by Todd Henry
WHOLE-LIFE PLANNING
Each and every second, we encounter millions of stimuli in our environment, but we are conscious of only a few at any given time. Right now you are likely feeling the weight of this book (or your e-reader) in your hands, the pressure of your chair on your rear, and the temperature of the air around you. But chances are you weren’t thinking about any of these before I called them to your attention. That’s because the only way you are able to survive as a human is by selectively ignoring stimuli that aren’t immediately relevant.
Selective attention is incredibly beneficial to us in that it allows us to focus on what matters in a complex and dangerous world. But for creatives, this kind of behavior can also cause us to lose sight of the big picture, and what’s really going on in the grand scheme of our life, for the sake of what’s immediately urgent or pressing. Often we unconsciously compartmentalize data as relevant or irrelevant to the problem at hand, conceptually dividing our life into various “airtight” chambers that don’t interact with one another. We like to think that the various areas of our life are like file folders that we can pull out of the cabinet, explore, then replace without affecting the other folders in the cabinet. We examine the various areas of our life and work, make commitments on them, and generate ideas for them, in isolation.
To reinforce this, the preponderance of self-help literature over the past few decades has focused on effectiveness in various areas of our life. There are books on managing work, managing home life, and effectively managing time by dividing responsibilities into categories. But this kind of “divide and conquer” technique is destined to fail because it ignores the interconnectedness of all areas of our life and the effects that a commitment in one area has on another. We need to build the practice of occasionally stepping back to examine our life as a whole and establishing a rhythm around energy that accounts for all the commitments in our life. This will help us avoid the energy drains that zap our capacity for regular insight.
The Fallacy of Compartmentalization
Because we tend to divide our life into buckets, we talk about things like our “work life” and our “home life” as though we can somehow slip out of our skin and assume another identity when transitioning between them. But trying to compartmentalize the various parts of life can take a toll.
Every area of our life is hardwired to every other area. It is impossible to perform a task in one sphere and not have it affect another. Energy we put toward a work task is energy we can’t put toward a personal project. Similarly, every personal commitment we make, even if it’s just a commitment to think about something, requires energy that will not be available when it’s time to focus on our work.
How does this affect our ability to generate ideas? When we are in a very busy time at work, one in which we’re required to generate a lot of ideas in a short amount of time, we need tremendous amounts of energy and focus. But many of us make commitments and expend energy on other, less critical projects thoughtlessly during these times without considering the consequences. We don’t realize that each commitment we make affects every other. We fail to plan ahead and take into account the creative energy that will be required by our work during a specific week and continue to make commitments, plan meetings, or allocate time to work on unrelated projects.
Most of us assume that as long as time is available, we can continue filling it up. This is how we have been trained to think about productivity—it’s all about efficiency. But mindlessly stacking unrelated activities and projects into a week where we expect creative breakthroughs on important projects only drains our energy and fractures our focus. This goes for personal commitments, too. We will miss critical insights that could lead to conceptual breakthroughs simply because we are operating at less than optimum capacity. However, if we take into account the season we are in at work and at home, along with all the associated demands, we will be able to make commitments wisely rather than by instinct.
I’ve met and worked with many people who blow right past this principle at great cost. In fact, I used to be one of them. During one five-month period of my life, I was growing a creative team from five members to twenty-five, continuing to manage the daily demands of my very challenging fifty-to-sixty-hour-a-week job, dealing with the needs of our newborn second child (and his older brother), working on the adoption of our little girl from Guatemala, launching a nonprofit to fund international adoption and planning an associated benefit concert, working on a book with a colleague, working on the early stages of what has become Accidental Creative, performing with a band and writing music with my songwriter friends, and attempting to maintain some type of interpersonal health with my wife and close friends.
At the time, I remember feeling like I was being quite productive. I was accomplishing more than I ever had, seeing success across every area of my life, and feeling pretty good physically. Until I hit bottom. Hard. Because I technically had the time I needed to focus on each of these projects, I didn’t think there was any problem with pursuing them with full guns blazing. I would stack hour after hour with project activity and creative demands, but unknowingly my creative engine was burning oil.
One day, I realized that though I was technically “working” on all of these projects, I was gradually becoming less effective in each of them. I stopped having ideas for the book I was working on, and I was straining my relationship with my coauthor. Team and organizational leadership priorities became fuzzy, and my team was suffering badly. Ideas weren’t flowing for our most important initiatives. My interpersonal relationships, including with my wife, were strained. Most surprising of all, everything that I was once quite excited about felt like an obligation rather than an opportunity. I was spent. I was a shell of myself. I wasn’t able to bring the best part of myself—my creative insights and leadership—to anything that mattered to me. I had to take time off from work just to reground myself in what I was really trying to do. I had to trim several initiatives out of my life—at the expense of the personal relationships involved—just to get my head above water. The worst part was that my family had been feeling the effects of my overextension for a very long time, and I’d not even noticed. My wife and I had to have some frank discussions about setting boundaries in my work, including the amount of hours I could put in.
