Maybe no one else experiences this, but my life seems to run in cycles of varying levels of contentment and productivity. The majority of the time I feel like things are clicking along, life is in order, things that need to be done are getting done.

Recently, however, I have been in one of my periodic funks. The end of the day comes and I feel like I have had absolutely no spare time in the day, yet I look back over my day and I feel like I accomplished nothing. The scenario seems to be the more busy my life is, the less actually gets done. I have a few symptoms of my optimal lifle rhythm getting out of whack, and so I looked back over the past few weeks and, sure enough, my personal symptoms were there:

• No personal reading. Whenever I stop reading things for my own pleasure, my brain tends to decrease to startlingly low levels of creativity, energy, and motivation.
• Not a lot of time for writing. Usually this means I’m not blogging, but not always so. Although I have been writing my “How I Built a Church Website for Free” series, it is not the kind of writing that really energizes me in life and ministry. I just thought that the series might be helpful to some people. Apart from that, the blogging has been a little lax over the past few months.
• Lots of time on the computer. When I am spending lots of time on the computer, it’s usually a sign that I am in a funk. I think I am doing productive, helpful, or intellectually stimulating tasks while I’m on the computer, but in reality it just eats up time that I should use for doing other things.

When I am in one of these funks the house tends not to get cleaned, we eat out more, work is less exciting and more difficult to focus on, and I seem a bit distant to most people. I’m not sure what triggers these. Maybe nothing does. But I do know that the above three symptoms are signs that I’m in one of these funks. Usually committing myself to reading, writing, and shutting down the computer is enough to pull me out and move the rest of my life back in the right direction.

So that’s how I know I’m in a funk. What about you? How you do know when your life is getting off-track and needs a little bit of prodding to get back in line?