Category: Being Productive

A lot happens throughout the day.

And a lot of what happens isn’t given enough time to be fully processed, addressed, or resolved.

Taking 5-15 minutes at the end of your day to just sit and actively replay all of the happenings that unfolded can be an excellent strategy.

Maybe not to fully process, address, or resolve every single thing that comes / came up…

…But to at least plan it into your schedule or calendar to be addressed at the appropriate later time.

Because when tomorrow comes and a lot more happens throughout the day… guess what’s going to get pushed further into the background of your mind?

…You guessed it: everything you haven’t given enough time to either process, address, resolve—or schedule and later prioritize.

If you want to prevent that feeling of having “dropped the ball”—this active replaying is an excellent way to keep your eye on all of the balls that came your way throughout your day.

Sitting down to write today, I stared at my screen for around thirty minutes.

…Not a single word typed.

My mind wandered… thinking of people, chores, tasks… and seemed to keep coming back to a task I was dreading that I’d have to do later in the day.

Thirty minutes of thinking about it was enough.

So I reminded myself that, if I wanted to have different, higher quality outputs (in thinking), I needed to interrupt that pattern with new, fresh inputs.

So I read through a few pages of a few books and finished a few thought provoking emails…

And no sooner than when I read those last few words, the idea for this post popped to mind.

Sick of an output? Change the inputs.

When we exercise our body to fatigue, it takes less to get back to that point of fatigue if we do another set of the same exercise within a close enough timespan.

And even after we’re done with our workout, it can take anywhere between 24 – 72 hours before our body is fully recovered… which means we’re in a prolonged state of it requiring less to get us back to that point of fatigue.

This is how it is for mental fatigue as well.

If we push our minds to a point of complete mental fatigue, it’ll require less to get back to that point for at least a day thereafter. And the closer in proximity we are to that initial point of complete fatigue, the easier it’ll be to become re-fatigued.

The reason this is important to understand is because in life… we’re constantly getting hit with mentally fatiguing tasks, challenges, and experiences.

And if we’re not mindful of where we are on this Fatigue Threshold Spectrum… then we might not act in alignment with what our mind needs to perform optimally and most efficiently.

Just like the muscle group that we fatigued needs 24 – 72 hours of rest to fully recover… so, too, do the mental muscles we flexed to similar points. And if we don’t follow this protocol, then we’ll just hit fatigue quicker, using muscles that aren’t fully recovered, and only prolong our full recovery out further.

So either a) get in the habit of stopping at your 70% fatigue level so you can recover quicker or b) find ways you can give yourself more time to get back towards 0 after pushing yourself to 100%.

The more tired I am, the more easily I’m sucked into distraction.

The more easily I’m sucked into distraction, the more tired I get.

At some point, the cycle needs to be broken.

The cycle can be broken by getting more sleep (which makes it easier to avoid/resist distraction and then again get more sleep) or by further removing distraction (which makes it easier to get more sleep and then again further remove more distraction).

The problem is that most people have a really hard time making this up front investment.

They get to the end of their day and don’t want to go to bed early (because they just want to ‘relax and unwind’) so they allow for unnecessary and excessive distraction.

Or while they’re staring at the priority workload they have to complete, they succumb to the distractions instead because it’s easier and more pleasant to get a couple quick dopamine hits than trying to complete a daunting work load.

But once you make that initial upfront investment and deliberately make choices that lead to more sleep or allow you to focus on the priority tasks over the cheap dopamine hits… and the cycle is actually broken… what begins anew is a fresh cycle… an upward spiring cycle… one where more sleep leads to more willpower over distraction and/or less distraction leads to less struggle with sleep.

And THAT is where the real pleasure in life is found.

Inner Work Prompt: How can you break the tired and distracted cycle in your life?

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P.s. ICYMI you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week here.

Almost everything is made better when we slow down.

The quality of our work is made better when we slow down.

The comprehension of any learning material is better when we slow down.

The connection made with another person is stronger when we slow down.

The understanding of our inner world becomes more apparent when we slow down.

The presence we might feel when traveling is more pronounced when we slow down.

Which begs the question… why are we rushing all of time?

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P.s. ICYMI you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week here.

One of the most useful times of my day… is the time I spend sitting at my computer… staring at its blank screen… as I allow my mind to replay and settle from the recent happenings… and patiently wait…

Feeling bored to tears and drawn to distraction…

Until, slowly, slowly…

I feel the noise… quiet… and ideas start to shine… and imagination start to run… and creative connections start to form… and what’s important resurface… and the urge to do inner work and create gifts and share learnings and make meaningful contributions and take proactive initiatives increase in size…

One of the most useful times of my day… is when I’m not doing anything useful per se—in the sense of getting tasks done and checking things off my urgent to-do lists…

…It’s when I’m unobtrusively being and introspectively observing.

Two ways to better utilize the limited amount of energy you get each day:

1. Daisy chain tasks—physics says it’s easier to keep a body in motion than it is to start a stopped body… So, daisy chain tasks one to the next to the next so that you can keep momentum on your side and reduce the energy suck that comes from having to start back up after coming to a full stop.

2. That said, plug yourself back in strategically—we humans don’t recharge very well while our bodies are in motion. That happens best when we come to a full stop… like our phones when we plug them back into the wall. Sure, there’s coffee and other stimulants that we can take on the go, but nothing beats rest. Too many rest breaks, however, can mess with idea #1… and actually make rest a counterproductive effort to our day.

So the art, then, comes from figuring out how to optimize your tasks so that you’re daisy chaining everything together that can be daisy chained while mindfully making time for full stop rests.

…And not letting full stops turn into a counter productive daisy chain of full stopped tasks that last way longer than they’re supposed to (i.e. taking a power nap, which leads to social media scrolling, which leads to TV viewing, etc).

Ask yourself: where are the full stops in my day? Can I daisy chain tasks in their place instead? Can I combine my full stops into one strategic full stop that’s placed at my most needed time? And how can I make it easy to start back up after that full stop?