The principle that I’d blown right past in my pursuit of creative invincibility was that each commitment I made, and each project I decided to take on, required something more of me than just my time. Each required my energy. And because I was not being strategic and purposeful about the number and nature of the simultaneous commitments I was making, I soon found myself in energy debt. I was creatively inverted and no longer had enough energy to generate the ideas I needed just to keep my head above water.
When you are planning your life, you need to account for every commitment you make in every area. This means that when you are in a busy season at work, you need to be disciplined enough to trim back the number of personal commitments you make. Similarly, when you are entering a busy season in your personal life, you need to be purposeful about the extra commitments you take on for work. While you can’t always choose what you work on, you can be careful and strategic about where you focus your energy outside of those core commitments.
When you are planning your life, you need to account for every commitment you make in every area.
Question: Can you think of a time in your life when the convergence of your personal commitments and your work commitments have caused you to feel overwhelmed and ineffective?
The Three Horizons of Whole-Life Planning
There are three horizons of whole-life planning that I recommend to clients: weekly, monthly, and quarterly. It is critical to get ahead of your energy commitments and examine them objectively. Saying no to a new opportunity is very difficult in the moment, but if you have been strategic in your planning and know what a new commitment will truly cost you, then you can refuse new opportunities with confidence. Once
you understand your limits, you will be able to manage your energy more effectively. Remember, this is about setting yourself up to have conceptual breakthroughs in the areas of your life and work that matter most.
▶ WEEKLY
As part of your weekly checkpoint (which we’ll discuss in chapter 9) analyze the demands of the coming week. As you look at your calendar, don’t focus on work-related commitments alone. Remember, your personal commitments affect your energy just as much as your work ones do. (In fact, I’d strongly encourage you to keep only one calendar with both work and personal commitments in the same place, or use two calendars in the same place that can be selectively shown or hidden, such as in Google Calendar. It’s difficult to look at multiple calendars in multiple places and get a good sense for how overcommitted you really are. If you can’t keep your personal and work commitments in the same calendar, at least have both calendars available as you do your weekly checkpoint.)
Pay attention to those activities that you find invigorating, such as meeting with clients, brainstorming sessions, or strategy sessions, versus those you find draining, such as follow-up calls, invoicing, or weekly status-update meetings. As much as you are able, try to space out the energy-draining activities throughout your days and week rather than stacking them together. If you have multiple difficult conversations on the agenda for the week, try not to put them back-to-back on your calendar, or you’re guaranteed to be fairly useless the rest of the day. Instead, try to space them out and create buffers.
For example, if you have multiple draining phone calls to make back-to-back, try taking a short walk or spending five minutes with headphones on listening to music in between. While on the surface this may appear to be slacking, you are actually restoring your energy and making sure that you will be able to give your best effort to the next call. You can also apply this method to other draining back-to-back activities as a way to cleanse your palette and recuperate a bit before diving into your next exertion of energy.
Buffers, or quick energy-building activities, can also be helpful in managing energy as you shift between various roles throughout your week. One practice that I’ve effectively built into my life is to establish a buffer between work and home life so that I don’t carry the angst and pressure of work home to my family. During my weekly planning time, if I see that I’m going to have an especially busy week, I plan to arrive at work fifteen to twenty minutes early so that I can leave early at the end of the day. With that extra end-of-day time, I will stop off at a bookstore and browse new titles. I find that this is a quick way of renewing energy and “rebooting” my system before interacting with my family.
When I fail to practice this and arrive at home still a bit stressed from the day, I’m usually reminded by my son Owen, who has taken on the responsibility of announcing to the family, “Daddy’s just a little grumpy tonight.” That’s not acceptable to me. I want my family to get my best. Buffers, whether between work and home or between energy-draining meetings, can be an effective way to reboot and ensure that you’re always giving your best to whatever is in front of you. As you’re planning your week, make sure that you’re placing them strategically.
This is also where you will put all your energy-giving activities on the calendar and commit to them. When will you study, read, or experience other stimuli this week? When will you have time to yourself to strategize and generate ideas for your projects? When will you take a walk or exercise? What does your sleep schedule look like this week? Are there any late nights? If so, what does that mean about what should happen the next morning?
