How to reduce productivity stress… and sleep like a baby

The worst thing about being passionate about productivity is that you become very sensitive to the times when you’re not productive. Is the desire to be productive generated by a big list of things to do, or is it the other way around?

I find that stress manifests itself through:

1. The mental ‘pop-up reminder’
2. A persistent anxiety that I have forgotten something or am neglecting something.

For me, the stress indicator is whether or not I sleep well at night. The loops look something like this:

Good Spiral

Bad Spiral

I’ve tried a couple of ways to convert the bad spiral into the good spiral. Early attempts aimed at a good night’s sleep as the starting point. I exercised, got up early, avoided indigestion, and used mind calming techniques to remove or at least defer anxiety. E.g. “I will not worry about this now, because I know it will pop up tomorrow, so I’ll worry about it then” – can be surprisingly effective.

I was really surprised I could get this working; it only took a few weeks.

But it was still really deferring anxiety. In most cases, the pop-ups were still there, along with a background level of anxiety. So I concluded that I had not addressed the root cause. I guess this is what people who resort to sleeping drugs find.

Maybe I was allowing too many non-important tasks into my life? After re-reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I tried to apply the Urgency/Importance categorisation across my tasks. This was great – it highlighted that I was not getting to the important things – and it caused me to think about what really is important to me. Still had the pop-ups and anxiety though…

From here, I went on to read a lot of ‘getting organised’ type of stuff, and eventually latched onto David Allen’s ideas. I discovered that the mental pop-ups were occurring because my mind had no real sense of timing for its reminders. It will only stop the pop-ups when it knows it doesn’t have to remind me anymore i.e. it trusts that I have a method to handle the reminders.

This has been a watershed. I began carrying a pocket notebook and pencil around to capture the reminders and ideas as they came to me. I diligently entered these into a spreadsheet and used it as my daily task list. In the first two days I loaded about 90 items into the list. Amazing – no wonder I couldn’t sleep! All of those pop-ups going off all the time! Just three weeks later, my list is about 200, but my pop-ups have dropped to just a handful a day. Importantly, I’m sleeping like a baby.

The secret is not the act of listing – I’ve been making lists for years. The secret is the commitment to a cohesive process for capturing mental pop-ups and dealing with them. My stress levels plummeted within a week.

I’m now working on the best way to work the list…

Summary – The first habit to reduce stress

Buy a small pocket notepad and pencil – get into the habit of carrying it with you ALL THE TIME.

TIP 1: As you transfer items from your notepad to your main action lists – cross them out in the notepad, and tear out the pages when you’ve transferred everything. This helps you ‘close’ the pop-up.

TIP 2: When you buy your notepad – buy two so you’ve got the next one to move on to when you finish the first.