Easy Like Sunday Morning: How To Focus More And Get Stuff Done
My life can be pretty hectic.
I work full time as head of content at Receptive, I’m building a content marketing agency (Contented) and at the same time trying to achieve that holy grail of 21st Century life — the perfect work-life balance.
There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done AND have time to chill out and relax. It’s not possible.
Something has to give.
A lot of people I know in a similar situation jump to the obvious conclusion. They simply decrease their time spent relaxing and increase their time spent working. Simple.
Only, that relaxation time is important. It stops us burning out. It rejuvenates and it heals. It’s pretty much essential.
So making the conscious decision to relax less. Well, that’s stupid. If you don’t think you need to regularly switch off from work you are, in the nicest way possible, stupid.
Because what happens if you don’t give yourself time to recuperate? You get tired, you get exhausted. You lose your will to work. Any work you do manage to do is laboured and takes longer and the results are questionable at best.
It’s stupid.
The other solution is to stop worrying. In other words? To relax.
If this seems irrational, then that’s because it is. I mean, here I am telling you that you’ll get more done if you just relax. Now who’s stupid, huh?
But here’s the thing. When you have a lot on your plate, it’s easy to work yourself up into a frenzy.
“Oh god I have so much to do today!”
“I’ll never get through this workload!”
“Why oh why can’t I be a little worm? They have easy lives!”
And when you do that, you’re asking for trouble.
Instead of focusing on getting one thing done at a time, one foot in front of the other, you try to do everything at once. You rush things. You forget things. And you end up getting nothing done at all.
The key is to realise that yeah, you do have a lot on, and yeah it might take a while, so let’s prioritise the most important things.
What needs to be done today?
What needs to be done by the end of the week?
What can be put off for the foreseeable future?
And once you have some sort of order you can start working your way through them.
Don’t worry about getting things done. Just get them done. Calm and collected. One at a time.
You’ll be amazed at how soon that to-do list starts to shrink.
So to paraphrase the immortal Lionel Ritchie:
Be easy. Be easy like Sunday morning.
PS. Please share this around with your overworked friends. You can follow me on Twitter @thismonkeytypes. I don’t bite.
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