If you want to work well, you need to take time for play, rest and relaxation. So if the daily grind is getting you down I can recommend an excellent medication-free treatment… a good pampering!

To be classed as a good pampering, you need three things:

1. Indulge and excite the senses

It must offer something out of the ordinary for your taste, touch, smell, sound or sight – if it indulges more than one all the better!

2. Bring about a quietness of mind

You may be contemplating the experience, hardly thinking anything at all, or calmly considering what has been happening in your life recently. In any case your mind is quietly in the moment, it is not distracted or excited by some external frenetic activity.

3. Generally go it alone

This is related to the previous point. Of course there may be other people around, but generally achieving quietness of mind requires personal solitude – no talking or distractions from friends.

Here are some of my favourite pamper suggestions:

• Oh la la! Visit a day spa for massage and/or beauty treatment.
• Best kept secret… Select some delicious home treatment products (body scrub or lotion, pedicures, facial – there are so many to choose from now!) and dedicate two hours to a slow personal pampering.

• Oh la la! Treat yourself to high tea at the finest tea house you can find.
• Best kept secret… Select a fine tea from a specialty store and enjoy creating your very own tea ritual – with a slice of sweet cake.

• Oh la la! Visit a forest or natural sanctuary – stay overnight and wake with the birds.
• Best kept secret… Find a shady spot in your local park and laze away the afternoon.

• Oh la la! Set out for a day drive with no destination – get lost and enjoy the journey!
• Best kept secret… Jump on your local train, ferry or bus and see where it takes you.

Keep it slow!

And remember that none of these can be hurried – set aside the whole day and let everything else fade into the background.

Share your favourite pampering tips in the comments

Rebecca

Struggling to meet unreasonable commitments and expectations is exhausting and demoralising. Yet frequently these demands are self-imposed: it might seem like your todo list driven by the needs of others but, if you review it honestly, you will see that the long list is borne of your own expectations and feelings of obligation.

Last week I detailed step one in my process for ‘cutting back’ my commitments: Capture all your commitments on paper.

Now for step 2 and 3…

2. How much time do you really have?

You now have a complete list of all your commitments: everything to which you have dedicated some level of psychic energy.

Now you need to get real about how much time you actually have for all this stuff. There are only 24 hours a day and 7 days in a week – this is non negotiable.

Neil Fiore in The Now Habit details how to use the unschedule methodology to ensure that you have guilt-free relaxation time and will, therefore, use your work time more productively.

For my purpose you need only complete step one of the unschedule process which is to draw up a weekly timetable and all your non-negotiable activities. This includes absolute must-do activities (like sleeping and eating) and leisure/lifestyle activities (like exercise and socialising).

The kind of activities you list in your unschedule include:

• daily must-do activities such as sleeping, eating, commuting
• other routine events such as medical appointments
• health activities such as gym or walking the dog
• quality time (that you enjoy) with loved ones / friends such as dinner or a picnic
• relaxation / pampering time to read a book, get a massage

You may be thinking, surely dinner with friends or getting a massage are luxuries that I only get after I have attended to my todo list? Absolutely not!

Firstly, these types of activities are absolutely essential to your ongoing mental, emotional and physical well-being and there should be time for them in your schedule each week. If you don’t ‘have time’ for some leisure and fun, then that is a sure sign you are doing too much.

Secondly, if you defer fun until you have finished your todo list then you will never get around to having fun, and you will continue to feel overwhelmed, overloaded and overworked. It is a vicious cycle!

Note: Neil Fiore’s unschedule is intended to help you be more productive with your work, so you only schedule non-work activities and then log your work time after you have completed at least one-half hour of uninterrupted work on a project.

For this exercise we are attempting to work out how much time you have for your personal commitments. If you have an office job then the hours of your shift are pretty much a non-negotiable ‘routine event’ which is not available for you to use for personal commitments. So you will need to add in, for example, a ‘work’ appointment from 8:00am – 1:00pm and 2:00pm – 6:00pm each weekday.

Having completed your unschedule you will realise that you may only have a couple of hours a day (perhaps longer on the weekends) for other commitments (by the way, Neil Fiore recommends you have at least one full day a week for recreation and small chores).

We now know just how limited our available time is, but we still think that all the items on our lists are equally important. How do we decide what to cut?

