Breathe before you need to

Most people don’t have the luxury (and it is a luxury) of doing only one thing at a time. In such an environment it’s also very easy for all your different projects (or tasks) to be on high priority all the time. After all, you run a tight ship and you’re trying to operate efficiently; “automate or delegate!” and so on.

Unfortunately, operating like this leads to one of two possible outcomes:

• if everything is always marked “Urgent”, effectively nothing is urgent and tasks begin to glob together into a big pile of “Work!”. Or,
• you really do work as if every task is the end of the world. It’s probably possible to operate like this for a little while, but eventually you’ll burn yourself out.

This doesn’t need to be your life.

Life’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Or, similarly, it’s a long swim and you need to make sure you make it to the other side.

While you’re swimming you usually breathe in, swim for three to five strokes then come up to breathe out, take the next breath and continue. You can chug along like this for a surprisingly long time before you get tired; you’re breathing in before you’re really “out of breath” and you’re not gasping for air at any point.

Thing is though, when you’re just starting out you’re nice and oxygenated so you can probably go for 7 strokes or even 9 strokes. That comes at a cost however, there’s no free lunch — Very quickly you’ll find that you’re panting and struggling to continue.

Pretty soon you’re struggling to paddle and you’re not getting very far. It’s at this point you decide to tread water and chill for a bit, or you cramp up and need to be rescued.

Heed your body’s wisdom

Dale Carnegie’s book “How to stop worrying and start living” has a similar idea in the chapter “how to add an extra hour to your day”. (You can read more here for a start)

He talks about how the heart can continue to pump blood every minute of every day for decades at a time because there’s actually a little rest period between beats. The actual numbers escape me now but it’s an astonishingly low ratio of work/rest that the heart maintains, much lower than you’d expect, and that’s how it’s able to maintain itself for so long.

It’s all about breathing. You breathe in and then you have to breathe out before you can breathe in again, there simply must be time to heal and rest between sessions if you’re going to go the distance. Try and schedule some “downtime” as part of your work schedule (for yourself or for your team), and then stick to it… even if you know you can continue working.

Your future self will thank you for it. :)