Improve, then Enjoy
Daily routine and mindset during career change and transition
I fully expected to have some aimlessness when I quit my teaching job in May.
Six-ish months later, I am not yet sure what I want to do for work next, but, I have a daily routine that centers around a simple approach that is really working for me in the meantime, while I explore!
"Improve, then Enjoy”
Forming habits is a great way to cut through inefficiency and a lack of motivation (Do I do X? For how long? How often?). If you just have a habit in place, none of these questions matter because you have a thing you do, at a certain frequency or time of day, for a particular duration — no need to think twice! Decision fatigue is alleviated and productivity improves.
So…why not apply the idea of establishing habits to create an entire daily routine? While this could be as detailed as “at 8 AM I always ____; and at 10 AM I ___” I have learned that my type-A personality can lead to tightening over time which can produce unncessesary anxiety.
So, instead, I tend to keep my daily routine a little looser and flexible, simply ensuring that whatever I do each day falls into one of the two buckets above: Improving or Enjoying. I also try to keep them in that order (That is, I improve, then enjoy).
This differentiation between improvement and enjoyment does a few things for me:
- encourages me to continue to strive and grow / apply a growth mindset, get grittier, or whatever you want to call it (improve)
- encourages me to tap into what is truly restful, re-energizing, and enjoyable for me, and to prioritize it at the same level as I do my work/improvement time (enjoy).
The order of the tasks encourages me to actually get shit done! It’s all good and well to get up and hop under my electric blankie with Harry Potter on my Kindle at 6 or 7 AM…but it turns out that by 9 AM, I feel gross and unproductive and that leads to a cascade of yucky feels all day long.
Conversely, I find that if I get up and use a combination of tools (a weekly plan and the things app, among others) to organize and prioritize my “improve” tasks for the day and then tick them off one by one, by the time I get through them I feel energized and accomplished. I also reach a commensurate level of cognitive and physical exhaustion and feel ready to enjoy and as though I deserve it more. This leads to less guilt and more true enjoyment during the second part of my day.
What about you? What strategies do you have to be productive, yet get the rest you need…to ultimatley get productive once again? How do you combat overwork and burnout? How do you rest and re-energize? If you like this kind of content, please “clap” so more people see it and so I know to write more of it!
