Take rest seriously, but also take work seriously

This is the main premise of the book. Work when you're working, rest when you're resting. Be deliberate about how you spend your time, and don't let work blur into leisure or leisure blur into work, because that just leads to a constant background haze of anxiety. It leads to poor work because you're not fully invested, and it leads to poor rest because you're never really disconnecting from work.

This book makes the case for rest in service of productivity, but not the kind of cog-in-the-machine productivity we're used to hearing about. For those of us whose interests both within and outside of our careers tend towards the cerebral, the idea of instagrammable beach-time leisure might not always appeal. Or even when it does appeal, it quickly grows stale.

Rest is active / rest is a skill

I am not good at sitting still (mentally), and maybe you aren't either. But that doesn't mean you need to fill every waking minute with work or work-related thoughts in order to have meaning or stave off boredom. In fact, I'm guessing you're reading my blog because you have struggled with (or are currently experiencing) burnout caused by this need to stay in motion and our society's eagerness to channel that into work activities.

Rest emphasizes that the act of resting doesn't have to look like being a couch potato. In fact, it shouldn't look like that most of the time. Rest should look like getting outside and moving (exercising in whatever way makes you feel good, especially if it gets you in nature). Rest should look like reading a book or playing a game or making art, as long as it's not exactly what you do for work every day. The way this is described in the book is that rest is active and it's a skill. 

The importance of play

I've spent a good amount of time now in the "slow productivity" idea space. Podcasts, blogs, and books that focus on slowing down, on mindfulness, and on intentionality. Building Balance definitely falls into that category, since I'm not just giving you tips to be an efficient machine at work, but how to use your time more wisely so that you can find the time and space to pursue things that restore you and bring you deep fulfillment. 

Something I've heard with increasing frequency in this community is that work-life balance is a myth. That there's no such thing, and trying to achieve it just puts you in a brand new hamster wheel of your own devising. And I agree with that, to some degree, but I think that rejecting the idea of work-life balance misses the point.

Work is not separate from life. It's a part of it. But so is rest. So is play. The balance we try to achieve is not in work and life, but in the elements of life that give it meaning: work, play, and rest. And balance doesn't have to mean some rigid division of time: balance is dynamic.

Habits 5-10

• Simple trusted system: have context lists for different areas of life, and make sure you check them daily. Don't overcomplicate the system: pare down to the most essential.
• Organize: apply the inbox principle to everything else. Use your context lists and your inboxes appropriately. Have one designated place for everything (physical and digital) in your life, so you always know exactly where to look. (Note: I find that this combines naturally with the previous habit, and I tend to treat them as one and the same, but you may find the separation useful).
• Review: ZTD recommends a weekly review where you check in with how you are doing and set goals for the next week. I, personally, do a very quick daily (how did I do today, did I set appropriate goals, etc) and then a much longer monthly review (see this blog post for more detail on reviews).
• Simplify: pare down your goals and tasks to just the most essential ones (again, I find this sort of belongs with habits 5 and 6 in practice, but is a really useful thing to ask yourself during your review process of habit 7).
• Routine: create natural structure where you can. Find ways to make things automatic. I, personally, struggle with routine becoming boring and have learned that making it more mindful (a ritual instead of a routine) helps me feel more grounded and makes it easier to let go of things that aren't working for me.
• Find your passion: this one feels not at all like a habit to me, and I see it as the overarching why behind this entire process. We have limited time and energy, so why spend it on things that aren't enriching our lives in some way? Establishing healthy time habits can help us return to our passions, or just give us the space to discover them.

There is so much to learn from all the habits. I find, though, that habits 5-10 are the kind that take time to work your way into. I've iterated on versions of them many times over the years, and I would recommend that if you want to use this method, you really focus on getting so confident on habits 1-4 that they become second nature before you worry too much about the other habits. 

