Manage your energy to manage your time: Mental energy part 2

In the second part of our series on energy levels relating to time management, we shall discuss how mental energy needs to be seriously considered when we look at time management.

Just as our physical energy levels are depleted when we are hungry, our mental energy levels also tend to have peaks and lows throughout the day.  It is important to understand the factors that influence your mental energy in order to be able to manage your peaks and lows and to be able to plan your high level tasks in accordance with your peak mental energy periods.

What exactly is mental energy? Mental energy is our ability to concentrate and focus upon high level tasks.  Our ability to make good decisions is also dependent upon our mental energy which is rapidly depleted as the day progresses.

Signs of mental fatigue include poor concentration, clumsiness, finding normal tasks more complicated than they need to be, procrastination and making unnecessary mistakes. Your ability to think and reason clearly is jeopardised.  Severe exhaustion often results in burnout and depression. 

At The Time Clinic, we assist employees and individuals in establishing balance in order to optimise productivity and wellness.  As you can see, if your relationship to time is unbalanced, effectiveness in all areas is compromised.

Do emotions affect mental energy? Emotions we will examine in our next module, emotional energy, but it is important to mention here that yes, emotions do impact upon our energy levels.  Just as positive emotions can increase our feelings of motivation and enthusiasm, so to can negative emotions add to our ‘allostatic’ or stress load, and result in increased feelings of tiredness and depletion.  For this reason, we will examine all three aspects of a human being’s energy in this series, but for the purposes of this article, let us focus on mental energy.

Now that we understand how mental energy is crucial to our performance for intellectual and high level tasks including in both the workplace and while studying, how can we manage this energy and, if need be, boost it when required?

The first thing we need to understand is that each and every human being has their own unique peaks and lows.  Some of us are more inclined to function better first thing in the morning, whilst others take a while to ‘warm up’ and others still prefer to burn the ‘midnight oil’.  You need to ask yourself when do you find your best times of the day are for working on high level tasks?  Can you rearrange your schedule in order to move these tasks to these times?

What can we do to boost or increase our mental energy?  Taking supplements such as Gingko Biloba and Peruvian superfood ‘Maca’ can increase energy and concentration. High doses of vitamin B6 and B12 and Omega 3 oils also assist brain functioning.  Avoid caffeinated beverages as the initial boost may be appealing, but adrenal burn-out tends to result in the afternoon.  Stick to green tea for a healthier dose of a more natural type of caffeine.

Eating a low GI or high protein diet can also dramatically improve mental energy levels.  Have you ever noticed how after a big meal or a sugary treat how all you want to do is sleep? High blood  sugar and insulin are major culprits for depleted energy levels.  Eating a low GI or high protein diet will also ensure you get the extra B vitamins and essential fats that will feed your brain to aid concentration levels whilst keeping your sugar levels even.

Aside from diet and supplements, what else can be done? Well, a change is as good as a holiday so they say! Think of your energy levels as batteries that need to be recharged.  Sitting at your desk all day without a break is going to result in depletion. A five to fifteen minute break every forty minutes is important to recharge your batteries and help you stay motivated. Go for a walk, get some sunshine, stretch!  If your working environment does not enable this type of movement, then rather move to a less high level task to give yourself a break for a while.  Try to reward yourself with incentives throughout your day.

Try to spend more time on activities that are challenging.  We call these ‘flow’ opportunities.  Sometimes the biggest reward lies not in the outcome of the task, but in the way we feel when we are being stretched! Have you ever noticed how time flies when you are working on a challenging task, and how you resent being interrupted? Plan your day to allow yourself stretch opportunities when you can work for periods without interruptions on these challenging tasks.  If you can’t think of any at work, then find a hobby at home!  Stretch opportunities recharge your mental batteries!

In our final article in this series, we will examine emotional energy, an aspect that must not be ignored in order to complete the time management picture.  We hope you enjoyed our article and remember to follow our blog to stay updated or 'like' our facebook page for more updates.

For more information on time management and time management training visit www.timeclinic.co.za

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Ten tips that make life easier - yay!

We found this short, fun gem of a talk by Tech columnist David Pogue. He shares 10 simple, clever tips for computer, web, smartphone and camera users and we certainly learnt a few that will make life easier. We are pretty certain you will too.

Enjoy friends!

Manage your energy to manage your time: Part One – Physical Energy

A critical and often overlooked aspect of time management is energy management.

If we take a look at our average working day, our energy levels fluctuate throughout.  These energy fluctuations are different for each and every individual and it is essential to monitor and understand your peaks and lows in order to prioritise your workload accordingly. 

