Does your calendar start each week with Sunday or Monday?
Your answer probably has a lot to do with where you grew up and your religious background (American planners tend to start on a Sunday, Europeans on a Monday; and the whole question has its roots in religious conventions regarding which day is the Sabbath). However, given the fact that e-diaries allow you to choose which days starts your week and paper diaries of all formats can be ordered online and delivered anywhere in the world, I believe that your choice reveals something else about you too. Or, to be more specific, perhaps I should say that I have come to realise that my choice definitely says something about me.
Growing up in the UK and now living in France, I have always had the choice between the Monday-start and Sunday-start diaries. Even when I switched to an online diary (more recently than I care to admit, but I’ve never looked back!) I had the option to display the week starting with Saturday, Sunday or Monday. To me it was a no-brainer. The week starts on Monday, and you only get your weekend after your five days of work, with the traditional (in my culture at least) day of rest at the end. Work first, then rest.
However, I have of late begun to question this deeply entrenched belief. The belief that rest comes after work. That you get to sit down after you get everything done, tick off your to-do list, and have cleared the decks. I have come to see that it is, to a great extent, what we call in coaching a limiting belief.
The limits of productivity
It has limited me in the past by making me plough on with work when what I really needed was a break; by pushing me to do one more task, postponing the moment when I let myself stop for the day in order to achieve the ultimate satisfaction of crossing everything off my list. It has limited me by marring my enjoyment of leisure activities that meant I had to carry to-do items over to the next day; or adding unnecessary pressure to finish my essay, clear up the kitchen, return a few calls, or wrap a few things up before I was allowed to join the (figurative) party.
This tendency is fuelled by a mentality that says rest is something you have to earn, something that you only get when your cup is well and truly empty. It’s a mentality that sees a link between productivity and self-worth, between accomplishment and how much you deserve. It says that you only get to take when you have nothing left to give.
Mindset change
I disagree profoundly with these beliefs. We are not defined by how much we achieve and the volume of work we can get through. Getting your to-do list done doesn’t make you a better person, nor does it really make you happier – not in any deep and meaningful way. It’s satisfying, of course, but we all know that even if we get through today’s list, there will always be another list tomorrow. And that’s as it should be, of course, since the only time you will ever have nothing left to do will be – sorry to put it bluntly – when you die. When you fully embrace the reality that you will never get it all done, you can see that rest should be taken when it is right for you rather than at some arbitrary moment dictated by the length of the pages in your notebook, or by the list your early-morning self made for you before they knew what surprises the day had in store.
Moreover, the objective of life can’t be to get it all done and so to able to stop. It is surely to enjoy yourself along the way. You wouldn’t whip around Disneyland going on rides just to “get them done”. You wouldn’t walk away from dinner with friends saying, “Right, that’s that off the list for today”. Why should we apply that mentality to less obviously fun tasks? We all have a certain number of things – from work requirements and life admin to family obligations and health caretaking – that we need to do on any given day. Not all of them are a hoot, but in a lot of cases we could make things a little more pleasant for ourselves by seeing them as the stuff of life rather than stuff to get done. And I can guarantee that a level-3 boring/horrid task will always feel like a level-9 if it’s tackled at the end of the day, when you’re worn out and pushing yourself to do it now just so you can say it’s done rather than to-do.
The productivity trap
I also think that the belief that prioritising rest allows you to be more efficient afterwards is, while true, ultimately just another way of prioritising productivity and linking our output to our self-worth, and with that we’re back to where we started. I don’t want to rest or have fun because I’ve earned it, or as an optimisation strategy to allow me to do more later. Rest and recreation is a major part of what makes life joyful, and making time for it, scheduling it in, or randomly deciding it’s the next right thing to do for you is not slacking.
So for a while now, I have been experimenting with the idea of resting first. That has meant enjoying weekend mornings more, letting myself read or play with the kids instead of trying to get all the chores done now so we can have the afternoon free. It’s meant finishing end-of-day client sessions and – whisper it – leaving the associated admin tasks for the next day. It’s meant learning to feel (and not just to say) “that task can wait”. Bigger picture, it has meant giving myself permission to decide when I feel ready to say, “I have done enough for today”. So, while I doubt I’ll ever set my calendar to start the week with a Sunday, I have managed to (mostly) silence the inner voice that tells me I can only rest once I’ve done it all, and turn up the volume on the voice that says I can choose when I rest, indeed I can even “rest first”.
What would it look like for you to “rest first”? Perhaps it would mean taking a walk after lunch rather than diving straight into your afternoon tasks. Maybe it would mean saying yes more often to your child’s request to read/play/chat (rather than “Let me just get this done first”). It might lead to you to make your next-day to-do list at the end of the day, as you actively tell yourself that all these things can – and will – wait. Or, it might mean you get to relax into your evening yoga/Spanish/singing class safe in the knowledge that the emails will all be waiting for you when you leave, or even tomorrow; you are never going to get to the end of them all, anyway – in fact, you’re not supposed to.
How have you been treating yourself lately? What inner voices are running the show in your mind? Are they kind, compassionate and empowering, or are you allowing the voices of anger, anxiety and “not enough” to drive your choices? Working with an experienced, empathetic and insightful coach can help you to assess and change how you talk to yourself. It can help you to take back control of what you do, how you do it, and how it makes you feel. Contact me to find out more about working together.