One of the biggest pitfalls of organizational programs is that--especially for people like me that love a good system--it's so easy to get distracted by the flashy parts and try to jump ahead and skip the essential (maybe a little boring) parts that actually make it all work. It doesn't really matter if you do a weekly or monthly review (habit 7, also a topic of a previous post) if you can't get your days under control. Focus on doing the work, freeing up space to allow for that higher-level structure. Give yourself at least a few months on the first four habits before you move on, and then when you find life creeping back in, narrow your focus again to the first four habits until your mind clears a little again.

Just like anything, Zen To Done is not a quick fix. It's not a one-and-done. But if you give it the time, it will guide you to cultivating the kind of simple, effective habits that you can keep returning to when life gets overwhelming.

I hope this review was helpful, and I'd love to hear from you. Have you read Zen To Done? Do you have any favorite tips or tricks from the book? Or maybe you're brand new to this -- try it out and let me know how it goes!

When it came down to it, I might have been able to find the space in my calendar each month for a couple of hours to write a post and send it out. But when I looked at my to-do list and had to make those hard choices about the things that absolutely needed to happen (including critical self-care like sleeping enough, exercising, and traveling to see my partner who was at the time living in another state), this blog always ended up on the chopping block. As much as I enjoy the meta-cognition of thinking about how to function in difficult times, sometimes it has to just be enough to do it.

I've done a lot of reflecting on the last year. My first year in my dream-job-in-training was rewarding in so many ways. I am more confident than ever in what my values are and how to ensure that my day-to-day work aligns with those values. But I'm also once again having to confront the fact that there are finite hours in a day, a week, a month... a life. And I have so many ways I want to fill that time.

Parkinson's Law and Growth Mindset

Another thing that has become extremely clear to me this year is Parkinson's law: work fills to expand the time you give it. This is a difficult thing for me, a historically perfectionistic person, to combat. There is always more to do. There are always ways to improve. And that's a wonderful thing! But it's difficult for me to find the stopping point. To say this is enough, for now. I have long struggled with the idea that less is more, at least when it comes to what I can contribute. My impulse is to give more, to push more, and to do it right now.

In my classroom, I push back against perfectionism with growth mindset. And that is an amazing first step to backing off of intense perfectionistic tendencies. It's good to reframe mistakes as opportunities for growth and improvement, rather than permanent, catastrophic, life-altering failures. But one of the struggles with growth mindset, once you're in it, is finding the right pace for growth. Sustainable growth requires periods of expansion balanced with periods of rest. It requires truly subscribing to the idea that sometimes, less really is more.

The future of Building Balance

I've done quite a lot of thinking over the summer about where I want to put my time and energy. And I'm not ready to let go of this work just yet. Instead, I want to pull back (intentionally, this time, not accidentally) from the burden of coming up with new monthly topics for this blog. I'm working on a longer-term project -- a semester-long course designed to help people cultivate their personal toolkit and establish habits and develop resources to find their balance in work cultures that are always asking for more -- and I want my energy to go toward that instead. 

So this fall, I will be switching temporarily to a review format for these posts. I'll present a few of the books, podcasts, and other media that have helped me develop my own systems, with a few of the highlights that make them resources I return to over and over again. The posts will be shorter, and there will be less of a call to action, but I do hope that sharing these sources of knowledge can help you all do some of your own exploration as I work in the background to develop this workshop.

And if you're interested in taking part in the workshop, stay tuned! I'll have more on that front this winter.

Take care everyone, and if you're feeling overwhelmed, remember that it's okay to step back for a little while from things you love but don't have the energy for. Find the places in your life where you could do a little less.

The famously overused quote (attributed to Socrates) the unexamined life is not worth living may sound dramatic, but there is much wisdom in this idea of self-examination. It can be easy to let life's demands pull you along a path until you no longer know where you are or how to get back. And this is not to say that the path itself is easy -- in fact, the harder the work, the greater the stress, the more likely it is that you will lose the forest for the trees, as they say. Intense focus on just surviving the expectations put in front of you can make it hard to remember why you started on this path in the first place.

This is where self assessments can come in handy, and if you're a person who resists labels don't stop reading just yet. I could write paragraphs on why things like the Myers Briggs and Enneagram resonate with me, but those are not the assessments I'm talking about here.