As human beings, we have different types of energy that we need to be aware of.  The first and most obvious category is physical energy.  The second category, mental energy, is linked to, but not always dependent on physical energy levels. Have you ever gone to bed physically exhausted, but found yourself unable to sleep due to an overactive mind? 

Sometimes our bodies are tired, but our minds are still capable of high priority tasks.  The third category is emotional energy – our very psychology and source of motivation.

At The Time Clinic we believe time management isn’t about managing the hours in the day, it is about managing yourself; a complex organism with various facets in response to the numerous tasks that you are required to perform and objectives you wish to achieve.  Understanding the three different types of energy and how to renew each resource is critical to your success.

How healthy are you? Increasing your physical fitness not only increases your stamina, but counters stress and improves overall vitality.  Taking measures to increase your physical fitness may initially take more time out of your day, but the increased benefits will soon outweigh the sacrifice.

Eating a low GI diet will improve your physical stamina. And the grains, seeds and good fats characteristic of a low GI diet will also feed your brain at the same time, assisting your mental function and mood.

So often we chastise ourselves for being different to others in terms of the hours we are inclined to keep. Have you ever wondered if this thinking is serving you, and if there is a way you can rather rearrange your day to correspond with your energy levels? For example, by exercising at the correct time of day for your specific genotype, you will obtain better results.  One of the things we do at The Time Clinic is identify individual genotypes and assist people in optimising, and adjusting their personal biorhythms. 

Once you have made every effort to optimise your physical energy, analyse your typical day.  What tasks require more physical resources? Perhaps you function better when you arrive at work earlier rather than later? Could you schedule a walk at lunch time to get some exercise whilst refreshing your other energy resources?  How can you rearrange your schedule to optimise your physical energy?

We will continue this discussion and include mental and emotional energy management in our follow-up articles, but we challenge you to consider these questions in the meantime and wish you all the best on your journey to vitality and optimal personal and time management!

Find out more about our training courses at www.timeclinic.co.za

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Beat stress once and for all!

Need to manage the stress in your life? In order to do so, you need to manage your allostatic load. This may sound like a mouthful, but is a concept that is useful to explain the load that is upon your shoulders including the worries that prevent you from sleeping at night.  Allostatic load is a negative form of stress that literally ‘weighs us down’ and eventually causes us to become ill.

This toxic negative stress also leads to inflammation of the brain which prevents us from forming new neural connections – in other words we become unable to learn, develop and grow.  So what can you do to lighten your allostatic load and combat stress?

The first thing we need to accept is the lifestyles that we are living in today’s modern age are not healthy, nor are they natural.  Every delegate who attends our course complains that their ‘work life balance’ is a big problem, and wish they had more ‘me’ time.  We are living a life that is out of balance and in crisis. As a result we lose sight of the very things that help us cope and stay healthy; the aspects of our lives and ourselves that keep us in balance.

 The human body was not designed to be sedentary, sitting behind a desk from nine to five (or seven to seven!).  Exercise has been proven to not only the reduce stress hormones in the body, but also causes neural pathways to grow and form: in other words, exercise keeps you young!  Dramatic results have been found in seniors who simply start walking for an hour every day.  Exercise is crucial to helping you rediscover your balance, however neuro-scientist Bruce McEwen has revealed that exercise can be more effective in a social environment.  

Social support is a dimension that is necessary to balance the human being.  In times of crisis, many people withdraw from their friends and loved ones.  Being lonely can also add to your allostatic load.  We must attempt to increase our social contact and nourish our important relationships rather than neglect them during times of crisis.

The human being has a spiritual dimension.  We are not referring to religion or new age philosophy, but simply the aspect of each and every one of us that seeks to find meaning.  Viktor Frankl, famous psychologist and holocaust survivor, pioneered the idea that the strongest motivational force we can tap into is the meaning we are able to create for ourselves.  A concentration camp survivor, Frankl noticed that the prisoners who had a sense of meaning in their lives survived, whilst those who couldn’t not find it sadly perished under the dreadful circumstances.

 So how does one find meaning when one feels out of balance? When we neglect ourselves during times of toxic stress, we forget the things in life that bring us joy.  So many of our clients arrive for training and have lost the ability to desire things on a personal level.  This is purely a result of chronic toxic stress and the loss of connection with self.  To restore the balance, we need to find and make time for the things that bring us joy on a daily basis. We need to make time for ourselves once again.

Living with the world resting upon your shoulders is neither a healthy nor a sustainable option.  The good news is change really is possible if we simply focus on the restoration of balance by making time to appreciate ourselves as individuals – physically, emotionally and spiritually.

For more information on stress management and making time for the important things contact info@timeclinic.co.za.  

