I often beat myself up over “wasted” free-time. A long weekend, or mandatory vacation, is planned out to be filled with a mix of chores, social obligations, hobbies, and relaxation… but rarely do I manage to check off more than a handful of the smallest tasks. Which one’s get priority is even a confusing mess I can’t quite grasp; time just slips like sand through my fingers. Even when I have a pretty good idea of how much stuff I can fit into a certain amount of time, it always ends up short or long despite my index cards and to-do apps.
This struggle is amplified by comparing myself to others who manage to do so much more in the same amount of time (or less). But thanks to a year of weekly therapy on Talkspace, I’m learning just how disruptive that is for me and the reason why I have to stop…
I’m not governed by time, but energy.
Let that sink in for a second. Think about what it means.
When you plan things out, making a schedule or to-do list, you are fitting tasks into time-slots—eg: it took me X hrs to do this task last time, so I only need X hrs next time—but we rarely think about the circumstances of this time vs last. Was it the only thing on my list last time, so I was able to hunker down and concentrate? Was I juggling multiple things, thus it took longer than it should have? What was my headspace at the time, how did I sleep that week, was I sick or healthy… and ultimately, is there any documentation of that surrounding stuff or was it a checklist with things ticked off and then tossed in the trash after I finished? Hopefully you are starting to see why this paradigm shift can be a problem.
And as someone motivated by deadlines, this was extra mind-blowing because it seems contradictory. My thought in the past has always been that I work best under pressure/stress, so when I need to get things done, I tend to procrastinate until it qualifies as something with enough pressure/stress behind it to focus on. My priority system is basically broken, so I can only dig up energy from the reserves when something is labeled as an emergency. So, yes, I may be exhausted, and I’d rather be doing anything else, but if the project is actually due, I find a way to function despite running on fumes.
When something can wait? Well, I can’t convince my brain/body to dig into the reserves because the next emergency could be right around the corner; that’s what I need the energy for, not planning ahead.
This snowballs into situations where everything is an emergency and I’m only reacting to things as they come rather than planning how to handle everything, and welcome to my life. I’ve tried making fake deadlines to motivate myself, like setting early alarms to help wake me up in the morning, but only the last possible alarm can rip me out of bed and throw me into the shower (or in some cases, into my first meeting). If my brain smells a fake deadline, it hits snooze and waits for the real deal.
The most frustrating part about this discovery, and there are many, is trying to find where my energy gauge is and learn how to read it. Time is an easy enough thing to gauge… you watch a clock, set a timer/reminder, schedule things on a calendar, our entire productivity system is based on time. But, as fellow humans (I presume), you know there’s no dashboard in our body or mind with clearly designed icons saying “this is your energy gauge” or “here’s how X amount of energy translates to Y amount of work.” There’s only past experience to learn from, and my memory sucks… My partner and I have tried communicating our energy-levels based on the “spoons” analogy set up by Christine Miserandino, but even trying to decipher how many spoons I have on an average day has been a sticking point. If I put something off because I finish the workday with only one spoon left, that’s a huge deal if I began the day with a dozen to work with. However, if my daily budget is more like 3 or 4, then a single spoon might be a victory I need to leverage in order to get laundry done.
What tasks cost a certain number of spoons also varies wildly between people and situations. For me, a social engagement (especially in person or with physical contact) can make the entire day a bust; but long periods of isolation, like we’ve experienced in quarantine, can have a similar effect. So, while I’ve been super productive while working from home, the fact that my coworkers have left (or are leaving) the company means that meetings and tasks have become a grind. It makes estimating our sprints harder because the task may only take a couple hours, but if the grind of it eats half-a-day of my energy, well, something has to give—usually it isn’t work that gives, but my personal life. But that still affects work, whether they know it, like it or not.
The best strategy I’ve found so far is to monitor two things: rest and mood. Thanks to a couple Apple Watch and iOS apps, I can compare how well I’ve been sleeping, to what my mood looks and feels like; thus, helping me find a correlation between rest, mood, and energy.
