Disembarking From the Failboat

Sometimes we take a ride on the Failboat.

What’s the Failboat?

It’s when nothing you’re doing seems to go right.

Every step forward comes with two steps back.

You screw up everything you touch.

Or maybe it’s not you screwing it up. It’s the world conspiring against you.

Everyone around you is an idiot, and the software you’re trying to use was clearly designed by drunken monkeys, and it can’t do this simple obvious thing that’s like the most basic functionality you’d expect, and nobody’s answering the help chat, and you just spilled coffee on your lap, and that bird outside your window won’t shut up, and you dropped your phone in the toilet, and your computer crashed and you lost that important work document you forgot to save, and you just want to crawl back into bed, except your cat peed on your pillow.

You’re Not Alone

We’ve all had days like this. It’s not just you.

So how do you handle it?

You could just curl up into a ball and cry. That may be your natural inclination, but wallowing in misery only leads to more misery.

Or you could go the opposite route, and try to “tough it out.” You could buy into the super-achiever nonsense that you can simply will yourself into overcoming all your frustrations and sadness. But that’s a recipe for greatly magnifying your frustration.

Instead of either of these, you should seek out sensible techniques that will make it easier to dissipate your frustrations, and move forward in a better headspace.

Don’t drown yourself under the Failboat, and don’t try to punch the Failboat into submission. Find a gangplank to disembark the Failboat.

So what are those gangplanks off the Failboat? I’ll tell you what works for me.

Failboat Gangplank #1: Take a Break

The first thing I do is take a deep breath, and then take a break. 

I go for a short walk, just around my house. If I’m at work, I go to the bathroom. Even if I don’t need to use the bathroom, I’ll sit in the stall for a few minutes.

Well I’m doing this, I try not to think about whatever I’ve been failing at.

I know telling someone “Try not to think about X” is usually counterproductive, so let me rephrase that. I try to spend that time thinking about something I enjoy. Something I’m looking forward to, or a movie or book, or a vacation I took, or some other project. (As long as that other project hasn’t been frustrating me.)

Then, once I’ve taken a few minutes to catch my breath and clear my head, I’ll take a longer break, doing something that will hold my attention. Play a video or phone game. Read a book. Watch a YouTube video.

Self help gurus always bash social media. However this is an excellent use of it.

(But only if you’ve already curated your social media feed to remove upsetting stuff, arguments, and politics. I recommend doing that in general. But in this situation especially, you should only turn to social media if it will be fun and pleasant. Not if it will expose you to anger, fights, and opinions you find frustratingly stupid.)

Failboat Gangplank #2: Do Something Easy

Then, once I’ve taken that break, I’ll do some small productive task that I know I can succeed at. Wash the dishes, or straighten up a bit, or start some laundry. Or some minor and simple work-related tasks. Something I can complete (or at least make tangible, visible progress on) in 30 minutes or less, and I definitely won’t fail at.

These tasks aren’t necessarily fun or relaxing, but they do let me dissipate my frustrations. They let me navigate the Failboat into port.

I no longer feel like I’m failing at everything. I have a success under my belt, with some forward momentem.

Failboat Gangplank #3: Procrastinate if Possible

Here’s another time where you should do the opposite of what many self-help gurus say, because this is an excellent situation for procrastination.

I’ll ask myself if the things I’ve been failing at need to be done today. If not, I’ll punt them off to the next day.

Perhaps by the next day I’ll have come up with better approaches than what wasn’t working. At the very least, I’ll most likely be in a better state of mind, out of the Failboat mentality.

Sometimes this isn’t possible, if the issue is time-sensitive and needs to be handled right away.

Either way, when I come back to the issue, the next step is the same.

Failboat Gangplank #4: Reframe the Problem

I try to reframe the issue, to identify what exactly is the roadblock that has been causing my failure. And then instead of continuing to try to fight through that roadblock, I look for ways to do things differently so I can get around the roadblock.

By reframing things this way, it becomes a new question. One that I haven’t been failing at.

And then I don’t have all the baggage of my frustrating failure. Instead, there’s a sense of relief. I can bypass all that stuff that wasn’t working, through whatever alternative methodology I came up with. Maybe that alternative didn’t seem like the best plan yesterday. Maybe it involves starting over from scratch. But given all my failures, it’s a lot more appealing now.

A Recent Example

Here’s a recent example.

I use Mailchimp for the Self Helping Yourself newsletter. (By the way, if you haven’t already subscribed, you really should. I send weekly tips on easy ways to improve your life, not just from my own site, but from around the web.)

I was trying to set up a second list related to The Weight Loss Habit. But no matter what I did, I just couldn’t make Mailchimp work the way I wanted to.

It turned out my account wouldn’t let me have separate lists. Then I found out there was something called Audience Segments that might work the way I wanted to. But by then, I had already imported the e-mail addresses in the wrong way. When I tried to re-import them, it wouldn’t let me change them.

I tried many different things to set it up the way I wanted, but nothing would work. And I was getting more and more frustrated by my trip on the Failboat.

Eventually I took a break to walk around, and a longer break to check Facebook.

Then I washed some dishes.

Then for the rest of the day I worked on a completely different project – one that’s not very difficult, but is long and time-consuming. So the hours I put into it would result in visible progress.

The next day I came back to the mailing list problem.

It occurred to me that Mailchimp is one of ten or so interchangeable e-mail list services that are free up to a certain number of subscribers. (A threshold I was way under.) Instead of struggling to make Mailchimp work with separate lists for Self Helping Yourself and The Weight Loss Habit, it would be way easier to start over and pick an arbitrary different service to use for the Weight Loss Habit list.

So that’s what I did, and got everything set up in 20 minutes, after spending hours on the Failboat trip the previous day.

It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it worked.

Conclusion

Taking a ride on the Failboat is something that happens to all of us. Nobody’s perfect, and everyone has bad days. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.

But you need to remember that the more frustrated and overwhelmed you get, the harder everything will be. Once you get on the Failboat, it’s hard to disembark.

So the important thing is to find a way to stop the cycle of frustration.

And that’s where taking breaks, doing easy tasks, procrastinating, and looking at challenging tasks in a different way can help.

How about you? What do you do when you find yourself taking a ride on the Failboat?