Filling In the Blanks

Another title for today’s entry could be “Cramming It All In”. As I get ready for the week I feel like I have an opportunity to fine tune how I try and get things done. Monday morning is a fresh start and if I’m lucky, have had some time to unwind over the weekend, which really helps to approach Monday with a clear head and fresh thinking. I wasn’t able to unplug Sunday for the first time this year, however did get a solid night’s rest and feel more refreshed this morning than I was expecting to feel!

Lately, I’ve been battling a tendency to fill in any and all free time with getting things done. By free time I mean the time I have available outside of my primary work responsibilities. I seem to have an overwhelming urge to fill any free time I have with doing something. I have difficulty not scheduling things to do within that free time, however limited it may be at any given time. It’s been very difficult for me to just roll with it and do whatever I feel like doing with that time at the moment that time becomes available to me.

This battle creates a tension between easing off and pressing forward. My tendency is to press forward and try and get more and more done in shorter periods of time. Some recent reading I’ve been doing, combined with some experimentation is convincing me, slowly, that taking breaks, especially from mind intensive activities, actually increases, rather than decreases productivity. Giving myself mental breaks from time to time makes me more efficient and effective over the long haul.

I tend to know this and have seen evidence of it when I’ve allowed myself the opportunity to take these mental breaks. I find that allowing myself to do this gets much more difficult as the demands of the week begin to accelerate into a full on sprint.

So I’m glad to have a few minutes this Monday morning to at least put this out there. I don’t immediately have a solution to striking a better balance between filling in the blanks and allowing myself a better mental break rhythm. I do find that writing about it before planning out the week makes me concious of the fact that now’s a good time to start thinking about putting a better balance in place. I hope that by writing about it at the start of the week helps me set the tone for the week, which in turn may be a step in the right direction to stop feeling the overwhelming need to fill in the blanks.