Low Energy Productivity

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Low Energy Productivity

I’ve been sick for about a week. Not fun.

Still, there’s work to be done. Just because I’m sick doesn’t mean I can’t not keep up with what I have to do – especially since I’m self-employed. So I’d spent much of last week conserving my energy for the bigger aspects of my work (facilitating two sessions at ProTECHtivity, taking part in a couple of podcast interviews, my mandated writing for clients) so that I didn’t overdo it and stay sick for very long.

Even during my rest periods, I did a few tasks that would fall under the category of “low energy” productivity. These are things anyone could do to that would have a high impact on their productivity while not draining them, and also provide a sense of accomplishment that can be sorely missed when ill.

Here are just a few of the things I did:

I cleaned up and organized my hard drives. Using Hazel to add additional rules and manually culling some files that were no longer needed freed up a ton of drive space and prepared me for the inevitable move away from my first-generation Drobo to a more stable backup system.Doing a major review in OmniFocus. I killed some contexts and took a long look at my projects and made some changes. I spent some time reviewing Kourosh Dini’s Creating Flow with OmniFocus once again (along with Asian Efficiency’s OmniFocus Premium Posts) and spent some time in my task manager of choice connecting better with what was on my plate.Playing with apps I hadn’t played much yet (like Alfred 2, for example)1 and apps I hadn’t played with in a while. I took some notes, but spent more time just “being” in the apps. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

For the better part of last week, I simply shifted into a mode of productivity that allowed me to focus on the major tasks at hand: getting well and doing what was needed to be done well. And even though I didn’t feel well over that time, I definitely did well with that time.

1 I’ll have more thoughts on Alfred 2 later this week, but Sven Fechner over at SimplicityBliss has some for OmniFocus users already.