Today I am writing an open letter to myself. This post is written to me and everything in it is about me. You see I want to be more more productive. I want to be more present. I am the one who desires to become a more effective person in life. So, I am writing a letter to tell myself what to do. So you want to be more effective…..? GO to bed!
I hope that perhaps some others of you find this useful as well. I hope that I heed my own wisdom!
So, I understand that you have a desire to be more effective. More productive. That’s not uncommon. A lot of people do. Most people in fact. You want to be more present at home. Spending quality time with your spouse, quality time all together with your family. You want to spend good times, one on one, with each of your children? You want to have energy, focus, vibrancy when doing this? You want to be more positive and patient?
Your thinking about your job as well. You want to be more productive and effective there. You would like to be able to tackle things more efficiently, take on more significant responsibility. You want to make fewer mistakes, no more silly little errors and balls dropped. And you want to actually complete your task list more often than you don’t? You want to be supportive for your colleagues, patient with clients and feel less burdened and overwhelmed every time something new comes your way?
You want some time and capacity for stuff outside of work as well? Not just vegging on the sofa in front of the TV?
So you want to be more effective…..? Go to bed!.
The wrong trade off
The problem is, you are making the wrong trade off. Your doing the maths and just getting the wrong answer.
You are looking at that list and your calculation is:
More stuff to do → More time needed = Less Sleep
That looks so rational and so reasonable but it is the wrong trade off.
The wrong mind set
Not just that, you are applying the wrong mind set as well. I hate to be the one to have to tell you this but no-one else is going to.
You feel like with more stuff to do, you have more time ‘on’. That makes sense. And so, you need down time. You need time off. That also makes sense, I suppose. And therefore you decided that you can have less sleep so you get down time.
The wrong habits
With the wrong trade off and the wrong mind set, you have falling into all of the wrong habits.
Everything takes time and so you keep going until well after everyone else at home is in bed. Then you switch on the TV and binge watch for an hour or two as you feel you need that time.
Then there is the doom scrolling on your phone. In your bed or on the sofa downstairs. All of that comes after faffing around on nonsense late at night.
Take last night as an example. You knew you needed to go to bed, but you couldn’t remember the name of the young defender you always used to buy on Championship Manager 2. So after a lengthy time of googling, you found an online version of the game, loaded it up and searched the transfer lists until you found the likely candidate. Not time well spent!
These are the wrong habits.
But, you aren’t alone. There are thousands upon thousands of people who are all in the same boat. They might not be identical to you, but its basically the same boat. They want to be more effective, but they make the wrong trade off, have the wrong mindset and maintain all of the wrong habits.
And the result is pretty dramatic.
Tired
You and everyone else on this trajectory is tired. Exhausted in fact. Many of you are close to burnout if not facing it already. Remember if you buy one of those candles that says it burns for 10 hours, and put a wick in both ends and light them – it will only last 5 hours.
You are trying to be more effective by throwing more time at the problem, but you only have 24 hours a day and so you just sacrifice sleep for it. So you are exhausted.
So you want to be more effective…..? GO to bed!
Sloppy
This inevitably leads you to sloppiness in your work and all your endeavours in fact. The tired mind tends to rush things and doesn’t know how to be patient. But, weirdly, even though you are rushing, the exhaustion means you are just slower overall. It takes you longer to do things. You make more mistakes, you miss more. The reason is pretty simple. When you are tired you do not think as clearly. So, your approach to a task or activity will be a less efficient or effective one. You rush through something, making your work sloppy, but your route through the task and your process is not efficient and so you take longer overall.
So you want to be more effective…..? GO to bed!
Irritable
There are other impacts as well. Relational ones. A tired mind is less patient. It can tolerate less. So you are more prone to irritability, to being miserable and to be grumpy. You are less able to be present with people, with your family. And when you are with them, you are a pretty poor version of yourself.
Therefore → You are LESS effective
In short, you made the wrong calculation and the result is that you are actually less effective. Less productive. Not more. That’s the bitter irony of all this isn’t it. You gave more and more to achieve better results but in the end, the outcome was worse overall. And so….with the wrong trade off, mind set and habits, the obvious conclusion is….maybe I didn’t give ‘enough’.
So we cut back on sleep further to give more and the cost of that just compounds.
So you want to be more effective…..? GO to bed!
Prioritise actually getting the sleep you need. Consistently so. I am sorry to tell you Mr Wood, there is no easy way to do this. Actually, that’s wrong. It is VERY easy, but it goes against all of your current instincts and so you will feel VERY much like you are making a bad choice. A selfish choice. But worse…. with the kind of mind set you have been living with, it will feel like a dangerous choice.
Consistency – no matter what
You need consistent sleep so you need consistent times of sleep. You need to be aiming to go to bed and aiming to get up at the same time every single day. Now, you can relax this periodically without too much harm but generally speaking this is what you want to be doing. Your body clock adjusts and adapts. Now, I don’t mean bed at 1am and wake up at 4am. That won’t cut it. Figure out what amount is sufficient and aim to plan everything else around this. It’s that important.
Routines
Then, buttress that with a consistent shut down routine. It doesn’t need to be dramatic. It doesn’t need to involve complex rituals and activities. In fact, the more simple the better. Something like
- Setting a time to stop everything, as far as possible, no matter what you feel is still needed. Just stop.
- Take 10 minutes to figure out what you need to know about tomorrow and make sure its written down so you can leave it until tomorrow. What you need to do, where you need to be when and things any of your family are doing.
- Get yourself ready for bed
- Find somewhere quiet and read with a hot drink (decaf) for 20-30 minutes.
- Go to bed and settle in to sleep.
What this will do, after you adapt to it, will tell your body it is time to sleep. It’s like a shut down. It will likely mean you sleep better on the whole. I am not promising a perfect night that re-energises you every single night. But this kind of routine will certainly help. You know it will you just need to follow it.
Grace
Ok – there is one more thing you need. Actually, this is more important ultimately than all the rest. You need grace. You are not unlimited. You cannot give it all and then keep giving more. You are limited. More than that you are human and a sinner. You will make bad choices and do things that are wrong every single day. What you need is grace, not more activity to try and offset your limits and weaknesses.
You need to recognise that you cannot do everything. You need to recognise you will make mistakes. You need to recognise you will get things wrong. That you will fail. So you need grace. Grace means you can be content with what you have done. You can trust God with all the things you haven’t been able to do. With every mistake and failure.
Go to bed content in what you can do and content with what you can’t do or haven’t done.
And there will be a payoff.
You won’t wake up tomorrow as basically a super soldier. You won’t be able to do all the things, all the same stuff, just better and in half the time. You won’t become ‘unrecognisable in 6 months’ if you follow this plan. All of that is just clickbait advertising trying to sell you a dream.
But there will be a payoff. Over time, your energy levels will rebuild. Over time your cognitive function will replenish.
The payoff is that you will be able to be present and focussed when it matters. With a whole lot more joy. And that is more effective and more productive by far.
You might get more done because you have more energy. You might make fewer sloppy mistakes because you are more focussed. You might be less grumpy because your tolerance levels and patience are improved. All that might happen. In fact it probably will. Yes, you will still make mistakes. You will still get tired and you will still be grumpy. But maybe, a bit less than before. Noticeably less than before. So you will be more effective overall.
You’ll probably make better decisions as well about what to do and how to do it. That will mean you might do less stuff, but have a more positive impact overall.
There will be a payoff, and over time you will notice it.
So you want to be more effective…..?
GO to bed!
