Rushing around inspires me, and staying put can make me feel sleepy
This pattern has always been the same for me, and it is a challenging reality for a home-worker. When I’m busy with places to be and people to see, I have dozens of ideas pouring out of my brain faster than I can put pen to paper and capture them all. The best ones tend to come when I’m walking; the bottom of the rucksack I carried to my day job would be littered with tiny scraps of paper with half-formed inspirations, like seeds which could be lovingly nurtured to help them to grow into more.
There was just one problem — I didn’t have enough time to nurture them.
Conversely, when I have a whole day at home to put pen to paper with no distractions, the ideas seem to dry up by about 3pm. Whenever I worked from home in my previous corporate job, I always felt sleepy an hour or two after eating lunch. I’ve found myself in situations where I had a ton of time to write, but could never seem to get a whole day’s worth of work done without needing a snooze in the middle of the afternoon.
When I recently decided to leave fixed permanent employment in order to put more hours into my writing, freelance and full time, I knew right away that killing the ‘3pm slump’ would be something that I would need to focus on.
So far, it’s working. Ultimately it comes down to three things:
1. I’m dispensing with the idea that nothing good gets done before I take a shower
For a long time, I thought that getting drawn into work before getting properly dressed was a recipe for disaster no matter what, but I’ve since refined my view on this a little.
Don’t get me wrong; sitting in pajamas whilst cross-legged on the bed drinking a third cup of coffee past lunchtime is definitely not ideal (and I have most definitely been there). When I was a homeworker copywriting and marketing for a large corporation with colleagues based all around the globe, switching on the laptop before putting on my work clothes was dangerous. One conference call could easily become three, and a swift glance at emails could escalate to my IMs blowing up about a situation that had developed overnight. The next thing I knew, it was the middle of the day and I still had bed head.
Since freelancing full-time, I’ve found that a little bit of time sat at my laptop at the very beginning of the day has some merit after all. It’s a chance to set some goals for the day and get down any ideas that came to me overnight. I set a timer for half an hour, so that I don’t get accidentally drawn into work before I jump in the shower. Half an hour is plenty of time to write myself a few brief prompts that I can come back to once I’m washed, refreshed, properly dressed and ready to work.
2. I know that my best ideas come to me whilst on a journey — so I make an effort to get out and about
Once my start-of-day ideas find their way out of my brain and onto the page, it’s time for a shower before I sit down at the computer to write some more. Inevitably, late in the morning, there will be a sight productivity lull. I used to try to ignore this lull by taking my lunch break, but I’ve found that this only compounds the issue and makes me even sleepier once I have a full belly.
To avoid this, I take a short walk before lunch. I’ve found that having a mission and fixed end-point helps, even if it is something as simple as buying a pound of coffee. The pandemic obviously makes getting out and about less attractive and more difficult, so sometimes a brief neighborhood stroll in my mask will suffice. The important thing is to get a bit of fresh air before settling into the afternoon.
3. I’m learning to put off housework and ‘life-admin’
My impulse has always been to handle the least nice task the earliest in the day. Brian Tracy calls this ‘eating a frog’. The idea behind this strange idea (originally attributed to Mark Twain) is that the entire day is more enjoyable once an annoying looming task is out of the way.
I tend not to be someone who puts things off, and it doesn’t matter if that thing is studying for an exam or doing to vacuuming. Once I spot a task that needs to be completed, it’s difficult for me to focus on anything else. But this wasn’t working for my work-from-home rhythm — I needed to learn to put some things off until a little later.
It feels irresponsible to me in the moment, but I have to remind myself that it is exactly the opposite. I know that I get my strongest ideas early in the day, so I need to use the mornings to be creative, whereas laundry can easily be completed in the late afternoon. Whilst doing housework in the late afternoon might not be enjoyable, it’s mindless and easy, and so it makes perfect sense to save those kinds of tasks until later in the day when I’m not cognitively at my very best.
I’m a few weeks into my new rhythm, and so far I’m hopeful
I’m so happy to be wringing my productivity from each day than ever before. I’ve finally found the routine that I need to be in to avoid losing the last couple of hours of the work day at home to exhaustion and boredom.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
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