

What??

The HTML problem had finally been solved.
But now I still had to manually add all the links, figure out the right labels, and so on…

At least another half hour, easily.

I probably don’t need to explain how incredibly irritated I was by that point.

That beautiful day was gone.
A walk to the beach wasn’t realistic anymore at that time of day anyway (it’s about an hour each way on foot — I don’t have a car).

I could still have gone to the bar; it was nearby and there were still a few hours of daylight left.

But honestly… did I still feel like it?

No.

On moments like that, I get so irritated that I might as well throw the rest of the day straight into the trash.

And that’s exactly what I do.

Then I think:

“Tomorrow is a new day.”

And that helps.

I take a shower (washing the frustration off 🤪), put on my pajamas, eat something nice, pour myself a glass of red wine to get a little drowsy, and go to bed.

The upside:
The next morning I wake up rested — and indeed, it’s a new day.
With new energy.

And then I think: wow, I feel so much better than I did yesterday! 😊

Photo: Samuel Regan-Asante