Before you can reduce something, you need to know what to reduce.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it ? Turns out it’s not always clear-cut.
After doing some experiments and training in feeling what things do to me, I found out some of my energy busters:
- interruptions
I like helping other people, especially if they come away happy with the help.
The problem is, that I don’t have infinite time. Therefore, helping them out takes away time from projects or other things I have to be doing.
This causes stress because it’s not possible to do both well. So I needed to choose between the two, causing one or the other or myself to be let down. - expectations
When I promise something, I go for it. Promises that I make to others (and myself) feel like tiny threads pulling me one way or another.
Have enough of these and I felt torn in all directions and none. - context switching
When I switch tasks, I need some time to get back into it. The more complex that task is, the more time it takes.
If I then get interrupted, it takes my attention away and I need to spend energy to regain the point I had before. - emails
When reading mails one after the other, I want to solved them asap. There are two problems with it:- It takes energy to get into the question.
- It takes time to solve the question, causing your backlog to grow.
- tasks that don’t give me energy
Sometimes, I have tasks I need to do but really don’t see the goal or feel that it’s something that stretches me too much.
I then tend to procrastinate. However, these tasks stay on the to-do list. Instead of a tiny thread, they become a big rope with a nice, heavy anchor attached to it.
Once I set myself down to do it, it’s quickly done (most of the time) but the energy spend procrastinating is already gone.
All of this combined, caused me to become border-line burned out.
This is part of my “40 days without stress” series. You can start from the beginning or go to the next part (What did I do before ?).
