In the early days of my newsletter I posted a link to Maggie Steifvater’s journaling approach, designed to manage uneven energy levels after she contracted a long-term illness that kept her from writing. The original post is gone now—along with the rest of Steifvater’s Tumblr—but the lesson from it has lived with me on-and-off in four bullet journals now.
The basic theory is this: before you plan the day, imagine the idealised version of you that’s operating at 100%. The perfect, focused, utterly ready to do all the things version of yourself.
Then check in with how you’re feeling right now, and rate your current state as a percentage of that ideal. Or, to put it another way, acknowledge your limits and work with the energy you’ve got, not the energy you wish you had.
It’s really easy to resent work when things are off-kilter with your health, whether its physical or mental. Resentment quickly leads to procrastination, which only compounds the problem. It’s so easy to hate yourself for being less than 100% that a 20% day can result in no work at all, instead of the 20% you might have been capable of if you’d framed your to-do list in those terms.
Today is a total 20% day for me at the moment. My anxiety and stress are high at the moment for various reasons, mostly PhD related, and we’re heading into the period where I’d be preparing to celebrate my dad’s birthday if he hadn’t passed away last year. The moment we get through that, we celebrate my birthday in March…which is the day before dad actually died.
On top of that, my partner is home sick and will need me to drive to the GP later. My morning routine is disrupted as hell, so I need to think about what I need to do next instead of letting habit carry me. And I’ve only had three hours sleep, due to poor dietary decisions last night and a cat whose decided 5:00 AM is the perfect time to attack my legs.
In short, I’m a complex mess of feelings—almost invariably leading back to holy shit I feel sad and burnt out—and setting aside that sadness to get stuff done for the sake of other people’s priorities is hard.
I thought about none of that when I first sat down to write today’s to-do list, which meant it set expectations at what I could achieve if I felt 100%: writing 4,000 words of rough draft in addition to editing, setting up and testing webinar options, catching up on email, and doing the line edits on the next Keith Murphy book.
Unsurprisingly, when I sat down to start work, I procrastinated like hell. Focusing on what should be, if my physical and mental health was in peak condition, created a metric butt-ton of resistance because my 20%-of-peak-Peter toolkits weren’t going to get all of that done. Failure to meet expectations would give my anxiety another tool to use when beating me up, and if I was already going to feel bad about doing less, it was easier to do nothing.
Which is where the advantage of Stiefvater’s system really shows itself, because setting expectations at 20% of peak Peter opens me up to positive reinforcement rather than negative resistance. I’m sure as shit not going to get to 4,000 words, but I can probably make 800…and everything after that will be gravy, pulling my mood up instead of weighing me down.
I may not manage all my email and business decisions, but I can clear 6 from the inbox (20% of the total) and try to answer the most urgent. I can’t do a full test of the webinar software, but I can write a list of next steps and do one of the things on the to-do list.
And here’s the thing: building on rather than fighting against tends to increase capacity as the day goes on. I started this post feeling 20% and stuck, but I’m finishing it feeling 30% because my focus has shifted.
In her outstanding book on focus and attention, Rapt, Winnifred Gallagher does a really interesting breakdown of bottom-up attention versus top-down attention.
Bottom-Up attention is involuntary and passive, the survival response that causes you to zoom in on threats and resources for survival. It’s highly attuned to risk-and-reward, and connects you to the world, but it comes with a major drawback: lots of distraction, and an immense vulnerability to new stimuli.
I wrote my first to-list for the day in a bottom-up mode, which only added to my anxiety. The moment I assessed my energy and came up with the 20% number, I shifted into a top-down approach where choices were made against the context.
Putting your brain in a top-down mode makes it easier to disregard distractions and focus on a particular task. By its nature, it suppresses our focus on irrelevant data. As Gallagher puts it:
The top-down sort has advanced our species, particularly by enabling us to choose to pursue difficult goals, such as nurturing the young for extended periods or building and operating cities. Where the individual is concerned, this deliberate process is the key to designing your daily experience, because it lets you decide what to focus on and what to suppress.
Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (p. 17).
Or, to put it another way, simply by acknowledging I feel 20% and pondering how that changes my day, I’m setting aside some of the anxieties and fears contributing to that number and freeing my attention up to focus on how today can bring me closer to the goals that matter to me.
It makes me feel a little less sad, and a whole lot more in control, even before the first thing on my new to-do list is attempted and checked off.
