Are you pushing too hard?

Do you have a time of day when you could cheerfully take a nap for half an hour?  I know I do - for me it’s between 2 and 4 in the afternoon - I really struggle to work and probably should move to a country that has siestas!  And yet I used to push myself every day to keep going, to work through it until I got a ‘second wind’, lasting usually from around 4pm for a few more hours.  I did this for year, until a few weeks ago.

My laptop, which is brilliant in nearly every way, has an annoying habit of overheating if switched on continuously for over 12 hours a day, every day (what a surprise!).  It just dies without any warning which can be particularly embarrassing if I’m on a Skype call with a client or in the middle of my online radio show.  When it dawned on me that I was perhaps expecting too much from it, I began to turn it off for a couple of hours in the afternoon and find myself something else to do while it was ‘resting’.  The results weren’t quite what I was expecting.

At first it felt as though I’d been disconnected from the outside world (no Twitter or emails, and no surfing either). I work from home so I did a few chores, but they didn’t take long.  What should I do for the rest of the time? 

So I got out some good old fashioned pen and paper and started planning a new product system I’d been thinking about for a while.  I'd become so used to typing everything (like this blog post), it was quite relaxing to just think, doodle and mindmap on paper and the time simply flew by.  I couldn’t believe how much I got done in a relatively short time period.  So I did it again the next day, and the day after that.....

Rather than pushing yourself to keep working through your daily energy dips - try relaxing and ‘switching off’ for a while.  You’ll be surprised how much more productive you become!