Episode XV - Reworking the Working Week & An Explosion of Doubt
How time away from your desk alone does not constitute a break & the inevitability of doubt...
Welcome to the 1 new subscriber who joined over the last week, bringing us up to 62 in total - I hope you can think differently after reading this 🙂
Questions I’d like you to ask yourself from this week’s episode:
How quickly do you take action once a decision is made?
Are you allowing habit or tradition to dictate your working patterns?
How often do you question your own direction?
Does self-doubt come hand-in-hand with self-belief?
In my last post I took a long look at my working week - TL;DR, it needed fixing, and badly!
And so last week I started to make changes, staying true to my beliefs about the importance of speed of action.
It didn’t all go perfectly, but it has made a difference.
So here we go…
Reworking the working week
Let’s start with the situation as it stood last time:
My assessment here was that I was too responsive to other people’s needs in that core work hours period.
And my plan was to start work earlier in the day to avoid that busy period & finish earlier too:
So I tried that, and the inevitable happened.
I didn’t finish earlier, I just worked longer!
A couple of reasons why I think that was the case:
As “the boss”, I do feel the need to be available - I described this last time as a sense of responsibility for my teams, our clients & other people that are supporting me. So even if I did knock off early, I wouldn’t really be relaxing anyway
In my household, we both work from home most of the time. My wife has a salaried job & therefore less flex over her working hours. She’s working until a normal finish time, so me finishing early just let me waiting for her to finish too. Not a good environmental fit for me
There has to be another way…
I looked at the facts:
I want to start earlier because I am most productive then
I don’t want to finish earlier because it doesn’t fit well
I don’t want to increase my working hours because that’s daft
Only one answer to that then: take a longer break in the middle of the day.
Reworking my model
That led me to thinking that I had actually misrepresented my working day in my original model.
I was never working in a solid block as I had laid out - what I was actually doing was this:
So I was already taking a break in the middle of the day - why wasn’t it doing anything for me in terms of productivity then?
In short, because it is never really a break at all!
I know I only have an hour, so I feel like I have to cram in a walk (to get some fresh air) & then eat.
And by the time those bits are done, it’s time to go back to work.
I’m not resting, or relaxing, I’m merely continuing to do necessary tasks.
So no wonder I’m not feeling more productive when I get back to my desk.
Back to the drawing board…
Taking an actual break
I needed to take a different approach here - one that involved a genuine break for necessary tasks.
So I started to take an extended break in the middle of the day.
And this is how I am now looking at things:
That actual break in the middle of the day is giving me a real boost in productivity.
So when I’m returning to work in the afternoon, I feel more able to contribute meaningfully.
My calendar doesn’t always allow for an extra hour’s break, but I’m conscious of its importance to me now.
And I’ve communicated such to my teams as well - I’m not doing this in secret, I’m doing it in public.
Much easier to stick to it that way!
There may well be further iterations to this structure in due course, but early signs are that this works for me.
Or at least better than the old way.
A few questions to ask yourself about this topic:
Are your breaks actually breaks?
Is time away from your desk genuinely helping your productivity when you get back?
Do you make changes in secret or public? And which ones are easier to stick to?
If this week’s exploration resonates with you, please share it with others:
The explosion of doubt
Just pack it all in, scrub the decks & start again…
That was the feeling.
Only for a morning, and never a realistic prospect, but it was visceral nonetheless.
Recently I wrote about self-acceptance & the logic I had applied to help me generate some level of acceptance of my progress.
But therein lies the weakness of that process.
Human beings are not logical.
They are emotional, irrational, prone to outbursts that fly in the face of facts.
And no level of reference to demonstrable achievements or progress will assuage those feelings.
But that explosion did then lead me to ask another question:
Did I explode because I actually give a sh*t?
Would life be easier if you were not ambitious?
This was the discussion topic with a friend & fellow agency owner over dinner recently.
As ambitious individuals both, we talked about friends & acquaintances we have who don’t share that trait & asked ourselves whether we thought they were happier than us.
Those people don’t share our desires to be more than we currently are, to achieve more than we have currently achieved nor indeed to advance themselves on multiple fronts.
But for every action, there is an equal an opposite reaction right?
Therefore to possess the heightened sense of self-belief that is necessary for starting & running your own business, you must also live with the equal & opposite level of self-doubt at times.
So if I didn’t believe in my ability to maximise my potential, I wouldn’t suffer from the same explosions of doubt in that ability.
It is because I care about what I am doing that those feelings run so hot at times.
So the conclusion I have come to on this is that that explosion of self-doubt is to be expected.
My ambition is an intrinsic part of who I am & it comes with significant self-belief.
But the flipside is inevitable too.
So I shouldn’t be disappointed that things went the way they did last week, but rather be prepared for the time where it will happen again.
And so to finish, I will paraphrase a friend who I discussed this with - when the gremlins sneak out of the place you have buried them…
The last word
I talk about a lot of personal challenges in this newsletter, and I know from discussions with others that they aren’t just my challenges!
So if you ever want to talk about them, I keep my chat open for any subscriber to start a discussion:
Until next week,
- M
I agree completely about self doubt and self belief. When I doubt myself, sometimes I'm too in it to have clarity and often seek counsel for a second opinion. A second opinion can reveal things you hadn't though about and offer another perspective that can be agreed with or not. Sometimes the other opinion makes me think yes I was right. Gut feeling is valuable, ignore it at your peril or that's been my experience, although I'm doubting this now! :)