Studies have shown that writing about what you value can help you perform better on exams and other high-pressure performance situations. But it's more than just a quick productivity hack. Knowing what you value is essential to guiding your career and your life choices. It can help you identify if you're in the wrong place, or it can help you focus your energy on the parts of your job that truly motivate you.

Values assessments are easy to do. You can find a list of values online, write each on an index card, and then sort through the cards, making smaller and smaller piles until you have selected just six. That's right, you have to choose only six values that are the most important to you. It is this process of choosing that makes you think really hard about what matters the most. Hard decisions can reveal your true values, your true motivations.

If you don't feel like creating a stack of index cards, there are online values assessments as well. One that I've used before and found helpful can be found here.

Once you've selected your top values, the true work begins. This is not something I can tell you how to do. It's up to you at this point to think hard about what values you selected and to find ways to align your work (and your play and your rest) with those values. Not every moment of your life has to be peak value resonance, but you should think about how to make sure that the places you put the most of your energy are places that feel like they match your core values.

So go on. Start a journal, brainstorm in a word doc, get a blank sheet of paper you can throw away later. And just ask yourself: how do my daily choices match my values or not? And what can I do to make that fit better?

That's all for this month, but it's hardly a small task. Examining your life is a process that never ends. But this is at least a good place to start.

It turns out that the quality of the time you spend working is far more important than the quantity (those of you who have followed my blog for a while will not be surprised to hear me say this). When your hours are split up into many little pieces, this is known as time fragmentation.

Time Fragmentation
Our world -- whether we are in the middle of a move or not -- is full of distractions. Most of our technology is built to distract us from what we are doing so that we pay attention to it (social media is a great example of this, though there are many other examples). Distractions, like ad pop-ups, show up so frequently that it's amazing we get anything done at all. And this is not just an artifact of addictive phone apps -- our culture is one of urgency. When things arise, we feel we must address them immediately, and this pulls our attention away from whatever longer-timescale work we were doing. That can be email, social media, news alerts, or a coworker popping their head in to remind you about something.
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​Our time has become increasingly fragmented. The average "knowledge worker" spends more than 60% of the work week on electronic communication and internet search (according to a 2012 McKinsey study). And the biggest problem with time fragmentation is the way our brains respond to it. This is a concept called attention residue.

Attention Residue
The human brain is not actually an efficient multitasker, at least not when it comes to higher-order processes. It's very adept at regulating chemicals, making sure you continue breathing, and other "background tasks" while you use your critical thinking skills, but you cannot focus on two things at the same time.  I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that watching TV while you work is not going to make you more productive.

Unfortunately, the human brain is also not as good at task switching as we would like it to be. If you are interrupted in the middle of a task that requires some cognitive effort, your brain is scrambling to hold on to what you were doing before and your attention will not be fully on either task. This 2009 research paper goes into more detail about the psychological effects of attention residue on task completion, but the most important thing to note is that interruptions reduce performance on subsequent tasks.

So how do I fix this?
The goal is to get long, unbroken stretches of time to focus on your work. Here are a couple of ways you can try to reduce time fragmentation.

Keep a running list of distracting thoughts 
Put a notepad or piece of paper next to you while you work. Every time something pops into your head that you feel the urge to do (that is not what you are currently focusing on), just write it down. Get it out of your brain and on to the paper, so your mind doesn't feel the need to hang on to it. You can later sort that list using urgent-important matrices, and having a process for handling these distracting thoughts can help your brain let go.

Block off time in your schedule for focused work in chunks of at least an hour
If you work from home, turn off any ways for people to contact you. Close slack and email, turn your phone on silent, even disconnect from the internet if it's possible. If you have a private office, close your door. You can write a note to put on your door asking people to email you and letting them know when you'll be available again if you feel pressure to engage. An hour is not really a very long time to be unreachable, we're just so unused to doing it.

​This is all harder if you work in a shared office or open-plan office space. In those cases, see if you can either leave the office every so often to work in a coffee shop or other public space. Or have a quick conversation with your coworkers letting them know you will be putting in earphones and listening to white noise in order to focus, and that while you have your earphones in, you would like to not be interrupted. 

