Life of Matt

It’s the end of the workday.  You’ve been busy all day, your focus is gone, and you’re completely drained of energy.  You flop down on the couch and turn on the TV.  You’re completely useless, utterly drained from the days events.

Sound Familiar?  What if I told  you there was a way to avoid that?  What if there was a way to to stay energized throughout the day, come home, and still be able to work on your own projects? There is a way, and I call it the power of the recharge.

Most of us don’t give much thought to where our energy and attention comes from.  Like electricity, heat, and other invisible resources, we tend to take them for granted until suddenly we find ourselves without them.  As I’ve focused on my own productivity the past few months,  I’ve begun to realize what valuable resources they really are.  And not only are they valuable, they’re also renewable.

I began to realize that just like rechargable batteries, when I hooked my energy and attention into certain activities, it would recharge them, restoring them to near full capacity.  I’ve learned how to find recharge activities for myself, recognize them when I find the, and structure my day around them, making my energy and attention sustainable resources.

In this article, I hope to teach you how to do the same thing, and never become burnt out again.

But How Do I Recharge?

So hopefully I’ve convinced you that recharge periods are necessary if you’re truly serious about your time.  But that still leaves the question of how to actually recharge.  To truly embrace this concept, there’s two things you need to know.  Firstly, you need to know what your recharge activities are.  Secondly you need to know when to recharge.  I’ll start with finding your recharge activities.

Finding Your Recharge Activities

An interesting thing about recharging is that in order to recharge your energy and attention, you can’t just not use them… you have to use them, just in the right way.  Whe you’re burt out, you do activities such as TV watching, things that don’t require  either.  When you’re recharging, you’re doing things like exercising, meditating, or reading (my own examples). These are things that require energy and attention, but in such a way that they allow you to refocus and re-energize.

Truly knowing what your recharge activities are will take trial and error.  You’ll have to test different things out, and see if they reinvigorate you.  However, you can greatly reduce the amount of time spent looking for recharge activities by narrowing down the list to activities with certain traits.

Traits of a Recharge Activity

• It’s something you’re good at.
• It’s something you enjoy.
• It’s something which you can effortlessly focus on, without forcing yourself.
• It’s relaxing.
• It engages your mind (learning/thinking), body (exercise/stretching), heart (socializing/volunteering), or spirit (hiking/meditation).
• It requires very little initial start up time.

Obviously, recharge activities will vary depending on the person. What I can provide you with is a list of example recharge activites that me and my friends use, to get you started.

Examples of Recharge Activities

• Reading
• Conversation
• Meditation
• Structured Relaxation
• Walking
• Hiking
• Spending Time in Nature
• Writing
• Playing Hopscotch
• Drawing
• Painting
• Doing Nails/Hair
• Shooting Hoops
• Playing Catch
• Wrestling
• Dancing

Take five minutes, and using this list and the guidelines above, create your own list of 3-5 recharge activities.  Once you have some good activities, the next thing you need to know is when and how often to recharge.

Knowing When to Recharge

Knowing when to recharge is important as knowing how.  If you recharge too often, you end up spending more time recharging than working, and your recharge activities lose their power to recharge.  If you recharge too infrequently, you end up burning out or not operating at full capacity.  For short term planning of recharge activities, self-awareness is key.  For longer term planning, you need to factor in attention span, circadian rythms, and health.

Self-Awareness

In the short term, you need to get into the habit of knowing your own energy levels and available attention.  For instance, right now I can feel myself needing to put in extra effort to focus on my writing.  I know that if I continue to work for too long, I’ll burn out, and my recharge won’t be as effective.  Instead of just continuing to force myself to write, I’m going to set a time limit of ten more minutes, because based on where my attention is, that’s how much I can focus without burning out.

Similarly, if you’re doing something which requires lots of energy, rather than attention, you need to monitor how tired/worn out you feel, and use this to gauge when you’ll need to recharge.

In the longer term, it’s actually possible to predict how long you’ll be able to work before needing a recharge, and schedule your recharges long in advance.

Attention Span

One of the most basic ways to predict how long you can work without burning out is simply to measure it.  Pay attention to yourself, and see if you can figure out the average amount of time that you can focus your attention and energy.  This will your baseline for how long to work before recharging. From there, you can use the following variables to either add or subtract time to this baseline.

Health

Health refers to how well your body is functioning.  If it’s functioning better, you’ll have more attention and energy, and if it’s worse, you’ll have less.  This includes factors such as sleep, diet, physical condition, and illness.  If you got 2 hours of sleep last night, have a cold, ate pizza for breakfast, and haven’t gotten out of bed all day, your attention span could be cut in half or worse.  Likewise, if you got adequate sleep, ate a healthy meal when you woke up, and went for a short run, your attention span will be greatly increased.  By factoring in your health as your planning your recharge times, you can better predict what your attention span will be.

Circadian Rythms

Your body is never really in a constant state.  Throughout the day it is changing temperature, regulating the levels of different chemicals, and rationing out energy.  These daily patterns are known as circadian rhythms, and knowing your own circadian rhythms and how you respond to them is vital.  For instance, I know I’m not a morning person.  When I first wake up, my attention span is next to nothing.  Only when it gets to be around 10 oclock does my attention span reach normal levels. It stays pretty constant, but around 5:00 it begins to pick up, and I can be superfocused for long periods of time.  At around 9:00, my attention span rapidly drops off again.  Using this information, I can plan more frequent recharge periods during the early morning and night, and less frequent recharge periods in the afternoon.  Pay attention to your own circadian rythms, and plan accordingly.

Planning Your Day with a Recharge Mindset

After you’ve accepted that you need to recharge, and figured out how and when to recharge, the next step is to plan your day around the concept of recharging.

Find a daily calendar which gives you the entire day hour by hour.  Then before you think about what you’re going to do for the day, schedule in your recharge times.  Regardless of what you’re doing, you’ll still need your recharge times, scheduling them first is just a way of making sure you don’t cheat.

Next, between your recharge times, schedule the things that you need to get done that day.  This is the reverse of how most days are planned.  Usually, recharge times aren’t planned at all.  Instead, it’s work work work, then burnout without planning too.  Now, your day is scheduled as work recharge, work recharge, work recharge.

With this type of schedule, you end the day feeling relaxed and alert.  Nothing ever gets to be a chore, and you never “burn out”.  Instead of wasting time on activities like TV, that time is spent towards activities which truly invigorate you.  You’ll never look back again, and you too, will know how to harness the power of the recharge!

See Also:

Energy Management by Scott H. Young

Procrasination Hack (10+2) * 5 by Merlin Mann 

How to Boost Your Energy by Jonathan Mead