How often do you take a moment during the day to recharge? What does your week look like in terms of being busy? What about your year?
We can't plan for every eventuality, even the most organised of people have days that run away with them, but we can create little calm bubbles during each 24 hour cycle. Moments to catch our breath and balance out the busy times.
During our last Thrive day, we experimented with Pulsing, an idea developed by Adam Morgan at eatbigfish and presented in the book 'Do Pause: You Are Not A To Do List' by Robert Poynton (which by the way I highly recommend.) The premiss of the idea is to try and visualise how time feels to you. Not necessarily an easy concept to get your head around, but exploring how a moment in time feels can be used to assess your day and work out where pauses might be required going forward.
As described in the book we used a binary system where the numbers 1 and 0 were used to represent different experiences of time. The uncompromising number 1 was used for any busy, stressful, intense or unenjoyable activity. The huggable 0 was used to represent moments that felt calm, joyful, relaxed or peaceful. This is an example of how the day's participants divided activities.

The numbers weren't rigidly aligned to a time period i.e. 1 didn't have to equal 1 hour, rather the number was given to a moment based on the level of feeling it generated. Doing your accounts might only take an hour, but feel like '1111' if it's a task you hate, brewing your coffee might be an important morning ritual and feel like '000' even though it only takes up 5 minutes of your day.
A typical day for me, prior to using this technique, might have looked like:
0011111111111111111111110
The first 00 is shower time, I love this, it's a moment of calm and quiet before the day properly starts. The next 111 are sorting breakfast, which I hate! I never know what to make that is healthy, gluten free and quick so I often get agitated. The next 11 might be work commute and getting family to the train station on time, then it's usually 111111 in a row whilst I try to get myself focused and wade through admin, emails and accounts (oh and sort lunch that's another series of 1111s - there's a food prep theme here!) Then a whole load of 111111111s which is more work. Finally a chapter of my book (on a good day) concludes the day with a well deserved 0.
Not great reading is it? I was/am (it's a work in progress) pretty poor at pacing myself. I have a tendency to be all 1111111111111s thinking I'm being productive and then crash and burn. I love my work, but all work and no play (or calm bubbles) really does make Helen a dull, tired and grumpy girl.
The simplicity of this visual activity really made me realise things had to change, and now I am so much more mindful of the need to plan those huggable 0s into my days and as a result I am far, far more productive. Who knew self care could make such a difference!!
I've also found pulsing a really good tool for forecasting. As business owners we can use the model to predict busy periods, and therefore recognise when we might have to pay special attention to our self care needs. For example, as a designer-maker my October to January is often very busy. February can be quieter (this has changed significantly, Valentine's day used to be manic.) March often ramps up due to Mother's Day and trade shows, and then April to June is a little quieter again. July and August can be particularly tiring as they traditionally include my busiest summer shows and festivals, and then September drops off as people recover financially from the summer holidays and prepare for Christmas. Obviously it's not an exact science as external factors can influence the economic climate significantly, but it helps me to visualise when I'm likely to be most busy - and these are the times I have to take extra care to look after myself and find some small, regular bubbles of calm.
If you get to the end of a day feeling wiped out (even if you love your work and it's wiped out and happy), I'd urge you to have a go at this as it's amazing how powerful pauses can be, and how significantly they can enhance your mental and physical wellbeing. If you'd like to have a go at pulsing, drop me an email helen@thethriveplace.co.uk and I'll send you the simple template we used during the thrive day.