Put your phone in a drawer
If you find yourself checking your phone reflexively like I do, it can be really helpful just to put it somewhere you won't see it. The first few times, you will still go looking for it to distract yourself (I speak from experience), but those extra steps of having to remember what drawer you put it in and then open the drawer to get it out can be enough time to snap you out of the reflex and prevent the worst of the attention residue. Over time, you will stop reaching as often for your phone.

Use sound as a barrier
If you are easily distracted by noise from other offices or are likely to get pulled into conversations happening near you, try using music or some neutral sounds like ocean sounds, rainstorm soundtracks, and white noise to create an aural barrier. Be careful not to pick music that will distract you -- it needs to be something your brain will automatically filter out, rather than pay close attention to.

Focus in peace!
It takes a little bit of effort to reduce your time fragmentation and attention residue. Sometimes that effort includes conversations that might feel a little uncomfortable in our era of constant connectivity. It's easy to feel guilty for not being reachable every second of every day, but I think you'll find if you start by taking an hour for yourself each day, you'll find that the imagined crises that would pop up never materialize.

I hope these tips help you manage your time so that your attention isn't hanging on to too many things at once. Now that my focused work time is over, I'm going to go back to unpacking some boxes. Stay well!

Journaling is a form of mindfulness, and it doesn't have to take any particular form, be any particular length, or produce words that you would ever want to share with other people. I have struggled to establish a steady meditation practice, even using apps like Calm and Headspace, but the kind of mindfulness Rachael talks about is more all-encompassing. It's not (just) about sitting down for a structured 30 minutes to meditate, but more about how to incorporate mindfulness into everything you do, one small step at a time.

So I've begun to pause a few times a day and just jot down what I'm feeling, what's stressing me out, what I'm excited about, whatever is on my mind in that moment. If I can't quite pin down what's going on, which is often because there is just so much competing for my attention that I can't figure out which one is most important, then it really helps to ask myself a few questions.

Journaling, like meditating, has always been a tough habit for me to form. It's easy for me to use a planner or to write something that has a clear purpose in my day job, but regularly checking in with my own feelings in written format felt too daunting. So for this month, I thought it would be helpful to share some prompts I've used to make this process a little easier. I recommend taking some time periodically during your day to look at these prompts, pick whichever one sounds most interesting to you, and just jot down a few thoughts. It doesn't have to be clear or complete. It just has to be enough for you.

These three sets of prompts are focused around three scenarios: starting your day with intention, managing overwhelm thoughtfully, and closing out the work day with reflection.

Click on the images to get downloadable PDFs. I hope these help you when you're feeling like you need to pause and collect yourself. It only takes a minute to respond to one of these prompts, but it can change your whole day for the better.

It was around this time that I started using journaling to manage my life. I don’t mean the dear diary kind of journaling, but rather a method known as bullet journaling or dot journaling. This method is intended to help centralize your goals, tasks, and notes, and introduces a helpful element of mindfulness to the process. This month’s newsletter is not about journaling (though I highly recommend it), but what I realized through beginning to track my goals and reflect on the process of achieving them was crucial:

I was absolute garbage at setting goals.

What makes a good goal?
I’ll start with what makes a bad goal, because I was setting a lot of goals that had these characteristics:

1. goals that rely on someone else accomplishing their part
2. goals that are too large, broad, or vague
3. goals with overly-aspirational timelines
4. goals with no timelines at all

There are plenty of other ways a goal can go wrong, but these were the sorts of goals I realized were setting me up for not just inevitable failure, but lots of self-blame. I would make one of those mistakes listed above with about 80% of the goals I set for myself, and then they would linger, un-checked-off and filling me with dread and a deep sense of inadequacy. If I couldn’t even meet my own goals, then how was I supposed to jump through the external hoops required to graduate?

I eventually realized, thanks to thoughtful reflection on my journal, that the problem was not some internal flaw in my work ethic or capabilities, but a flaw in the method. I wasn’t setting SMART goals.