How I'm Learning to Be More Productive By Taking Time Off

I have a fun hobby I've gotten really good at, if I do say so myself.

For all of my life, I've struggled with time management. I would say that I don't have a particularly linear relationship with time. So while I've slowly begun to get better at accepting this about myself without a lot of judgment, the thing I've come to realize that I've been perfecting is keeping myself in a perfect tangle of productivity pitted against rest and recovery.

What this looks like is me having unreasonable expectations of productivity on my downtime. When I'm facing some time off, I get VERY excited about all the things I will be able to catch up on. With all that space, I'll finally get to make some progress on my book, and by "make some progress", I one hundred percent mean that I'll DEFINITELY get it totally done this time. It's completely reasonable to me that I can complete the revision of my entire book in however much time off I've got lined up.

I'll also clear out my inbox (for the 3 minutes it'll stay that way), plus, I'll get to work on my other creative projects that keep getting backburnered, organize the garage, finish my website redesign, and I'll handle those 17 personal admin tasks I've been procrastinating on for forever.

There might be a few other things on my list, like connecting with friends and family, do all the fun things, do a wardrobe purge, get tons of sleep, perfect my ideal morning ritual, get outside and go for walks on the daily, hike, kayak and paddleboard.

If you think that my plans for time off sound unrealistic, then you've definitely beat me to the punchline. I've only really just begun to realize that this extremely familiar pattern of mine is a total set up to keep me stressed out, exhausted, and feeling like a failure.

Whenever I have time off, I talk about my plans with my coach, who inevitably reflects to me that it sounds like I'm planning to do a lot of work during my time off and that my plans seem a little bit contradictory. Perhaps a touch unrealistic. My competing goals seem mutually exclusive.

To which I will inevitably respond that I completely understand her perspective, but this is all stuff I really want to do, so really, it's not work at all. I can do it, and I want to do it.

Guess how it tends to go? If you're prediction is that I fall short of my aspirations while also not having as much fun as I'd like, nor getting as much rest as I need, then your predictive capabilities are much more accurate, or at least realistic, than my own.

Realistic is not really a thing people would say to describe me. Idealistic, absolutely, but realistic, not so much.

I'm pleased to report that while I suspect I shall continue to set resolutely unrealistic expectations for what I'll achieve while I'm taking time off, I am at least beginning to see the fruitlessness of the pattern. Planning to work when I'm planning to be off is not creating the experience of life that I wish to be having, so I'm changing the pattern.

Here's the thing: if you're never really off, then you're never really on, either.

I'm beginning to learn how to be off when I'm off, so that I can be on when I'm on.