A Healthy Person is a Productive Person
Why You Need to Practice Self Care to Be Productive
In November of 2017, I was pushing myself hard at work. Behind most of the time, working late and on weekends. I would work through lunch and sometimes not even eat.
At this point in time, I had stopped exercising altogether and I began to experience panic attacks in my cubicle. At the same time, work was consuming my dreams at night and I was losing more and more sleep.
In my attempts to get caught up, learn to do my job well, and continue to show how great I was at work something was happening. My body was responding to the stress and pressure I was experiencing. It was telling me one thing:
“You can’t keep this up.”
It was bad. I had allowed myself to get to a point in my physical health where I was no longer going to keep going. It was probably the beginning of a path towards a heart attack or stroke. And something had to change.
Today’s Work is Taking Tomorrow’s Health
If you Google “work/life balance” or “work and health” you will find dozens upon dozens of articles warning you about what I was experiencing. You will find stats that tell you terrible things about your chances of heart attack, stroke, and mental breakdown.
We have an epidemic in our work culture in the United States.
When we start to put work before life, we start to allow the important parts of our life to fall to the wayside. Our physical, emotional, and mental health start to decline. Relationships all around us start to crumble. And we our work product starts to decline even though we are working harder than ever before.
More and more in our world we are seeing people with greater anxiety, depression, exhaustion and turmoil in life. Even this morning I read and article about suicide rates increasing in the United States.
We need to do something about it! I needed to do something about it.
#20 Practice Self Care
While this may fall at the bottom of my productivity tools, it is probably one of the most important and most difficult tools to make changes in our work lives. And there was something I learned while implementing my productivity changes in the first few months.
No matter how many changes we make, we need to take care of ourselves.
Sure, there are a lot of things that increase anxiety, depression, stress in our world. However, most of us spend a third of our day working. And when that third of our day is the worst part of our lives, it takes a toll.
So, what does self care look like?
Self care is about being intentional with your entire being. In this case, it is about making sure you come first before work. And while our employers are telling us this is important, the message is not being edified in what they are asking of us.
We must take control of our own care. No one else will be able to do it for us.
How do we practice self care in our lives? After combing the internet for ways to take care of myself and to increase my productivity, I found a few things which seemed to keep coming up. All the experts and talking heads were saying the same things.
1. Start with the Night Before
Everyone says to have a good day, you need to start with the night before. And I have found this to be true about taking care of myself. It starts with planning our next day the night before. What is your morning going to be like? Are you going to workout or mediate in the morning? What are you going to take for lunch the next day?
You need to decide these things in advance. Because in the moment, we will sacrifice them for whatever we are doing at work. I started writing a list down in my journal so I could stick to it the next day. Every night before bed, I would write it down quickly and review it in the morning.
2. Create a Strong Morning Routine
I have shared this before, creating a morning routine will help you win. There is a lot to a morning routine though. It needs to be focused and relevant. For example, my morning routine feeds into the life-giving, creative nature of me.
If you wake up with your kids in the morning and have to get them out the door for school, you will need to make sure you aren’t setting a morning routine that neglects your duties. It may need to start earlier and be focused on you until the rest of your family wakes up.
3. Stick to Your Commitments
We must commit to taking care of ourselves at work. If you say you will eat lunch. Put it into your calendar. When it is lunchtime, walk away from your desk and eat lunch. If you are going to workout at lunch, do the same thing. If you don’t commit to it, you won’t do it.
Another way to commit is to have someone you trust at work keep you accountable. Give them a few ‘canned phrases’ to check in with you. I say canned phrases so you have given them good ways to keep you accountable without sounding like jerks. Sometimes it is a simple, “Hey, have you hit the gym yet?”
4. End Your Day On Time & Finish Well
This one was hard for me. Since I was always behind, I felt like I had to stay late and work at home after my kids went to bed. However, when I started forcing myself to end work on time, or at least within 30 minutes of the end of my day, I started seeing a huge improvement of my rest at night.
Decompress on the way home from work. Most of us commute. If you work from home, take fifteen minutes to walk off the stress of work. My commute isn’t always that relaxing on it’s own, so I will listen to a podcast, sermon, worship music or audiobook on the way home. It helps prepare me for my wife and kids.
5. Remember ‘Why’ You Work
This is probably the most important part of taking care of yourself. Remember “why” you are working is important. It isn’t only to make lots of money and keep getting promotions. It is to provide for your family and to have margin to enjoy your family.
Remember, we are productive to create margin. While work wants us to be productive to produce more. We are productive to create personal margin. This is why we want to be productive.
There is a lot more to self care of course. We need to eat right, exercise about 30 minutes a day, read books, spend time praying or meditating, etc. These are important for both ourselves and our work. Those things fall into the five ways to practice self care.
And I have found they tend to be more focused on very specific parts of who we are and what is needed for our lives.
Once, I started to take care of myself, I was able to be more efficient at work. My productivity started to rise, my stress started to drop, and I was getting more margin to leave on time or early!
Since November, my life has changed dramatically as I have put into practice 21 Productivity Tools to help me be more efficient and create more margin. Each tool has been outlined in a post during this time and can be found through this Medium Series:
I know I do not have all the answers, and during this journey of becoming more productive and creating more margin, I have learned some great tips from others.
What do you do for self care? How has it impacted your daily life and your work life? Share in the response below!
