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They say that one of the most important things in swimming is learning to breathe correctly.  In a sport that is ultimately based on streamlining and moving yourself as efficiently as possible, the extra drag that is created every time you take a breath can be the difference between winning and losing a close race.

However, if you don’t take breaths often enough, you won’t be feeding your muscles and body the oxygen that it requires to be as efficient as possible, in which case you may be as streamlined as possible, but your engine won’t be functioning efficiently.  (Or you’ll just drown and die.  And also lose the race.)

 

(It’s a metaphor)

 

When technology first started to improve our efficiency, it allowed us to shift our focus to spending more time in leisure and with friends and family (formerly only the privilege of royalty).  However, as time has progressed, our focus has slowly drifted away from the notion of technology enabling us to do less, to enabling us to take on ever-increasing amounts of work.

These days, the increasing emphasis placed upon productivity is reaching epidemic levels.  This is in part due to the fact that productivity and efficiency have become ingrained in the fabric of the modern working world.  Operating at the subconscious level, most of us aren’t even aware of how much pressure we put on ourselves to produce.

I am by no means suggesting that being productive and efficient are bad things, all else considered equal.  But when an emphasis and priority are placed on these two concepts to the exclusion or detriment of the rest of our lives, things start to fall apart.  You need look no further than places like Japan’s working culture and our more demanding professional careers like lawyers and doctors to see that efficiency and productivity without balance are detrimental in the long run.  (see my friend Michi’s blog for an insider’s perspective on Japanese working culture).

Recognizing the importance of balance is one thing, but understanding how to actually affect changes in your life that allow for it is another altogether.  Many of us get caught up in feedback loops that lead to a lack of balance simply because we don’t know any better.  All we know is that working hard got us to where we are, so presumably working even harder will take us even further.

But we know that this approach is fallacious in swimming, and so too is it in life.  So what should you do?  Simple:

 

Stop.  Breathe.  Repeat.

Literally.  Just breathe.  Don’t think about what to do next.  Don’t think about what you aren’t doing while you’re taking time out to breathe.  Don’t think about your deadlines, or what you need to do next, or where you’re going to be tomorrow.

Just breathe.  Physically.

Put down what you’re doing, close your laptop, put your phone on vibrate, and just breathe for five minutes.

It’s not a huge commitment – but it is a commitment.  Five minutes may feel like eternity to you if you’re not used to taking time out from your own productivity.  Commit to those five minutes (set a timer if you need to), and turn your focus toward breathing.

You need to make sure that you’re kicking and stroking with your arms as you swim, but you also need to actively increase your drag (temporarily) so that you can take the time to provide your body with the nourishment that it requires.

 

Practicing What I Preach

 

I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.  It’s easy to tangled up by all of the strings pulling at me, and if I’m not careful, I can find myself with days that are booked up from 9 in the morning to 9 at night.  This does not leave much time for reflection or relaxation, let alone spending time with my wife.

I find it especially challenging to maintain balance when I have multiple projects or commitments demanding my time, as they are not always willing to play nice, and the only commonality between them is myself.  This kind of situation makes breathing that much more important.

When things are really busy, it’s all I can do to try to follow my own advice.  Bring up my head and breathe.  Take a look around, see what the rest of the world is doing, and get a handle on what I’m currently undertaking.

The reason that granting yourself moments of breathing and clarity is so valuable is that when our heads are down, we’re unable to get a feel for what we actually have on the go.  Our attention is focused on the immediate task at hand.  Every intrusion feels overwhelming and like a whole new emergency requiring our attention, regardless of what the distraction may be (Eg, e-mail, a new piece of reading, a meeting request, a phone call, etc.).  All we can tell is that it is not what we are currently focused on, it is another thing to be added to our plate, and good grief, don’t we have enough stuff on our plate already?

 

Lift your head up and breathe

 

Find time to pull yourself up from what you are currently focused on and assess what you’ve got on the go.  What are the things that are currently demanding your attention?  What are your immediate priorities?  What do you need to do, but can be left until later?  (If you’re having trouble figuring it out, a braindump may be a good way to go).

