The realities of creating a guilt-free work week
Reflections from my 12-week Investigation Day experiment
If you’ve been following my writing, you’ll know that earlier this week I posted Creating a guilt-free work week here on Medium. My plan is to spend the next 12 weeks experimenting with using my Fridays as “Investigation Days” — devoting time to the things that I know make me a better coach and a happier person — in the hope that I will feel less guilty about not getting to the really important stuff. I‘ll be sharing my weekly reflections here each week using a really simple format:
- Do I feel less guilty?
- What observations or insights have I drawn from today?
- How will next week’s Investigation Day be different? Why?
So, here we go…
Week 1
Do I feel less guilty?
Yes. Absolutely. Throughout the week it felt great to have a “place” to put things that felt important and/or interesting but not urgent. Small things like a recommended podcast or article to read used to weigh on me — suddenly they felt do-able.
Finding time to catch up with people also felt less guilt-ridden. It felt really natural to say to them:
“I’m trying really hard to keep Monday through Thursday for client work and Friday for my other interests, would you be OK to meet on a Friday?
I used to feel bad if I couldn’t see someone for a few weeks. Being able to explain how I’m devoting my time made it easier to say “how about the end of March?”.
I’m really lucky — I’ve got amazing support at home — which is especially important given that I work from home and the house always needs something done. My partner was very quick to make sure that neither of us turns my “Investigation Day” into our “meet with tradies” or “mow the lawn” day! Receiving this unprompted (and very insightful) support also helped me feel less guilty.
What observations or insights have I drawn from today?
You might remember that I set out 5 components for Investigation Day:
a. conversations to inspire
b. reflecting and writing
c. new product development
d. learning, and
e. getting out from behind the desk.
Turns out, that is a VERY aggressive agenda for a single day — but overall I really enjoyed it and can’t wait for next Friday.
I did manage to tick off something in each category but as I write this at 5:00 pm, honestly, I’m really tired.
I’m a lark so I started the morning with a couple of hours of deep work on product development. It was great to make early progress on something that’s been (stagnating) on my mind for a while. I had planned to jump straight into creative thinking about my brand — but I simply didn’t have the energy. It seems so obvious now that I’ve experienced it, but those items looked so interesting and do-able when I put them next to each other in the calendar.
I rejigged the agenda for the rest of the day and made a phone call to an old friend to bounce around some ideas which gave me the second wind I needed. I did come back to the brand work later in the day but definitely didn’t achieve as much as I’d hoped for.
I didn’t get too distracted by Slack, email or social media throughout the day, which frankly surprised me. As my energy wained it did become more of a problem and I want to work on that next week.
My “get out from behind the desk” activity for this week was a quick trip to the local driving range to hit some golf balls (which I haven’t done in years). I really enjoyed it (and didn’t do too badly all things considered) but am not sure that choosing a high concentration/focus activity was a good fit considering the “big brain” activities that I scheduled for today. Especially as it was something I hadn’t done for a long time so felt less natural than it otherwise might.
How will next week’s Investigation Day be different?
Based on how I felt today, here are the changes I want to make to next week’s agenda:
- Shorten the blocks of time for “big brain” activities (perhaps try Pomodoro method for this)
- Insert a short walk or another circuit breaker between activities
- Re-balance the order of “big brain” activities so that they’re not back-back and intersperse them with conversations
- Make “getting out from behind the desk” a little more relaxing/natural
- Create a short “break time” for checking Slack, email and social media and then don’t look at it again until beer o’clock
Speaking of which…it’s time for a cold one.
