Get More Done by Using Your Natural Rhythms – Part One

When you understand your personal rhythms and work with them, you’ll have  more energy and a better mood all day long.

Who doesn’t feel they have too much to do, and too little time to accomplish it all?  We all do.  While there is a certain reality to this feeling, it is also a self-imposed mood trap, one in which we can too easily end up in a negative cycle of feeling bad about not getting enough done, and then, ironically, not getting enough done because we feel bad. So how can you personally break free from the cycle?

Breaking the Cycle

There are four key factors that constitute your personal rhythm:

• The times of the day that are most productive for you
• Your personal priorities
• The kind of work or tasks that you enjoy the most
• The environment or surroundings in which you do your best work

Serious problems in productivity and mood arise when you go ‘against the grain’ and arrange your schedule so you are doing things at times that are out of sync with your rhythm.

Siesta or Brainstorm Time?

We all have our slow periods during the day, but we have other times during the day when it seems we can get an hour’s worth of work done in 10 minutes.  Are you a morning person or a night person?  Or perhaps you do your best work in the early afternoon?  Somewhere along the line you’ve probably noticed that you think most clearly at one or two of these times, are okay for many other hours, and are a real zombie at least one time during the day.

How does this help you? Once you can identify and understand your peak and slow periods, you can fit your tasks to these times. Of course it’s best to use peak performance times for demanding and critical tasks.

Be mindful of what you do and when

For many people, the zombie (least efficient) period of the day is post lunch.  In fact, there are sleep rhythm and biological reasons behind this.  Many cultures institute the siesta or early afternoon rest for just this reason – they don’t fight the early afternoon drowsiness, but instead work with it to energize themselves for the 2nd half of the day.

Short List Your Priorities

It’s a false sense of accomplishment indeed when you feel good about finishing tasks that really aren’t that important to you, and, in the process, leave the important ones undone.  This can sap your energy, since  the undone high priority tasks are sitting there in the back of your mind. As a result, you end up  feeling bad that they aren’t done.

To combat this, be very clear on your priorities and each day have only 2 or 3 critical “top ‘o the list” priorities.

Do this by prioritizing on several levels.   Keep a longer term list of your ‘big’ priorities in life this year – for many of us these might include loving and supporting our family and friends, excelling at work, and having high integrity.   Then, once every week or two, keep a list of your medium priorities – the tasks you rate highly for the next week or two.  And, every day, be clear on your priorities for that day.  These often times might be mundane but essential tasks.

Part 2 of this post presents  two more key ‘Natural Rhythms’  rules.