Again, in all these things we are not attempting to strike some kind of “life balance.” We are simply being strategic about managing energy so that we have it when we need it to generate ideas. If we are wise in our energy management, we will find that ideas emerge when we least expect them. Our minds are constantly working in the background to solve whatever problems we give them. We just need to be strategic about clearing the way and ensuring they have the energy they need to do their job. It’s amazing what happens when we work with, rather than against, the natural flow of the creative process.
▶ MONTHLY
During your monthly checkpoint (again, to be discussed later), you need to spend time analyzing what’s on the horizon over the next several weeks. This is where you can make strategic choices about new projects, both work and personal, relationships you want to rekindle, and overall priorities in terms of energy use. If you see a new work project emerging and anticipate that it will require a lot of your time and energy, scaling down your expectations about personal commitments may be wise. (You will probably want to have this conversation with others in your life.) Similarly, if your month is looking a little light, then it may be time to take on a personal project that’s been waiting in the queue.
This is also where you want to develop a template for your month. Are there specific practices that you want to build into your month as buffers? When will you perform the tasks that give you energy, like exercise, study, or connecting with friends? Setting expectations about these things on a monthly basis will help you make choices about where you will spend your energy so that you won’t have to instinctively or reactively make them in the moment. Remember that creativity craves structure. When you establish effective boundaries, you are focusing your creative energy rather than allowing it to run rampant.
▶ QUARTERLY
During your quarterly checkpoint you will be looking at your life rhythm as a whole and establishing priorities. Are there significant milestones on the horizon that need to be accounted for? Are there important principles in your life that are being neglected and need to be revisited? Are there projects that you’ve always dreamed of pursuing but can never find the energy to get moving on? Now is the time to get these on paper and to start analyzing what can be done over the next quarter to initiate them. Again, your eye is primarily on energy management, so you are looking for opportunities to be strategic and wise about your life and which projects you pursue according to what will be required of you. You want to be poised to bring your best effort to all your projects, even the personal ones. If the upcoming quarter contains several new work initiatives, “build rocket-powered personal jet pack” might not be the best objective to initiate, but “write proposal for rocket-powered personal jet pack” may work.
This quarterly planning time is also when you want to get any new and intriguing work projects in the mix. Are there things that you’ve wanted to suggest or pursue but haven’t because it’s never a good time? See if there’s any aspect of the idea that you could begin to implement this quarter.
Make certain that you’re taking into account every upcoming commitment, milestone, and project. If there are especially busy seasons for your family (birthdays, anniversaries, et cetera), take those into account as you are setting expectations for the upcoming quarter.
Whole-life planning recognizes that your creative process is the result of the merging of all your experiences, skills, and passions. When you are able to strategically and purposefully structure your life so that you are giving your best energy to what’s most critical, ideas will naturally start to flow in situations when you need them most. As mentioned, you will be learning more about how to integrate this practice with all the other practices in the chapter on checkpoints.
ELIMINATE LESS EFFECTIVE ACTIVITY
A second energy-management practice closely related to whole-life planning is pruning. We all live with the illusion that we can have it all. This illusion is sold to us in the media; we are bombarded by ads and the news with images of people who accomplish superhuman feats of work without sacrificing anything in the process. And it doesn’t help that when we look around it seems like many people around us are living this “have it all” dream as well. They take a significant role at work, lead a few charitable initiatives, are active in their family life, and always seem to have a story about some weekend project they’ve been tinkering with on the side
. If we’re honest, encountering these people can make us feel like we’re simply not pulling our weight as a human being.
Do you want to know how these people are capable of accomplishing so much? It’s likely because (1) they are projecting an image of extreme productivity that doesn’t match reality, (2) they are overextending themselves and are about to crash, or (3) they’ve learned the secret of energy management, and especially the practice of pruning. They are concentrating their energy and creative efforts on a select group of activities that provide them with the maximum amount of productivity. And because creative insight and productivity are cumulative, they continue to maintain forward momentum as long as they are mindful of their energy.
As mentioned above, each choice you make to do something is a choice not to do something else. I’m often reminded of something my father-in-law used to tell my wife when she was a child: “You can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.” That’s opportunity cost in a nutshell.
If you want to have the energy to creatively engage with the important things, you need to carefully choose your creative priorities. We each have a threshold for how many creative problems we can effectively manage at a given time. Taking on any additional obligations or commitments will decrease your overall effectiveness, and removing too many will mean you’re settling for less than your full potential. You want to feel stretched but not overextended.