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Hello fellow creatives,
Happy start of a new week (whatever a week is now - sometimes it feels like a year)! I’m hoping that you’re finding joy, gratitude, or purpose wherever you can.
Last week I wrote to you about my schedule experiment in time blocking, which I started on April 15. If you missed it, you can read about my initial insights and how this time differs from my past (spoiler: less self-compassionate) experiences with time blocking here.
Here’s how I shifted my approach last week - the detailed schedule was starting to create more pressure than I wanted, for 2 main reasons:
- I was trying to do too much, usually too many different things in one day
- I wasn’t taking enough breaks that truly felt like breaks instead of just “that 10 minutes before I have to start doing something else”
The biggest telltale sign was how often I noticed myself holding my breath while working, which is one of my “pink flags”, the signs before the red flags of stress and burnout start to appear.
Ideally, having a schedule should create just enough pressure to be motivating, but as soon as it becomes stressful, there are diminishing returns to its helpfulness. Feeling rushed and switching tasks too much isn’t how I want work, live, or FEEL. It also isn’t effective.
How productivity makes us feel might initially seem unimportant because it’s more important to just kick out the jams and get it done, but it’s directly related to how well we work, and most importantly, what we want our entire lives to look and feel like.
Mid-week last week, I started to crave more slowness and less structure, but didn’t want to eliminate the structure entirely, of course. (Also, coinciding with the new moon in Taurus, my sun and moon sign, if you care about astrology.)
I realized that I hadn’t been taking my own advice of doubling all of my time blocks, so on Thursday, I expanded many of them and created more white spaces between activities. That meant that I didn’t get to everything, although those time blocks got rescheduled so that they still have a dedicated spot in the future, but I was being much more realistic about what could actually get done.
On Friday I hardly stuck to what I’d originally planned, both because I had a 2-hour burst of creative brainstorming energy that I had to capture in the morning, and because the heat of the afternoon killed my energy. I decided to shift a few tasks to Saturday, which I expected to stress me out, but working outside mad it feel more leisurely.
When I did my weekly review yesterday and created this week’s to-do list, I noticed that I had either completed or made good progress on all three of my big priorities for the week, in addition to the majority of things that I’d intended to accomplish during the week.
(Here’s a link to my weekly review worksheet, if you want to use my reflection questions.)
This week’s insights:
- Even when things don’t go as planned, I’m still more productive with this highly structured and intentional schedule. It’ll never be perfect, because I’m a human, not a machine, but creating dedicated spaces in my calendar for the important stuff means that I’m constructing my days in a meaningful way that honors my priorities.
- The experiment mindset helps me stay detached enough from my emotions about what I did and didn’t do so that I can withhold self-judgment. Test and change, as many times as needed!
- If there are things consistently not getting done, there’s usually a good reason involving one of a few things:
- Fear about the task or not knowing how to do it
- Not planning for it well enough or not setting up the right conditions
- That it’s actually not that important (a “should”). I try to notice trends in what isn’t working, such as: this one task keeps getting pushed to the future, or I always try to do X on Friday afternoons, but I’m usually too tired, so X should be a Monday task or a morning task (when I have more energy).
- I have to be more intentional about breaks. I don’t want to specifically schedule them, since I want to follow my energy cycles to take them when needed, but I might try specifying a certain number of breaks that I need to take per day, or a certain amount of time, and seeing how that affects me.
- In terms of energy depletion, my mindset about the work matters more than how much I’m working (to an extent, of course, I don’t want work to crowd out other important things). I’ve generally been working until later in the day than planned (7:30pm instead of 5:30/6pm), in order to get more done, but overall, I’m not feeling burdened by it. I’m being careful about overworking, because the exhaustion can creep up, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with working a little more if it doesn’t deplete my energy!
- It’s getting a little bit easier to give myself permission to fit fewer things into each day. I also might try dedicating certain days of the week to bigger chunks of time for certain activities, such as all of Tuesday morning for brainstorming.
The longer I do this, the more interesting it gets, and the more ideas I get about compassionate productivity, and tips on how you can put this into practice for yourself. I thought that I would just report my findings in a blog post, but I’m realizing that this idea of compassionate productivity is much more expansive and is turning into something bigger. I’m not sure what that is yet, but you’ll be the first to know!
What comes to mind when you hear the word “productivity”? How about “compassionate productivity”?
Stay well, my friends. As always, please feel free to reach out if you need support! I always love hearing from you.
Have a lovely week!
Rebecca
P.S. I’m doing another online concert of Brazilian music this Friday 5/1, to uplift our socially distanced spirits!
My housemate Diana Strong will be joining me on accordion again for a few tunes!
It'll be streaming live on my Facebook page, and is free to attend, but donations are welcome (details in the FB event page here).
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