Tag: progress

Redesigning everyday life

Last few weeks I have been taking some more rest and time out to reflect on my progress so far. It’s been a steep learning curve and I am now up to a point where I almost know how much energy I have on any given day. I am now working on a system to score the amount of energy of each individual activity in a way such that I can compare and measure my flow of energy.

Until now I was giving out colours , red for an energy consuming task, green for an energy giving task and yellow for neutral. At the end of the day I also scored the overall day on a scale of 1 to 10.

While this was fine it didn’t help me as much as I wanted, especially when planning ahead. While thinking about this , I set on designing a system that helps me plan my activities more accurately and thus keep the heavy dips in energy at bay. So my first idea was to come up with some kind of system to score my activities and my daily available energy amount.

I discussed my idea with my therapist and she had a system which they don’t use that often because it’s normally a bit to hard for people to understand. But it has exactly what I need , a scientific based scoring method to score your activities. It also has a tool to calculate your base daily energy.

The goal for me is now to start and measure the activities and score my days. Once I have that sorted I will be able to manage my energy in a way that the strange dips in energy don’t occur as much any more.

For me this is a great step in redesigning my life in such a way I feel more in control about it. It also opens a lot opportunities to develop this further. Since it’s more accurate than just handing out colours it has a lot of potential for analysing my day to day and week to week planning.

I am very enthusiastic about this new method and hopefully I can report some good progress over the next few weeks and months.

Plan A or B

It’s been a few weeks since the post on the test results and in the meantime I have been spending some time on digesting everything, still a lot of questions need to be answered which I will hopefully get to in the next few weeks.

The recovery is now focussed on getting my concentration better when doing mentally intensive tasks. I have to cut up a task in tiny 10 minute pieces and take 10 minute brakes between them and do this for 1 hour. I then have to write all I experience during and after this hour. Also I have to grade my fatigue and general well being beforehand. Did I sleep well, what did I do the day before? That sort of thing. This is important to get a feel of how I perform and feel during a period of intensive activity.

I must admit last few weeks haven’t been easy , I had a bit of a setback after the ‘pressure’ of work went away , it’s not that they pushed me at work it’s just the fact that you want to perform at the best of your abilities. That being out of the way it became apparent how much energy this took away. After a week or so it started too creep in, being tired more often. Feeling fuzzy and unable to think properly. The people at the recovery centre told me this is normal when people go at it with full force, and thus having a few setbacks during the process. Learning to deal with these episodes is the important part.

One important factor which I always forget is to relax and let go , not constantly trying to figure out ways to improve myself and try to work on it all the time, be it consciously or subconsciously. Working harder isn’t the solution , relaxing more is. Which is an adjustment for me at the moment, but one I need to make.

They also pointed out to me I just started to really process what it means and what has actually happened in the past 7 months or so. After this stage I will have more room to accept it and then move forward again. All contributing to my recovery. So after sprinting in the beginning I am back to basics, simply walking.

It’s really strange how this affects your life , impacting almost everything you do on a day to day basis. Ignoring tell-tale signs of fatigue and pushing on is not the way to go. This also means being flexible enough to throw your ‘plan A’ out of the window and having a ‘plan B’ ready just in case. Which I now try to do when I plan my weeks. So if on any given day in the week I will be too tired for an activity I will have a backup activity in place, thus reducing stress from the pressure you put on yourself wanting to finish something.

Like Hannibal did in the old days, so every day can be concluded with ” I love it , when a plan comes together ” .