Photo by Meg Boulden on Unsplash
In the past four weeks I’ve been doing more public speaking then I’ve done in the last six months
On Monday I had another speaking engagement – my fourth this month. On Tuesday was the working group with our members (one of my main deliverables in my job). On Wednesday I gave the final push to a paper we’re launching at COP on the social aspects of circular economy. In practice, this meant mass reviewing 1000 revisions on track changes and comments to a semblance of a clean document.
Unsurprisingly by Thursday I was knackered. I remarked to one of my colleagues that this was one of the least productive days that I’ve had in months.
It was quite difficult to see that I had delivered far less than I had been in comparison to the week or even the days before. Suddenly very basic tasks that would probably actually only take me 30 minutes felt like an insurmountable task.
By the weekend, I felt quite drained and a bit guilty for not finalising everything I wanted.
It then occurred to me that last week I had to juggle travel, speaking, emails and project work. I even remembered remarking how I had basically done two days worth of work in an intense 3 hour period last Friday.
When I gave myself the grace to realise how much I had been pushing myself over the last two weeks, I could see that this was a natural cycle of energetic flow.
I’ve been noticing this phenomenon of post-stress work guilt. I’ve seen many colleagues and friends go through an intense period with high workloads and pressure. During these moments we often reflect that this is a short term thing, and that once the project is over we can finally relax. Unfortunately, when the quieter moment comes, we start to feel guilty that we are not doing enough. This means that our body doesn’t have time to recuperate the stressed energy that we used.
When we take a step back it can seem pretty obvious how self-defeating this is. If we are exerting ourselves beyond our normal limits, it’s completely natural that our capacity after the intense moments will be restricted. And yet rather than letting ourselves return to a rested state, we can instead push our way through more work out of a sense of loyalty or guilt. This leads to mediocre work, and a constant sense of tiredness.
I believe that we have learnt to be relentlessly consistent in our productivity. this sounds like a good thing to strive for, at least on paper. But the reality is that as humans, we aren’t built to work in this way.
In our contracted 40 hours work week, our metrics can tell us that we need a consistent level of productivity throughout these hours. Yet the reality is that we can have moments that are incredibly productive whilst in others moments that are anything but incredible.
There are two ways to tackle this. On the one hand we can look to be as consistent as possible by making sure that we have effective routines. And for many instances this can be very helpful, our ability to control our environment and the way that we live means that we can create the right conditions to succeed.
On the other hand, life is not perfectly consistent. We may have new challenges appear in front of us. We’ve often seen this during a time of intense project delivery, but we often forget about the additional strains that life outside the workplace can throw at us. Marital issues, illness or any other host of events can make us tap into our reserves.
The more that I am in tune with the rhythm of life, the more I feel in flow, no matter what I am feeling.
The biggest secret I have learned has been that the best way to deal with emotions is to not deal with them. By this I mean experiencing emotions without feeling the need to analyse or react to them. This is different to avoiding the emotions which just leaves them lingering under the surface.
So when we are looking at the question of productivity in our lives, it is helpful to reflect how we can be consistent in our routines, but also be flexible to the shifting enigma that is life.
The more that we can be comfortable with the idea that we do not have to be perfectly consistent the more that we will ultimately get done. The only thing that guilt does is serve to hold us back by making us feel bad about ourselves.
And my personal belief is that the only way to long term, consistent productivity is by being happy and motivated.