Productivity Cycles

Let me know if you’ve ever felt this way:

Everything is piling up. Emails, todos, housework, bills, taxes, books to read. It’s endless.

You develop avoidance. You can’t even look at the things you need to do. 

What’s worse is the knowledge that two months ago you had the perfect system. Everything was humming on all cylinders. 

But now the mess is up to your ears. It’s everywhere you turn.

You start piecemeal triage. Instead of clearing everything out, you just put out the really urgent fires. You’re not doing everything you need to do, but you are doing just enough to quell the, “Just following up on this…” emails you feel guilty about even getting.

Guilt. That’s a good word. Shame is another one. Compounded by the persistent thought, Is this ever going to go away? Am I just like this now?

It’s a constant weight. You feel bad. It feels like it’s going to go on forever.

This is how I am, you think.

Then, suddenly, from one moment to the next: your wind picks up. The leaves start to rustle. Thunder. Lightning. ZAP.

Everything shifts. 

You’re suddenly like the mother who lifts an entire car to rescue her trapped child. You’re full of piss and vinegar. 

You sit down at your laptop. You crack your knuckles. Energy is crackling in your fingertips. 

You are a warrior. You will not be beaten. You will conquer this mess right now.

And in a furious fugue state you beat back the emails. You plow through the todos. You clean your apartment from top to bottom.

You restore balance to the universe. Everything is okay again.

You look at your watch. It took you about an hour. Maybe two. 

You’ve just experienced a productivity cycle.

Where productivity cycles come from

For me, the trigger is non-equilibrium.

There are two big causes of non-equilibrium in my life: busy-ness, and big emotional events.

Busy-ness

This one is pretty simple: some days I’m just too busy to get through all of my emails. Or I get home too late and too exhausted to do the dishes. 

The next day, the same thing happens. So now I’m two days behind on emails. But I’ve compounded that with the shame of already being behind. 

So I’m busy, exhausted, and full of shame. By the third day this creates avoidance. I don’t want to even look at the mess I’ve made. 

Now it’s a self-perpetuating cycle — the mess gets bigger the longer I don’t deal with it, but my feelings of avoidance are also getting stronger for the same reason.

Strong emotional events

But there’s another subtle source of non-equilibrium for me: strong emotional events. It’s hard to get things done when I’m not centered.

Sometimes that can be as simple as getting an email from someone important that I don’t immediately know how to answer. 

Maybe the email requires me to do a bunch of research to respond to. Or maybe it causes me to reevaluate how I’ve been thinking about something important in my life.

I skip over answering it. But it’s on my mind. And because I haven’t answered it, I avoid even going into my email. Now I’m behind on everything else.