I wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who replied with encouragement and thoughts from my last two posts. If you missed either one, here’s what I’m testing out for the next couple months.
Themes for Thinkers: a short email at the beginning of the week with a prompt or nudge. A theme to focus your thoughts and get something on paper or journaling app. If you want to see last week’s click here.
Monthly Bullets: a quick list of great articles, podcasts, videos, and gear that I’ve been sorting through the past month. I want to help you sift through all the noise and go straight to the good stuff. Here’s February.
This week’s theme is about self-care and pace. This theme provides a balance to last week’s gung-ho message of going through the dip. Personally I fought like hell through the dip last week, only to fall sick (mostly due to exhaustion).
This month has been about carving away the non-essential to really focus on what matters. After New Year energy is gone and your body is rebelling against doing “all the things” – what will you choose to hold on to?
Recently I was able to have lunch with my friend Shawn Blanc. He’s one of those people that asks really insightful questions without probing. We were talking about the last few months (especially with my baby son) and he commented that it still sounded like I was doing A LOT.
It’s almost like the tired literally sank in after that, and I was sick the next two days. I saw how I was working at an unsustainable pace and not taking care of myself. I was worried I wouldn’t get everything done.
If this example resonates with an unsustainable pace in your life, take a few days to review what could change. Here’s what I do to re-assess when my pace is too much…
First is to make a list of little things that make me feel better. Journaling, reading, walking, ramen, and enough sleep are always winners. Next is to do as many of those things as I can every day of the week.
I’ll also make a corresponding list of things that don’t make me feel as great. In this cut I realized I was looking at my phone for two hours each day. So I removed Twitter and Instagram to drop my screen time under one hour.
Basically I’m asking myself “what are you holding on to that could be put down for a bit?” It’s a common struggle to have many commitments – but are all of them essential right now? Could something wait?
If you’ve spent the last few weeks thrashing through the dip, it’s time to rest and review. Take a week to really focus on what matters going in to the coming months and year. Could be that you keep going down the same path, but this time it would be with even more clarity.
Hope you have a great week, and if you have any thoughts on this theme reply to let me know!
Matt
Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash