I had a thought the other day while speaking with a client who had been pushing themselves too much:
“We can’t leave our body behind while we work.”
Rest needed
This client had not had a good night’s sleep in a week and was suffering from headaches regularly, but “the work had to get done”, they kept saying so what choice did they have?
I urged them to take a sick day. Let their body rest and catch up. To prepare for that we talked about delegating tasks, delaying tasks, and reaching out for help. Simply put, it’s just not possible to leave behind your body and any health issues to work on projects. They admitted that their output had dwindled significantly anyway.
Explore the landscape
The flow of your day is directly related to the energy that you have. We have to account for our full selves when approaching our day. Look at your calendar, what obligations and commitments have you got for the day? Now, look at your to-do list. How many of those things listed can you realistically accomplish today? Don’t think about what you have to do. Think about what you know you can do with the time, and, more importantly, the energy that you have.
Once you’ve explored the landscape of the day ahead, and figured out what you can and can’t do for the day, then you can start to reallocate and reassign things to future days, and make today more doable. With my client’s lower energy in mind, I asked them to consider which tasks take very little energy and effort, and we assigned them to days in the future that were heavy with commitments.
Future is the keyword there. It’s really important that you don’t just move all of these things to tomorrow. Especially if you’re recovering from health issues, you need to think beyond tomorrow because you likely won’t be feeling on top of the world that quickly!