I generally find that most people prefer not to seek the answers to the questions I’ve asked above — they’re worried that knowing will only add to their stress.  The reality is that there are few things that generate as much fear and anxiety as the unknown.  If you know what the demands on your time are, you can at least take active steps to prioritize what needs to be done, and alert the appropriate people if a deadline is going to slip.

Awareness will free you from the burden of knowing only that you have an undefined number of other things you need to do.  (This is a common concept in GTD, and much of the methodology is based around addressing the open loops that are tugging at your mind, thereby freeing it up to focus).

You’ll be amazed at the relief and clarity that can be brought by the simple action of taking ten minutes out to assess where you stand and what needs to be done.  I can attest that I am regularly surprised whenever I conduct this exercise, generally discovering that I actually have a lot less that needs to be dealt with immediately than it felt like I did ten minutes ago.

Above all, try to remember that the way that you feel about the demands on your time does not necessarily reflect reality.

 

The larger context

 

In the larger context, making the time to take a deep breath is analogous to making time to perform weekly reviews, or setting aside time during your day to meditate.  Both of these activities simply represent other ways to pull your head up and assess where you stand and where you’re going.

If these suggestions sound simple, that’s good.  Life doesn’t need to be as complicated as we make it.  Taking steps to simplify your life may be exactly what you need.

 

TLDR

 

As always, here’s the summary of the keypoints:

• While taking time to stop what you’re doing may cost a little in the short term, it will benefit you greatly in the long
  • (Remember, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re swimming if you’re dead)
• The unknown will generate more stress than anything else.  Taking stock of where you are and what demands are on your time will give you clarity and relax you
• Learning the skill of retreating to centre yourself (this is what we’ve been talking about) will continue to serve you as you get better at it
  • Meditation, weekly reviews, and other techniques are all just different implementations of this simple concept

School started proper again yesterday, and that means that the makeup of my days will change radically from that of the previous four months.  Although I’m writing today, the frequency of my posts will decrease drastically once work really gets underway.

I made the decision to take on a fair number of items this term, including:

• Continue to be a good husband (yes, continue);
• Continue to do well in school;
• Devote a non-trivial amount of time to an application I’m working on with some colleagues; and
• Teach weekly dance classes with my friend Jesse at a studio we’re renting in town

All of these items require substantial amounts of my time, and inconsistently to boot (meaning that I won’t get to choose when one of these items will need more attention – there will be peaks and troughs for all of them).  I believe that I’ve got the skills and ability to meet all four of these goals while maintaining my own sanity.  However, it will require planning to ensure that I’m ready when the storms start to strike.

This is a pretty short post, but if you’d like to jump to the summary, you can do so here.

A new way of looking at my available productivity

Because of these competing demands, it’s very important that I figure out the best way to maximize my productivity.  If I waste my opportunity to be productive, things will start to get backed up, and I’ll quickly find myself with too many things to do and not enough time to do them in.  Something will necessarily fall by the wayside (and if I’m being honest, I suspect it will be item #1 – it’s often easiest to let things slide with the person around which we’re the most comfortable).

Rather than try to plan everything down to the hour, I took a new approach to scheduling my productivity this term.  To start, here are my assumptions:

• I can achieve what I’m setting out to do.

This is the most important assumption because it’s the starting point for everything else.  If I don’t believe this, then I should return to my list above and remove one of the items.  (If you don’t get this, ask yourself why you are planning to try and accomplish something that you don’t actually believe you are capable of achieving?)

• I was apathetic the previous term and often felt myself wasting time playing video games instead of studying.

While I found the feeling of apathy generated stress, my grades did not suffer and I exceeded the standards I had set for myself.  This suggests to me that I had additional spare time that could be put to better uses.

• I don’t want to spend any time this term feeling bored.

That is an indication to me that I currently have too much spare time.  Relaxing and just cooling out is one thing, but sitting around literally feeling bored is off the books.  If I find myself feeling this way, I should be looking to engage myself with a different pursuit.

• I can be more efficient if I’m able to divide my time across multiple tasks.

