Your energy matters more than your time
If you absolutely had to get something done, would you prefer to have:
lots of time, but very little energy; or,
lots of energy, but very little time?
I’ve asked a lot of people that question this year, and almost universally people say they’d prefer to have lots of energy. Which makes sense; since energy is what gets things done, not time. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve got, if the only thing you do is sit on the couch in a lethargic daze and watch Netflix, you’re not going to achieve much of anything.
It is energy, not time, that gets things done.
Which brings me to the great bugbear I have with mainstream productivity advice; it’s almost always about time management. The productivity gurus espouse the value of applying discipline (there’s that word again, regular readers) to prioritising projects and tasks, working out what order they need to be delivered, estimating the time taken to complete each task and then filling your calendar for the rest of the week by blocking out time to perform each of the tasks in the required order.
Forgive me if this makes me sound like a dysfunctional human being (I don’t think I am) but that sounds more like instructions for self-torture than productivity advice to me!
I don’t know about yours, but my body and brain evolved to survive on the African savannah. My ancestors took long naps in the shade on hot afternoons. They leapt into action at a moments notice when a vulnerable and tasty antelope stepped into view. They spent hours outside, foraging for berries and working the soil with their hands to find tubers. They spent much of the day relaxing.
Anthropological research suggests that our hunter-gatherer ancestors spent three-to-five hours per day working (I have a reference for that), and as a creator I find that’s about the portion of 24 hours I can spend in deep productive work. I suspect they did not plan their days in 15 minute chunks, days and weeks in advance, and then hold rigidly to that structure (though to be honest I don’t have a reference for that 😂), and as a creator I find that I can’t do it either.
In my “emulate Peter Cook” phase I absolutely threw myself into the project of implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. I’m not saying I spent a week or two, either. I spent years committed to trying to make it work. I didn’t want to feel like a failure so I couldn’t stop trying, or admit to anyone else that I was struggling to adhere to the strategy. In fact, I spent years espousing the value of the process and telling other people they should do it too! (In the book’s defence, it unpacks some incredibly useful ideas; principally that your brain is an idea generation tool rather than an idea storage tool, and you should equip it as such. I’m still a fan of the book even if the system as a whole doesn’t suit me).
It’s probably only been in the last five years or so that I’ve been able to admit that the GTD methodology doesn’t work for me, and to accept that my failure to implement it properly doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me. Why should it? I’m evolved to thrive on the African savannah, not rigidly follow a time-management algorithm. (Equally, I think in most cases the characterisation of ADHD as “a disorder” is an absolute joke. Yes, people struggle to concentrate staring at a computer uninterrupted for hours at a time; and no, there’s nothing surprising about that! I’ve never gone to a psych to check but I suspect I sit at the shallow end of an attention spectrum of some kind).
My issue with GTD was not one of commitment. I put absolutely everything into implementing the strategy. The longer I spent following the plan, the less I seemed to achieve. As the years wore on I came to realise I was spending less and less time excited, enthused, and in flow.
Rigid time management devours my energy.
The insight that completely transformed my creative life is the understanding that rigid time management devours my energy.
With that profound realisation made, I immediately started launching experiments. I tried not using a calendar at all (that was a Fail). I tried never writing more than three things on a to-do list (a Success). I tried allowing myself to be distracted by unicycle practice whenever I felt like it (that was a grand Success). I tried weekly repeating work times (fail), I tried fortnightly repeating work times (partial success). I tried new methods of creation (like dictating into Otter, a success). I tried living my work-life to the metaphor of a drum-beat (that experiment is ongoing partial success, I’ll tell you about it in another essay soon).
My personal productivity system remains a work-in-progress. I suspect everyone’s is and always will be, since humans are not static beings. We grow and evolve over time, and what works today may not suit tomorrow.
What I can say, however, is that I feel so much better now about who I am and what I do than I used to. I no longer care to grade myself on my ability to adhere to rigid systems.
I haven’t given up on productivity. I love to create useful things. My attitude now is that one of my jobs is to create systems of personal productivity that generate energy. The more energetic I am, the more I do.
Today’s essay has been pretty deeply autobiographical. The point I’d like to illustrate with the story isn’t anything about me, however. It’s about you (or at least it might be, depending on your personal reaction to rigid time-management strategies).
I meet lots of incredibly intelligent, insightful, creative, imaginative, kind, warm, generous people who feel bad about themselves—soul-crushingly bad—because they struggle to chain themselves to a desk and work without interruption for hours and hours at a time. If that’s you, please let go of that outdated idea of the industrial complex. The universe doesn’t want or need you to sit at your desk for hours at a time. Get up, move around. Work in sprints. Work while walking. (Work while sprinting? Difficult but not impossible perhaps!)
Let go of whatever outdated notions you have about time management and ask yourself instead “what could I do that might light me up?”.
This week, come up with an experimental way of working that you suspect will lift your energy, and then give it a try.
Photo by kazuend on UnsplashFlowchart from David Allen’s Getting Things DoneApropos of nothing, here’s an incredibly good cryptic crossword clue:
“Uncontrollable emotion blowing up this year (8)”
(Scroll down for the answer if you can’t work it out).
Clue: “blow up” (IE, make an anagram of) “this year” to make a word that means “uncontrollable emotion”.
Still haven’t got it? That’s okay. It’s “hysteria”. What a great clue! Absolutely genius.