To find out more about the toxic effects of stress read this article: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/how-stress-gets-under-the-skin-qa-with-neuroscientist-bruce-mcewen/

Image by Stuart Miles www.freedigitalphotos.net

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will do!

Goals.  So many of us hear that word and cringe.  Perhaps you relate goals to New Year’s resolutions, and have had about the same measure of success? Or perhaps you have this nagging feeling that you really need to create some goals, but when you think about it you find it really hard to want things for yourself? Sound familiar?

Did you know that only 3% of us actually write down our goals.  The sad reality is if we are not writing down our goals, we may as well not bother with them, as they remain a ‘nice to have’.  When we put pen to paper, we are far more committed psychologically to attaining them.

Think of goals as arriving at the train station.  If you have no goal – or destination – you may as well climb on an unmarked train and wonder where it will take you.  One thing I have become very convinced of is that what we expect out of life, we will receive.  And this is not a new-agey spiritual concept, it’s common sense that we play a hand in creating that reality for ourselves!  If you have no goals, you will tend to regard yourself as a victim of circumstance.  However, by setting our destination and deciding what it is that we really do want from life, chances are we will receive it.

It makes sense to have goals, no one can dispute this. Yet one of the hardest parts is creating these goals for ourselves.  Some of you may find it much easier to create career and money goals, but will struggle with spiritual and personal goals because it is much easier to think of other people than to think about yourself.  Others will find the opposite – personal goals are easier, but career and money goals are more difficult. If this is the case, you are probably not feeling fulfilled in your current worklife, and need to evaluate your direction in order to set some goals that will enable you to create a fulfilled career.

There is a concept known as ‘locus of control’.  If you have an internalised locus of control, you believe that you are the master of your own destiny and that you can create the life that you desire.  A person with an externalised ‘locus of control’ believes the opposite – that they are a victim of circumstance;  that fate decides their path and that no matter what they do, external circumstances will override their intentions.  An externalised locus of control does not cause us to be happy or healthy.  Yet we can really turn this around by creating goals and taking back the reins of our own lives.  As little by little we achieve success, our mindsets will automatically shift into a healthier space, one where we accept and practice self mastery over our own lives.

 Goals will involve some introspection; we need to spend quiet time with ourselves and decide what it is we want from life.  Do not think this is selfish behaviour, rather it is crucial for your personal development, mental and physical health!

Commit to discovering and writing down your goals today, and take back your power and control so that you can create the life you really want to lead.

If you would like to attend a goal actualisation workshop where you can discover how to overcome the obstacles to attaining your goals, contact info@timeclinic.co.za.

Image by Tony Curtis Freedigitalphotos.net

Why do we procrastinate?

You know you should be doing that important task, but you find yourself creating other things to do that are either more pleasurable or more ‘important’ instead. Well, they are not really more important, who are we kidding! But we will go to extreme lengths to find tasks to distract us from the very things we are avoiding in order to justify the guilty that we are feeling. Some of us even help others to avoid the issues in our own lives. Sound familiar?

Have you ever wondered why we do this to ourselves? And is there ever a legitimate reason to procrastinate?

Procrastination was built into us as a biological defence mechanism.  There really is a legitimate reason we procrastinate.  Let us imagine that I was to ask you to invest in a new business proposition that you were unsure of.  Or perhaps I ask you to do something that initially appeared ‘above board’, but the more you thought about it, the more unsure you became?  Can you relate that uncertainty to a ‘gut feeling’? Well your gut is correct in some cases! That feeling of uncertainty is there to caution you, to warn you of potential danger in situations where you might be at risk, or where you could be potentially compromised. A useful mechanism, agreed?

This legitimate reason to procrastinate somehow got corrupted along the way when our brains realised the benefits of procrastinating over ordinary things.  At a subconscious level, this biological mechanism has gotten confused when in today’s world we are faced with tasks that we do not feel like doing. We beat ourselves up over the fact that we are procrastinators, but to procrastinate is a human response. However, it is a habit that is not productive, and a habit that does not need to control us and can indeed be overcome with the right set of tools.

The good news is that no human being was born a procrastinator.  Every single human being has developed their own pattern of procrastination along the way. You are not alone. And you really can shed the shackles of procrastination.

For more information on procrastination and how to overcome procrastination email info@timeclinic.co.za This information is copyright of The Time Clinic and unauthorised distribution is prohibited.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles www.freedigitalphotos.net

The Puzzle of Motivation

I'd like to share this really interesting TED Talk with you that is turning what we think in business regarding motivation upside down.  An important talk for us to better understand ourselves, and an important talk to watch for us to better understand our working environments.  Dan Pink was Al Gore's speechwriter and is a career analyst who incorporates social psychology. Enjoy!