Last week, we discussed the "The Canary in the Coal Mine" case:
There's basically three times people get off track with their routines, habit, and how they run their life: when unusual events or extenuating circumstances happen, when things are going badly, or — most counterintuitively — when things are going well.
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You’ll note the effect [that after] napping, taking a walk, time spent on enjoyable activities all get shaky (in addition to not much time spent doing routine admin work), and then it starts to turn into a cascading effect of a bunch of things get sloppy.
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That’s this week’s takeaway: you can set up your controls in such a way as to give you advance warning of problems happening. For my part, seeing the red lights start to spread rapidly makes me slow down and give a day or two to managing my habits and keeping my affairs in order. I answered a lot of email, paid bills, took walks, handled admin, rested a bit, etc.
Again, if you read it (or checked the link), last week was marvelous. Immensely productive. But a scary alarm started to go off — I started to miss out on key habits, neglecting napping, neglecting taking time for enjoyment, neglecting admin work and letting it pile up, etc.
This week was still quite productive, but I consistently hit the breaks in the afternoon and worked more heavily on just checking off habits. Taking walks, going to see interesting landmarks, buying supplies, taking naps, and otherwise just keeping my health and productivity in check.
All these measures are good for anti-burnout and increase endurance, but perhaps at the expense of not getting some sprinting time in.
You can always run harder or faster at any given moment, but it's not the way to start the marathon. This week, I could perhaps have squeezed out 30% more production at the expense of collapsing at the end of it. Instead, I had a solid productive week, and am recharged, on top of things, and with admin generally in good shape going into next week.
As a bonus, I finally got around to seeing the Hagia Sophia. It was pretty cool.
I know many readers have started making their own Lights Spreadsheets -- please very welcome to post yours with analysis or thoughts in the comments. Questions and feedback also very welcome.