A Simple Experiment That Transformed the Way I Work.

Finding your rhythm in a world out of sync, part 2.

This is part two of my series, Finding Your Rhythm in a World Out of Sync. If you missed part one, you can find it here.

I considered calling this post, How I Overcame 40 Years of Writers’ Block. But that was too embarrassing and not all that inspiring.

How I built a sustainable writing practice is not the story. It’s more a happy by-product. The real story is how I transformed my work life from something depleting and burdensome, to something fulfilling, meaningful and energy-giving. 

I won’t lie, the process took a long time. Further, not all the changes I made were conscious ones. So, to share them with you, I have to do a form of reverse engineering.

I realized that fulfilling work was not just about the work I did. I already had a fulfilling career. It was also about how I did it. I had to make time for the work that mattered most to me. But I also had to find a rhythm and a way of doing it that supported my physical and mental well-being.

I had to stop measuring my worth based on the volume of tasks I could burn through in a day. I had to stop striving to cram more and more into less and less time. I had to let go of trying to “keep up” and that crushing sense that I was constantly falling behind.

I should say at the outset, I am not anti-productivity and I’m not allergic to hard work. The truth is, I love to be productive. Feeling productive is an essential aspect of my intrinsic motivation.

The problem occurs when productivity is conflated with efficiency, volume, and freneticism. When we behave as if everything is urgent and important. When the noise of constant interruptions makes it impossible to focus. Productivity is none of those things.

Productivity is making meaningful progress on the work that matters most.

But, while changing my beliefs was fundamental, most beliefs don’t change simply because you want them to. They change when they no longer line up with your experience. This finally began to happen when I made practical and concrete changes to the way I organized and performed my work.

In the coming weeks, I will share the strategies and simple practices that were most useful. 

But first, the piece of advice that made the biggest difference.

Give your best energy to your most important work.

I can’t tell you where I first heard this advice. It kept coming up in various forms and from various experts in everything from productivity, to deliberate practice, to what author, Cal Newport calls, Deep Work.

I decided to conduct a live experiment on a sample size of one, me. To run this experiment, I had to answer two questions.

1. What is my most important work?

2. When can I give it my best effort?

Was my most important work the work that paid me the most? Or the work I felt called to do? For me, the answer felt pretty clear. My most important work was writing. 

While my coaching and leadership development business was very important to me, it wasn’t the work that most called to me. I had already significantly scaled back both my coaching practice and my day-to-day involvement in the business.

It seemed like an ideal time to try a different way of working.

I wondered. If I shifted my writing to when I felt most alert and focused, would I finally be able to build a sustainable writing practice? And if I found an optimal time of day, how would that impact my ability to continue to run my coaching practice?

So, in the fall of 2019, I decided to conduct a one-year experiment. I declared writing to be my ONE BIG THING.

If you ever want your life to go sideways, make a bold declaration like that. Within a few months of making that commitment, two things happened. 

First, one of my colleagues had an accident and was unable to work for a time. On the heels of that, COVID 19 and its associated restrictions put our business in a short-term crisis. Like many organizations during that period, we had to change the way we delivered services to our clients overnight. Further, we wanted to find a way to stay connected and relevant to them as they dealt with considerable stresses in their own lives and organizations.

Just as my little experiment was getting underway, my day job needed much more of my time and attention.

My first instinct was to put the experiment and the writing off until “things settled down.” But that's what I'd been doing for years. 

I wondered, could I still do this? I decided to go ahead with the experiment. Afterall, what better time to completely reengineer your approach to work than in the middle of a global crisis?

So, in the winter of 2020, I separated my work into two simple categories – BIG THINGS and bits.

I was ruthless in where I drew the line. Despite owning a business that clearly needed all hands on deck, it would not rise to the level of BIG in my mind. Even though that work was both important and urgent, it was no longer my BIG THING. Not only would writing come first, it would get my best energy of the day.

For a deeper, and admittedly nerdier, dive into my BIG THING system, check out my post What’s Your BIG THING: How to get traction on what matters most.

Now that I was clear on my Big Thing, the question became,

What is my best energy and how do I find it?

When I talk about best energy, I’m combining two concepts related to how our bodies work – ultradian rhythms and chronotypes. In my previous post, I talked about ultradian rhythms which are natural peaks and troughs of energy that we cycle through during the day.  

Chronotypes are your natural tendencies and preferences for wakefulness and sleep driven by your genetics, your age, and other factors. The expressions early bird and night owl are the most common ways we talk about these preferences.

Clinical Psychologist and Sleep Specialist Dr. Michael Breus describes our different chronotypes based on sleep-wake patterns in animals. Apparently, we are either bears, wolves, lions, or dolphins. If you like quizzes, you can take his free chronotype quiz on his website. 

Unexpected Results.

As I began to experiment with writing at different times of day, I noticed two things.

First, my best and most prolific writing happened mid to late morning, which was different than I expected. I thought my best writing would come early morning before the day got underway. Second, two rounds of 90 minutes of intense writing seemed to be my limit. If I tried to do more, my focus and productivity plummeted. I adapted my schedule to give myself a consistent writing window of 2 to 4 hours in the morning.

The results were stunning.

Despite the fact that my workload in other areas of my life increased that year, I went from struggling to produce a few articles a year, to producing 90,000 words or the equivalent of a book-length manuscript. (Further, I’ve sustained this level of output despite taking summers off for the four years since.)

When I began to pay attention to my peak energy and organize my most important work around those peaks, the work was easier and took less time.

Perhaps most surprising, when my colleagues no longer needed as much of my time, the extra time available to me did not result in significantly more writing. I found that whether I blocked off two to four hours or a whole day, there was no discernible difference in the quality or quantity of writing I produced. 

The other surprising discovery was that by compressing “the bits” into afternoons, I was more productive with them too, even when they were most intense. I was less apt to waste time jumping from task to task, I had less time to obsess and stew over the small stuff, and I had less time to answer emails. The hilarious thing was that as the messages in my sent box went down, so did the messages in my inbox. And more important, nobody complained, nobody disowned me, and nobody died.

Like before, there were still things I wanted to do that didn't get done, but they were less important. By compressing the bits into shorter time windows, I gave them the time they deserved versus the time I had.

The power of working with, rather than against your body.

When I began to pay attention to my natural fluctuations in energy throughout the day, I was able to work with my body rather than against it. Putting well-being at the center of my relationship to work improved both my well-being and my performance. Putting performance first, actually diminished both.

I know that I am fortunate to have autonomy over my work schedule. You may not have the luxury of scheduling your most important work for your best energy.

Giving my best energy to my most important work was only part of the answer. I’ll share more in part three of my series Finding Your Rhythm in a World out of Sync.