How to Work With Your Energy Ebbs and Flows

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When it comes to getting more done and being more productive, mindset is absolutely key. We need to be able to focus on our goals and stay motivated enough to take the steps necessary to accomplish them and that’s the most effective opportunity we have of completing challenges and getting to where we want to be.

But in order to do this, we often have to fight our impulses and our instincts. That means we have to force ourselves to get up and to work, even when we’re feeling tired and just want to go to bed. It means that we have to motivate ourselves to focus on a long, hard day’s work even when we’re tempted to go home early and do what we prefer.

This is what many of us think of as mental discipline: the ability to force ourselves to do that which we don’t want to do. To take our ‘medicine’ as it were and thereby keep progressing forward.

But it might not always be the best method. Because as it happens, being at constant war with ourselves is not conducive to great productivity!

So instead of doing that, how about working with your gut instead while considering the timing of things?!

Understanding Our Energy Flow

A lot of us pay too much attention to time management. We act under the assumption that if we have time to do something, then we can do it.

In reality though, our ability to complete work is much more related to our energy. If you don’t have the energy (some call it “bandwidth”) necessary to focus or to work, then you won’t be able to do it or your work won’t be as good and the outcome will be telling.

And as it happens, our energy levels come on in waves and are largely out of our control. For example, first thing in the morning many of us struggle with something called ‘sleep inertia’. This means our brains are still groggy from the night’s sleep and we aren’t as productive.

Likewise, we tend to be less efficient right after lunch or dinner. That’s because an influx of carbohydrates gets broken down to tryptophan and that tryptophan is then converted into serotonin. In turn, the serotonin is converted to melatonin, making us sleepy!

We’re all likely to be tired around 4:00PM too and of course some days are worse than others depending on what we did the day before.

So instead of forcing ourselves to change to meet our schedule, how about switching up our schedules so that we’re doing the most important work when we are the most awake?  Performing our best happens when we know ourselves better.  When we know the times we are most productive, we can decide to perform functions that require our most attention to detail during these times, whenever possible, to see the best possible outcomes materialize because we performed these tasks from a place of Alignment.

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