3. Is it something you really want to do?

Thinking ‘I have to do this thing’ or ‘I should do this thing’ or ‘I am a bad person if I don’t do this thing’ is a terrible way to motivate yourself. I have written before about creating the right frame of mind for positive action.

You need to make a deliberate choice about what you want to do, based upon a genuine consideration of all the options, an understanding of the benefits and costs, and an acceptance of the consequences of your choice. That might sound all too calculated and clinical, but, most of the time, we make can make these judgments very instinctively.

Look at each item on your list and ask yourself:

• Why is this item on my list?
• Did I make a positive choice to do this thing?
• If so, why was it important to me?
• Is it still important to me?
• Does it support one of my major life goals?
• What will happen if I don’t do it?
• If it is a promise I have made, can I renegotiate?
• Is this something I want to do in the future which I can add to my someday/maybe list?

As you do this review, please remember the first and second of the ten commandments for reducing stress:

1. Thou shalt not be perfect, nor even try to be
2. Thou shalt not try to be all things to all people

If attending another one of Uncle Wayne’s mind numbing monthly slide nights fills you with dread, why do it? Do you really believe you are contributing to positive family relations? If you refuse you may hurt some people’s feelings, but you cannot be responsible for the happiness of others. More likely, however, people aren’t even aware of the ‘sacrifice’ you are making for them and, moreover, if they were they would tell you not to bother. I think we tend to vastly overestimate our own importance. (Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to tell Uncle Wayne he is a terrible bore, there are always better ways to handle such circumstances.)

Conclusion

There are a lot of productivity techniques which, when applied well, will improve your efficiency and enable you to get more done in a day. More importantly, by being aware of what your choices, and cutting back on those activities which do not contribute to your longer-term goals, you will automatically find more time to devote to the things which are really important to you.

The bonus is that when you are working on things that are truly important to you, when you have a clear vision of why you are doing what you are doing, the work will seem more like a joy than a chore!

Good luck with your cutting back campaigns!

Rebecca

At any given time we don’t have a clear idea of what all this stuff is, nor do we know if we have enough time to actually do it all. But we just keep going in the hope that somehow we will reach an ‘end’. But we won’t. Our efforts, and our failure to reach this illusive ‘end’, will only exhaust, frustrate and depress.

This all sounds pretty grim, but we can do something about it! And the answer is not work harder or longer – the answer is to cut back on your commitments.

Last year I initiated my own cutting back campaign, and this week’s Zen Habits post “A guide to cutting back when you feel overwhelmed” prompted me to share my experience. As Leo explains in his post, overloading ourselves leads to stress (which is very detrimental to our physical and emotional well-being) and also decreases our effectiveness in achieving our goals.

We need to take care of ourselves, and use our energy wisely to achieve the goals which are important to us. Usually, doing this involves cutting back. The key to cutting back, as far as I am concerned, is to ‘get real’ about your own life.

Get a clear and honest perspective of what you are doing now, what you are capable of doing and what you want to do. Once you have this, it will become obvious what you need to cut. I am going to outline the three step process which helped me get a better perspective.

1. Capture all your commitments on paper

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system contends that we all have a lot of ‘stuff’ bouncing around in our heads (according to Allen, stuff is: “anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step”).

As long as we allow this to continue, our mental energy will be consumed with keeping all these balls in the air and we will forever have the feeling that there is something we have forgotten, or something we should be doing that is more important than what we are doing right now. Sounds kinda overwhelming, huh?

GTD instructs us to capture all this stuff – that is, write it down. Until you make this list you will not have a complete picture of what you have committed yourself to do. And while all this stuff remains a big, undefined blob you will have no control over it and no ability to do anything about it.

So, to begin your cutting back campaign you need to make a list. Include EVERYTHING you are currently doing or trying to do. This includes big goals (like go back to university), small goals (like exercise every day), things you said you would do (like help out at a charily stall), and mundane tasks (like clean windows).

For the purpose of this exercise, if something is on your mind, if it is already on one of your many to do lists or if you keep meaning to get to it, then you have committed mental energy to that task and you need to write it down whether or not you beleive you are truly ‘committed’ to it.

Use David Allen’s own Trigger List to make sure you have captured all those niggling to-dos from all areas of your life.

In next week’s post I’ll cover the final two steps in my cutting back campaign.

Rebecca