七、热身仪式(Warm-Up Rituals)

5.Warm Up Rituals
五、热身仪式

A warm up ritual is your per flight checklist you go through before you start focusing for a big session.It may be checking that you have water, that you don’t need to use the bathroom, that your phone is turned off or you’ve set yourself up to not be distracted by other people.
热身仪式是开始长时间专注前要完成的“起飞前检查清单”。可以是检查你准备了水，不需要去洗手间，手机已经关机，或者已经安排好自己不会被其他人打扰。

Warm up rituals are powerful because they also condition a certain mindset.Even beyond just how the ritual impacts your ability to focus, enacting the ritual primes you to start thinking about doing real work.
热身仪式很强大，因为他们也设置了特定的一种思维状态。甚至不仅限于仪式如何影响你的专注能力，实施仪式让你开始思考做真正的工作。

Inevitably, we all create warm up rituals, whether we think we are or not.It’s the little scripts in your head that say things like,“I can’t start work without my coffee,” or, “I check emails first before getting go work.”
无论是否意识到，我们都不可避免地创造着热身仪式。这是在你头脑中上演的小脚本，上面写着“没有咖啡我就无法开始工作”， 或者“开始工作前我要先查邮件”。

The key here is to optimize your warm up rituals so that they are maximally effective and don’t lead you into situations where they prevent you from focusing because conditions aren’t right.
这里的关键是优化你的热身仪式，使它们取得最大效果，而不是困为条件不满足，热身仪式反而阻碍了你的专注。

Here’s what you should do:
以下是你应该做的：

Is your ritual too demanding?You may want to lower the threshold for certain activities if those won’t always be present in order for you to work.Earlier this year,I noticed I was conditioning myself to only put in work on my book, if I went got a certain coffee shop, because it was my favorite place to write.However, sometimes I couldn’t go there, and so I might procrastinate in the intervening period. I realized I needed to recondition myself to start focus, even if I was at home.
1.你的仪式过于苛刻了吗？如果仪式的条件并不总能满足，也许你会想要降低特定活动的门槛，从而能够开始工作。今年早些时候，我留意到自己习惯了只有在去特定一家咖啡馆时才投入写书的工作，因为那是我写作时最喜欢的地方。但有时我去不了，在那段时间我可能就会拖延。我意识到需要让自己即使在家里也能重新适应专注。

Can you reorder the ritual?Email first may be a leisurely start to the day, but doing the hardest things first is likely more productive.Noticing when you’ve fallen into a comfortable, but suboptimal ritual, can help you fix the problem.Experiment with starting work right away, or working in chunks of time you’d normally dismiss as being too short to work.
2.你能重新安排仪式的顺序吗？先发邮件或许是一天悠闲的开始，但是先完成最困难的事可能更有效率。注意到陷入舒服，但未必是最佳仪式这点，有助于你解决问题。试着马上开始工作，或利用你通常不理会的因太短而无法工作的碎片时间做些事情。

Carry your ritual wherever you go.If your ritual involves certain thoughts or actions which aren’t tied deeply to a particular time, place or set of circumstances, you’ll have a lot more flexibility about when you can apply focus.Isolate parts of your existing warm up routine that you might be able to reinforce more strongly and detach from other circumstances.Sip of coffee?Closing your eyes for a few minutes to mediate?Maybe even just conditioning yourself to respond to saying"Do it now",in your head might be a more accessible ritual.
3.随身携带你的仪式。如果你的仪式包含与特定时间、地址或环境没有紧密关系的想法或行为，那么在何时开始专注上你将有更多灵活性。从已有的热身仪式中分离出一部分可以与其他环境分开并进一步加强的。喝一口咖啡？闭上眼睛冥想几分钟？或许甚至仅仅让自己在心里回答“现在就做”，会是更容易实现的仪式。

Test your assumptions.Part of the power of rituals is that they condition us to focus.However, this conditioned pattern of behavior can easily turn into a belief that those parts of the ritual are strictly necessary for focus (rather than merely being your current triggers).Therefore, you may want to experiment with different ways of working that violate your current ritual in order to establish new ones.
4.测试你的假设。仪式的强大部分是培养我们的专注。然而，这个习惯的行为模式很容易变成一种信念，即认为仪式的这些部分是专注所严格必需的（而非仅仅是你当前的触发器）。因此，你也许会想要尝试与现有仪式不同的其他工作方式，以建立起新的仪式。

Rituals exist whether we want them to or not.The power of thinking about your focusing ritual is to avoid maladaptive designs, which prevent you from focusing if in important situations, or places where you have encoded procrastination for too long.Used properly, however, a ritual can be a powerful trigger to start important focus when you need it.
无论我们是否想要，仪式都是存在的。思考你的专注仪式是为了避免不好的设计，在长期陷入拖延的重要情境或地点，不好的仪式设计可能阻碍你的专注。但如果使用得当，仪式也是在需要的时候开始专注的强大触发器。