Like most of us (all of us?), I experience diminishing returns the longer I spend working on any one particular task.  If I can divide my time across a number of tasks related to the different projects I’ve set out for myself above, I should be able to avoid the fall off that results from working on only one task for too long.

• I have, roughly, between 3 and 5 good bouts of productivity in a day.

On really good days, I can get my process started first thing in the morning, and also find a second wind after the post-lunch tiredness.  On a bad day, I can’t seem to get the gears turning until 11AM, take a break for lunch, and only just manage to accomplish things by the time 5PM rolls around.

• My bouts of productivity cannot easily be divided up into “clean” blocks of time.

Just like I don’t know what kind of day I will have until I find myself at the end of it (or mid-way through at least), I don’t know beforehand how long I will be able to stay in my flow for, nor how long it will take to read a particular set of readings.

Creating a workable system

So, with the above assumptions in mind, I set aside a couple of hours on the weekend to devise the system by which I would plan out my time and stay on track this term.  That system is based on the concept of productivity units (PUs from here on in).  PUs are what I call the blocks of productive work that I am talking about above in items 5 and 6.

Based on my assumption in #6, I don’t think that it’s a worthwhile exercise to try and map a PU to a specific amount of time.  In fact, it’s clear that I don’t usually think that’s possible.

Taking my range from item #5, I estimate that on any given day, I can probably accomplish about 4 PU worth of work in any given day, with no other demands on my time.

What does this actually mean?

So, what does it actually mean to accomplish one PU worth of work, if you can’t map the block reliably to an amount of time?

Here are some examples of what I would consider a PU worth of work:

• Complete a set of readings for one of my classes
• Spend some time writing out a few pages of a paper
• Sit down and clear out my inbox, processing everything there and responding to any necessary e-mail
• Spend some time working on my development team’s wiki, organizing everything and ensuring that all of our recent thoughts have been captured and stored somewhere for later reference
• Attend one class

It is important to understand that these are the benchmarks I have drawn for myself.  Based on what you see above, you could probably estimate that one of my PUs probably roughly translates to 1 to 2 hours worth of work.  This is reasonable.  However, this will not always be the case, and there are times when it will take two PUs to finish a set of readings, or only half of my available energy to complete something.

The important part of my system is that it is adaptive, flexible, and dynamic, as these are all characteristics that I wish to imbue in the work that I do.  If my system does not embody the same traits that I myself wish to, there’s going to be conflict (which generally leads to the system being discarded and returning to old ways).

Your mileage may vary – you may find that you prefer to work in smaller chunks, but fit more of them into a day.  Whatever works for you is what you should do.  For me, this provides a clean and lightweight way in which I can rapidly estimate how much work I can accomplish each day.

This approach also provides me with a metric by which I can determine whether or not I should really be feeling upset that I’m not being maximally productive.  Let me explain.

I have no classes on Tuesday, which means that this is a wide-open day.  However, I have no shortage of work, and so ideally, I’d like to get 4 PUs in on Tuesday.  If I’ve finished one PUs worth of work, it’s currently 3PM, and I’m sitting on the couch playing video games, things probably aren’t going too well.  I should be kicking myself back into work.  But, if I find myself in the same situation, having completed 3 PUs worth of work, I’m actually doing pretty good.

Why is this distinction meaningful to draw – isn’t this pretty obvious and intuitive?

No – it isn’t.

These kind of separations are always obvious to us when we’re external to them, having them explained to us or reading about them on someone’s blog.  It’s easy to divide everything into bright clean lines when you don’t have anything at stake and you’re not in the middle of all of the chaos and demands placed on your time.  However, when you do find yourself in the middle of everything that’s when you will most need to be able to determine if the way you are feeling is due to something legitimate or simply a pressure external to yourself that actually doesn’t matter.

Thinking in these terms provides a quick “escape ladder” that can be used if I need to pull my head up from the mess and figure out if the way I’m feeling is really something that requires my concern.

The honest truth is that sometimes you’re going to feel guilty for taking some much needed time to recharge.  It doesn’t matter that that is the best thing you could do – your psychology will play games with you and tell you that you could not possibly take the time off from working on that paper!

