If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably just come back into work a bit bleary-eyed after a long weekend with the bank holiday. It’s a nice novelty, considering as a country we have one of the lowest amount of public holidays in the world. This is particularly the case if you’re in England and Wales, where we don’t have a public holiday for either St Andrews or St Patrick Days which are the case in Scotland and Northern Ireland respectively.
So whilst the break hopefully has allowed us all to reset, this is probably something we wouldn’t have done if it were any other week. We usually appreciate the feeling of having some time off, so this is a good moment to reflect: what if we could tap into bringing ourselves out of our work routines more often?
With the current pandemic, it sometimes can be hard to get away from everything going on in the world of work, and the news is often pretty bleak. Naturally this may be ebbing away from your motivation, and doing tasks just feels harder. For me it certainly doesn’t help that I don’t even know what day of the week it is! Unfortunately, I’m equally guilty of trying to solve this ‘issue’ by pushing myself to grind through our motivational-low. But do more reminders, alerts and notifications telling you what to do really solve the underlying problem?
So perhaps a new way of looking at it: if you are feeling demotivated, this is your body and mind trying to tell you something. Rather than treating this as a negative, take this that your own self is telling you that you need a break. And from experience – ignoring it won’t make it go away, it will rather compound it and make it worse.
So if you’re finding your hitting a brick wall, rather than trying to do more, try doing nothing. Turn off your laptop. Shut down Social Media. Disconnect yourself. Move away from the grind. This will help you gain some perspective, and a chance to recharge your batteries.
If you’re constantly grinding through anything day-in-day-out without a chance to pause, the meaning behind why we are doing these daily tasks falls away. We get more focused upon delivery as opposed to why we were doing the task in the first place. So try and take a moment away from work. Considering how long we go without a real break, this is likely to solve some of those motivational lows, and give you new perspective on what you are doing and why it is important.
Hopefully this bank holiday was a good chance to disconnect, but next time don’t feel obliged to have to wait till the next one (25th December!!) to have a break.