5 Guidelines To Make Your Best Work Easier
Experiments I've been running to not become a robot monkey
Now that my mental health has been good for a couple of months, I find myself with two key abilities for doing good work:
I am able to work flexibly, e.g. the past three days I’ve been exhausted in the afternoons and slept, but I’ve been able to work at night.
I am able to focus for a few hours, e.g. I write most small documents in one sitting. This includes these blogs, as well as isolated tasks for my day job in tech documentation.
Both these abilities have been key in helping me balance ambition and rest, and the last four weeks have been the most satisfying of this whole year.
While wrestling with writing every day of the week, I find myself falling into patterns that feel in flow and reduce friction. I’m able to make it easier as I go along. This is crucial if I want to enjoy my life.
We’re not bees nor ants nor robot monkeys.
We’re flesh-and-blood anxiety monkeys that have more to see and do than operate an assembly line of whatever labor we’ve deemed important. As I get older, I want to see and learn new things, not just write tech documentation all day.
Making work easier is mandatory to take back control of my time and spend it on shiny new things that keep my monkey brain satisfied.
Here are 5 guidelines I’ve been using to great effect (summary at the bottom):
1. Warm up with background noise to ease into work
Multi-tasking is a myth and I refuse to be swayed on this. Maybe when I was a teenager, it felt cool to flit between 6 things in the span of 20 minutes. As a thirty-year old, it is just annoying.
The only “multi-tasking” I do is half-listen to YouTube videos and my “show of the day” (Pro wrestling shows and Critical Role, which line up with my mornings).
But while I’m passively consuming these videos, my fingers are bored and itching to do something. So once I’m done with breakfast, I usually will sit down with my laptop to write something light. This includes things like my journal, mundane tasks from the day job, or the outline to a blog/fiction piece.
The semi-split attention helps me stay entertained with some input, while gently breaking through the resistance to create some output.
From there, I can go two ways. If I’m feeling warmed-up and inspired, and the output pulls me, I turn the show off and start deep work. Warming up first allows me to have more deep work sessions every week, improving overall productivity and output.
If I DON’T feel warmed-up and inspired, I focus back on the show in the background and stop working. I still got some of the mundane work done, and possibly got an outline for a document/blog. Often, that is good enough.
tl;dr Do mundane or light work with background music or a show to warm up, and turn it off when you’re ready to focus and do deep work.
2. Split the day with your workouts and breaks
I’ve tried aggressively scheduling my day and it doesn’t work for me. It becomes more a source of anxiety than productivity.
Instead, simply scheduling physical activity or rest and trusting myself to work is working way better for me.
This whole year I’ve been trying to split my day into sections. Earlier in the year, this meant:
Waking up late (anywhere from 8 to 11 AM).
(Slowly) working on day job stuff from 11 AM till 4 PM.
At 4 PM, work out (good day) or languish (bad day) or sleep (best day)
Post scheduled activity, enjoy my evening with whatever I wanted to do.
The 4PM slot was my only scheduled thing each day to help me manage the day better. This worked while I wasn’t creating the podcast and blog. Having the evening free was a big help for my depressed self.
Depression-free me is working on a day job, on Thorough and Unkempt, and on workouts, so my split day now looks like this:
Free morning (I’m waking up at ~6.30)
Light stuff till 12 PM - generally TxU stuff on Tuesdays and Fridays, day job on Mondays and Thursdays, and fun stuff on other days
12-2 PM, work out (or zone out on rest days).
2 PM, day job stuff
~7 PM, scheduled break
Evening, anything else - which might be work or play
tl;dr Schedule 1-2 slots of physical activity/rest instead of scheduling work. It’s easier to manage.
3. Remove work from your morning routine
I hate people who “eat the frog” at 4 AM or whatever ungodly hour they claim to wake up.
Like I said, I’m not a robot monkey and I don’t want to be.
My morning is for me to warm up to the day and enjoy myself — a novel concept, I know. This means making and enjoying breakfast, watching the show of the day, and playing with my cats.
I’ll work in the afternoon, and since I actively try to make my work easier, I’ll accomplish what is needed in 3-4 hours instead of 8.
4. Use The Pause to prime yourself to enjoy what you’re doing
“The Pause” is what I call the one second when you tighten your grip on a pen before signing your name. It is a quick reset you perform so that you can write your signature as consistently as possible.
Given it’s just a mental reset, you can use the pause for anything. My favourite way to use it daily is to hold my face for a few seconds, take a deep breath, and answer the question, “what am I about to do and why is it fun?”
I use it before each item in my split day.
I wrote a whole essay on the pause. Read it here.
5. Prioritize listening to your body over any guidelines.
Every time I’ve tried to make an experiment into a hard rule, I’ve failed. The simple fact is that our lives and needs are not static over time. We change as people, our priorities change, and our routines need to change accordingly.
The four guidelines I’ve outlined go out of the window if I’m not sure of myself. My workout break turns into a break break when I am fatigued and sore. My passive listening turns into active watching if the show of the day is really good.
At this point in my life, I trust myself to know when to work and when to pull back. I trust myself to want to meet my own ambitions, so I actively focus on rest and stability instead.
These guidelines might be completely different next year. But for thirty-year-old me, they’re yielding great results.
Summary
Making work easier is vital to maintaining my recently recovered mental health. These five guidelines help me do that:
Do shallow work with background noise, and deep work in silence.
Schedule your workout and breaks instead of micro-managing a calendar.
Enjoy your morning instead of killing yourself to be “productive”.
Before sitting down to work, spend a few seconds to prime yourself.
Prioritize assessing your situation over hard-set rules.