You know those nights when you want to work on writing or your coding project or side gig? You want to grow outside of the confines of a day-to-day job but you feel like the job has taken everything out of you.
You get tired. You feel like you’re on the last bar of the battery. At the same time you feel like people around you are advancing and progressing on their projects.
“How do people do this?”
“How can they not be tired?”
“Where do they get the time/energy/motivation?”
All these questions float around a pool of wonder as you envy the things that others seem to have the ability to do, and you don’t.
You don’t? Maybe you do.
I’m not saying that you can create as much time as you need out of nowhere. Each person’s circumstances are different. But there is a way to see if you can make use of that last bar.
There is this article that talks about the US Navy Seal “40% Rule” that states when you think you’re “done” you’re really only 40% done, i.e. you still have more energy to do things. I don’t know how true that number is on average but I do find that when I think I’ve had enough for the day, there may be more.
The way for me to find out whether I do is to give it just five minutes. It’s a technique I learned from my writing coach Beth Barany. Make a goal to put butt-in-chair and work on your project, uninterrupted, for no more than five minutes. Just five!
But how can you accomplish anything in five minutes?
Sure, you might, in those five minutes, find a bug that’s been eluding you or you rewrite a paragraph and it sounds much clearer. What can also happen after those five minutes is you find you have a spark of energy to do more. You get “on a roll” or find your “flow state”. Whatever you call it, those five minutes can sprout like a seed, and become 10 minutes or 20 minutes or even an hour once there’s momentum. That’s when you see what you are capable of doing when you think you are too tired.
I would never recommend you push yourself to do this if you are sick or have to go pick up your kids or if this would otherwise cause harm. There have been times where I’ve sat down for the five minutes and I’m nodding off or making mistakes because I’m distracted or too fatigued. Then I know I really can’t put in the time
But at least I know and I don’t feel guilty as I do those times I don’t even try.