Those meters of rest and mood have their own internal momentum, so an upward or downward trend is easier to continue on versus turning it around. But each functions a little differently than the other. When caught up on my sleep debt, for instance, I may only need 5-6 hours per night to feel rested and ready to tackle the day… but running on 5 hrs per night for more than a week means I wear myself out quickly. When that happens, I find myself only able to take short naps or super-long comas, both typically filled with anxiety dreams. Good sleep leads to more good sleep, bad to more bad. But like someone on medication, you feel better before the meds have finished; if you stop taking the pills just because you feel better, you get sick again.
Similarly, when I’m trending steady on an okay mood, I can get things done without a lot of distractions popping up and slowing me down. But when my mood has a disruption, I can’t do much to regain control. The analogy I like here is related to water, specifically waves.
Example: I wake up manic on Wednesday and my “mood” starts climbing up, up, and away; a wave has started in the ocean and it’s building momentum. I can hyper-focus on tasks, juggle a million things, feel super energetic… but can’t sleep Wednesday night, so things start to level off quickly; the wave is hitting its peak and cresting. Thursday night I’m tired, but still can’t sleep for long periods of time, so on Friday I’m drained; the top of the wave is curling over on itself. I don’t wake up until late Saturday, I have no energy when I finally pull myself out of bed feeling depressed and awful, nothing gets done; the wave is crashing into the water below it. That wave hitting the water generates smaller waves in its wake, there is foam blocking the waters clarity, until it washes up on the beach, it doesn’t fully level off.
From that view on the beach, I can look back out to sea and see what caused that wave, what the instigating event was, and how I managed it via self-care or if I leaned into it to get things done. Maybe I rode the wave like a surfer, letting it carry me away while I felt amazing, or maybe I was the gravity pulling on it from below, keeping it from becoming a tsunami. I can learn something in that moment, but when the next event happens, its easy to forget (in the moment) what worked and didn’t last time.
So I monitor my rest and mood and try to tuck it away someplace where I can zoom out to look at weeks or months at a time, so I have something that feels useful down the road.
The other factor in this, is that I feel a difference between personal tasks and shared ones. Working on personal projects, like a zine, takes a different type/amount of energy than a shared project, like chores around the house. Most of my personal projects help recharge my mood and rarely effect rest in a meaningful way (because they’re all indoor, static activities), but shared projects often do effect my rest and drain my mood, because they are more active by their nature. I’ve found some success at mitigating those factors by pairing shared projects with a podcast enjoy, but in general those projects rarely amount to a net gain whereas my personal projects rarely amount to a net loss. That makes it much easier to focus on selfish tasks, even though shared ones enable personal ones to go more smoothly (having a clean space, or feeling proud of a nice yard, etc).
The results of all this self-discovery has translated into a few important lessons for me above and beyond what’s written above. First, I know that Friday nights cannot be used for productivity; my brain is dead at the end of a work week and my physical energy is at its absolute lowest. I have to get off the computer and do something fun (pushing through guilt) in order to recover some of my empty mood meter. That means I’m usually up late on Friday nights and sleep late on Saturday to recover from the extra sleep debt I dug for myself. After that, I can better play the weekend by ear… if it was a long/rough week, I may need to do more for my mood or rest than otherwise planned, whereas if it was a good/lighter week, I can dig into something more taxing. It’s harder to plan things in advance, since everything is so immediately contextual, but I’ve always been bad at following through on plans anyway, so why not throw them to the wind?
I’m still figuring a lot of this out, but thinking about time differently has pulled a lot of anxiety and guilt out of my life. I no longer look at a calendar and wonder where all my time went, instead I gauge my rest and mood levels before judging how many spoons I can hold in a given day. After all, what’s in the past is behind me, and what’s ahead is out of my control; I can only do something here and now, in the moment. So that’s where I’m trying to focus my attention. Do what I can, and stop feeling guilty about what I can’t.
And maybe one day I’ll revisit my old thesis project (which was a productivity app), and retool it for people like me, who need a task management system based on what they can do vs what they can fit into a schedule.
