About a month ago, I published an article about the power of effort-tracking, which explained how to use an effort-tracking spreadsheet to increase your productivity and exercise more. The thing is, my personal productivity has been excellent, and my exercise is on autopilot, so I hadn’t been using an effort tracker for over a year.
But at the time I published that article, I was struggling with burnout. I had been working too much and resting too little. And I realized that I had at my fingertips an elegant mechanical solution to this problem: I would track my recovery.
So I grabbed an empty spreadsheet from my coaching supplies, listed seven mental recovery activities, set weekly targets, and began keeping track of how often I did them. The items are:
- Walking
- Time in nature
- Stretching
- Listening to a wisdom podcast
- Reading
- Napping
- Gratitude journaling
None of these are new behaviors – they’re all things I would do from time to time anyway. But as soon as I started tracking them, I began doing them more often.
And it worked. Deliberately devoting more time to mental recovery quickly reduced my feelings of burnout. I’ve become calmer and more relaxed, I’m handling stress better, and I’m feeling less exhausted at the end of the week.
But wait, if you’re spending more time on rest and recovery, aren’t you being less productive?
Good question. Yes, I am being less productive. But if I were to sprint all day, every day, I would quickly exhaust myself and be unable to work at all. So I’m only being less productive in the short run. Because I’m being more sustainable in my efforts, I’ll be able to be more productive in the long run.
If you’re feeling burnt-out, overworked, or hyper stressed, it’s important to give yourself permission to rest. But that alone might not be enough. You might also need to track your recovery.