Dividing my time up into these kind of chunks is a convenient way for me to check the way I’m feeling and determine if I really need to get the gears turning again, or can relax knowing that the break I’m taking is well-deserved (and will actually make me more efficient on the whole).

The view from my desk

Here’s the example that I’ve created, to provide you with some context.  My class schedule roughly looks like this:

• Monday: 3 classes
• Tuesday: 0 classes
• Wednesday: 2 classes
• Thursday: 1 class
• Friday: 1 class

On Monday, I also run a dance jam down at Centenniel Square in Victoria, which eats up a decent chunk of time.  In short, I don’t have any additional PUs available for Monday.

Tuesday is wide open, and so I can aim for my maximal goal: 4 PUs.  The plan going forward will be to divide this time between reading/studying and the necessary time required for me to continue PMing the project I’m working on.  I have my time loosely divided in half between the two, but I can be flexible and if needed, I can devote all 4 separate PUs to studying (though I would rather not, as that will increase the diminishing returns that I experience).

Wednesday I have two classes, which means I have about 2 PUs remaining.  Likewise, Thursday and Friday each have one class, so I have 3 PUs for both of those days.  Just at a glance, this way of looking at my spare time gives me a rough idea of how much time I will have available to devote to the demands on my time.

If things get panicky or packed in tight, I may need to adjust my schedule, or attempt to squeeze an extra PU out of my day.  While this may be possible for brief bursts of time, I’m skeptical that that would be a sustainable practice.  Being productive for 10 of my 16 waking hours, on an extended basis, intuitively feels like I would be pushing the limits of my mental, emotional and physical health, not to mention my marriage.

Rehash

That’s all I’ve got for today.  In general, writing a blog post is probably about 1 or 2 PUs worth of work.  It requires writing (a task unto itself), then polishing and editing before publishing.  I’ve finished three sessions worth of reading, and completing this entry makes a total of four PUs.  That means that I can now devote the rest of my day to relaxing and pursuing hobbies that are less intensive, and ignore any guilt that may pop up from time to time trying to tell me I should actually be working harder.  Not only should I not be working harder, I’m not convinced that my yield would be worth the extra effort.

Here’s the summary of what we’ve covered:

• To maximize your productivity, break your time up so that you can focus your energy on multiple things throughout the day;
• Breaking your time up into productive units, or PUs, can provide a convenient way to get a loose handle on what you can realistically accomplish in any given day;
• Your PUs may be different than mine, and that’s fine – do what works for you;
• If you’re feeling lazy or like you should be doing more work, check in to see what you’ve accomplished in terms of your PUs, and ground the way you feel based on that.  Sometimes you need to kick your ass back into gear.  Sometimes, you need to relax.  Both of these things will be equally hard to accomplish at different times;
• A system doesn’t need to schedule or track every last available minute you have for it to work for you; and
• Check in with yourself from time to time to see if the way that you’re feeling is a reaction to your circumstances, or something external (eg, unrealistic societal pressure that you can or should be productive for every single minute that you’re at work).

I’m at the tail end of three weeks that I purposefully booked off before returning to school.  I recognize the value that is brought by taking time to retreat, and I knew that I would likely have a lot of loose ends that I wanted to tie up before starting classes for the Summer.

I’ve spent that time off doing a number of things.  Lots of it has been put toward a new project that I’m embarking on with two other good friends.  That is looking like it will be a significant sink for my time this coming term, and so I will need to be aware of both what that asks from me and how well I can make it mesh with the time that I will need to devote to school.

I’ve been trying hard to put together a retrospective for this term.  I neglected to post one about my last term in Vancouver (Summer) as well, and I started the Spring term with a task entered into my manager to trigger at the end of the workterm: Do a retrospective of this workterm and post to blog.

Well, I did the retrospective, but I have been failing miserably trying to convert it into coherent words and paragraphs.  I’ve sat down and conducted a braindump, I’ve brainstormed everything that I’ve learned this term (it’s a lot) and I’ve tried writing an outline.  But you know what?  Sometimes it’s okay not to try and reduce to words what exists in your mind.  In this instance, I really feel like part of the reason that I’m having trouble articulating is simply the depth and magnitude of what I have taken back home from Vancouver.  I’ve learned things that hadn’t even been in my field of awareness until I started talking about them with my friends this term.  In short, it’s been great.

