In my previous job as a strategy consultant, I felt lucky when I managed to sleep more than four or five hours a night. During the workday, I subsisted on our office stash of espresso and Cheerios because there wasn’t time to walk to lunch and still get everything done. When Friday afternoon finally came around, I practically collapsed into the weekend, completely depleted.
Whether your work takes place inside or outside the home, with or without pay, chances are you’ve felt similarly overwhelmed at some point. “‘Time poverty’ is the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it, and it’s really common these days,” Cassie Holmes, PhD, a professor of marketing and behavioral decision making at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management who has spent the last decade studying time and happiness, tells SELF.
And while many of us feel tired at the end of the week, “there is a difference between ‘My life is full’ exhaustion and the ‘Life is passing me by’ kind,” Dr. Holmes says. When it’s the former, she explains, you’re more likely to head into the next week with a “bring it on” attitude rather than one of “ugh, here we go again.”
Some energizing news: You don’t necessarily need endless hours in the day to achieve the “bring it on” spirit. In fact, Dr. Holmes, whose book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most came out earlier this month, says time isn’t only the problem; it’s also the solution. “The goal is to make our time more fulfilling during the week, not just full,” she says. You may still have a jam-packed schedule, but by making your time feel more meaningful, you might also feel less mentally spent (even if you’re still physically pooped).
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Here, Dr. Holmes shares her top tips for making the most of your weekday hours—before, during, and after work—so they feel less stressful and draining.
Track your time and happiness.
To add more happy hours to your day, you first need to understand how you’re spending your waking hours and how each task or activity makes you feel, Dr. Holmes says. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as saying, “Work makes me sad and being elsewhere makes me happy.” Instead, she recommends tracking your time for a week or two—in a journal, say, or a notes app. Her method: Log your daily activities in 30-minute increments and rate them on a happiness scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not at all happy and 10 is very happy. Think of happiness in its broadest sense: “What we’re going for is overall happiness of the activity, including feeling excitedly energized or blissfully serene,” Dr. Holmes says.
To set yourself up for the analysis phase of this exercise, rather than jotting down “work” as one of your 30-minute time blocks, get specific and note things like “staff meeting,” “restocking,” or “charting on patients.” And capture the situational nuance if you can: Maybe making dinner on Wednesday night for your kids when you had to be somewhere 20 minutes later felt awful, but stirring homemade risotto on Friday night while sipping a glass of wine to a soundtrack of Jon Batiste was pure luxury.
Source: SELF
