The respite of December has come and gone. February has rolled in. The sluggish start to the New Year has officially ended.
Time for business. work. meetings. Important Stuff.
I was fortunate to have a few weeks break in December. Unfortunately that feeling didn’t last particularly long. I’ve noticed recently that my work week no longer has the basic ebbs and flows it once did. Before, Fridays were quieter, and Mondays were about preparing the week. January was quiet, as was August. Now it’s all guns blazing throughout the year. With physical location no longer being a requirement, the pace of work has increased.
They say people once believed we would work only a few hours a day with the exponential growth of computing power. In fact, the opposite is true – humans are the weak link in the juggernaut of faster, better connected technology.
Now, I believe we can get better at what we do. I compare myself to only a few years ago, and my ability to process information and work efficiently has grown greatly. Yet for all the different project management skills, mental shortcuts or changes I’ve made, at some point we hit a limit where the human mind simply cannot do more.
Our brain has a finite amount of attention. We can try and cram more in, and perhaps we might succeed to some extent. But there is far too much information to cram, and at some point overwhelm hits. For me, I used to get as much done as I could in a working day. Some bizarre badge of pride. Look how great I am, because I managed to cram lots of meetings and reports written in a day. It was no wonder I went home each evening totally drained.
I am convinced that people who constantly go beyond their limits are miserable. Despite the amount they are doing, they feel guilty of not being able to do more. It doesn’t help them mentally that their focus is not on what they’ve achieved, rather it is on all the things that were not able to accomplish. They then spend their time focusing on how to find new ways to do more. When in reality they should be asking why they are doing these tasks in the first place.
Often we think that the human limit is time. After all, we only have 24 hours of the day. Time is a measured limit, and a universal concept too. Everyone knows time. We’re even programmed to use it as a reason too – ‘Oh I’d love to, but I just don’t have the time!’. Yet for most people, time isn’t really the issue. If time was really the only thing stopping me from writing a book (which I aimed to do!), I would not have wracked a couple of hundred hours between watching Youtube videos and my Playstation over the last year.
Instead, I think it is more helpful to look at this as how much energy we have. Imagine a well. It starts the day full. As we complete the tasks we have to do, the well slowly depletes. Our energy levels drop, until it is empty. Once this happens, little further activity can happen until it replenishes.
I like this metaphor because it can help us factor in different things. For example, if we have slept badly, our well has not fully replenished. Likewise, if we are doing lots of tasks we really hate, the well will deplete extremely rapidly. Most importantly though, there are tasks that actually give you energy. I’m not just talking about things like taking a nap or resting. Doing the activity we love can actually give us more energy than when we started. It’s for this reason we can hit ‘flow’ state, where we just keep on working on the task whilst the hours fly by.
So revisit your time. Look at what tasks are draining you. Do less of them. Find more tasks that give you energy. Focus on doing the things you enjoy. If you get it right, you’ll end up feeling limitless.
What activity can you do without limit?