I wrote half of a draft during my first week off.  I spent the rest of the first week and the second working incredibly hard.  I’m not trying to boast, I simply find it interesting (and worthwhile) to be aware of the fact that while some of us relax by doing nothing, I relax by taking care of things and feeling like I’m getting on top of everything I need to do.  There’s no feeling quite as relaxed for me as being aware of all the demands on my time and knowing that I’m in control of them.  (This is good and bad – good because I’m predisposed to be organized, but bad because I’m that much more aware when things are out of whack).

However, by the end of the third week, I could tell that it was time to relax.  I tried to sit down on Monday this week to do more work, but I just didn’t have the heart for it.  Over time I’ve learned to recognize this feeling and not try to force my way through it (law school has helped with this).  When it’s time to be lazy, it’s time to be lazy.

So, this last week, I spent a lot of time relaxing, meeting friends (old and new), spending time with Bay, making music (a new hobby that hit me right out of the blue – tracks posted here), and generally just being lazy.  As the term starts up again next week, I’m okay feeling like my schedule is getting a little out of shape – for people like me, that will provide added motivation next week to kick things into high gear and get a strong start.

So, in that vein, I’m going to post the goals I’m setting this term for the sake of posterity.  They are:

Balance my time effectively between…

• Bay
• School
• The application I’m working on
• Teaching dance
• Friends
• Myself

I don’t know that much else needs to be said here.  Note that myself and my wife are both separate items on this list.  We are different people, and I need to make sure that I set aside time and balance for both of us.

Make enough effort to do “good enough” at school, but not a lot more

The aim of this goal is not to be lazy or a poor student.  It is for me to recognize that studying has diminishing returns.  I want to do enough work to learn effectively, and to get good grades.  But I’m not interested in getting great grades.  Why not?  Because getting great grades will require a level of effort that will actually be a less efficient way for me to spend my time and energy.  A quick breakdown will help:

• Let’s assume that I can spend 50% of my spare time studying and that will earn me an B average.
• Now, the diminishing returns:
  • I could spend another 20% of my time to get a B+ average; and
  • I could spend the remaining 30% of my time to get an A- average
• These are purely arbitrary percentages, but the point is that the more time I spend focused on just one pursuit (studying), the less value or return I get for what I put in.

Because of this inescapable fact (I haven’t figured out a way to defeat diminishing returns, but if you do, there are some economists that would like to talk with you), it makes sense that the best way to ensure maximum yield for my energy expended is to spread my time across focused, but multiple, pursuits.

Part of achieving this goal means that I have to be willing to accept the fact that I should not expend more energy than necessary to get “good enough” grades, rather than perfection.

Have clarified what will happen post-graduation

I’m only halfway through the completion of my studies, but I already feel like my life has been inexorably changed.  I have a clearer idea than ever before of the things that I want to do next, but at this point more paths are open than closed, and the challenge will be understand exactly what approaches are available and desirable versus those that are a mere distraction or digression.

A lot of this goal comes down to communicating with Bay and figuring out what paths will enable the future that both of us want, rather than just one of us.  We know that we will be living in Vancouver for the next phase of our lives, but beyond that, nothing is yet definite.

Learn more about professional coaching

I have wanted for a number of years to take a more active role in coaching.  Many of the posts that I have made (observable by scanning through the archive) are really posts about me coaching on a particular subject, and I would love the opportunity to do more of this in a professional capacity.  The next step in achieving this goal is to learn what is necessary to pursue a career in this field.  I suspect more education will be required before I can forge out in this direction, but achieving this goal will help me know for sure.

I don’t want to write any more right now, because my body doesn’t want to.  I have two more days, and then I’ll become a troglodyte once more.  The dance classes I’ll be teaching will be starting on July 16th, so I will definitely post more information about that here, but until then, I can’t guarantee that this space won’t become fairly lonely for the next little while.  Hang in there, and as always, get in touch with any questions or potential post topics.