Trapped in a time management — not anymore
By: A Peanut Sauce
Tags: Self Development, Time Management, Love Yourself, Energy Management

Good news is, It doesnt do like that. how come we expect ourselves being constant all day long, it’s ridiculous it’s like you expect your smartphone to always have 100 % battery. A delucional yet unlogical thought. Time management require you at constant energy. while in fact we have a finite resource of energy. time management is overrated, you control over something that you cant control which btw its ridiculous it leads you to self criticize and I call it the never-ending-self-blaming cycle. You feel terrible when you cant finish spesific task, at the other hand you feel burnout with this never ending to do list. we are not a robot. please love yourself more

Thus, I started to think that the idea of time management is unappropriate, and maybe that is one of the reason my anxiety comes, as it turns out energy management is my next approach towards managing myself. I dont wanna be a person who caught up in one job and feel terrible after going home cause I feel too tired to mingle with my partner. Balance is the key.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

So basicly energy management is know your level of energy towards a day and put an activities that match with your level of energy. For me, it is easier to imagine my self as a smartphone. when I have a green battery level I could have a deep work. and vice versa, when my self battery is low a.k.a red, I just let myself charging for a while and put myself in a ‘save battery mode’. It’s not always green at the very beginning of the day, it depends on my amount of sleeps yesterday, my mood, and other variables. so usually before doing somekind of task I would ask to myself, what is my battery level right now? when my answer would be 80% green I could do a deep work. or maybe I make it 100 % first by sipping a tea in the morning. So when you come over to mydesk and happen to know that I sip my hot tea, I am charging myself that time.

To jumping from task by task I use pomodoro techniques, maybe some of you have been familiar with this. Pomodoro ( Duh, I keep thinking about the well-known property developer name in ID that have similar name, lol ok nevermind) — is from italian word means “Tomato” the idea is slicing your time just like the part of tomato. you do a work on a spesific time and take a rest before you starting to take another set of work. I did some adjustments to this pomodoro by adding my level of energy as a variable so I might have let my self doing a deep work with 2 hours non stop when I have the full green self energy level. or another time I might have let my self doing only 15 minutes of work non stop when I only have small amount of self energy.

Photo by Tetiana SHYSHKINA on Unsplash

energy management more flexible rather than time management. It facilitate me to enter the new area of my self which is a better self satisfaction, I feel content eventhough I did not checked all my to do list, because I am fully aware of my condition. I started to make a clear decision about what the things that should be done in a day and able to do a better prioritization. On a long run, it helps me to minimize the low self esteem and indecisive act. I also able to say NO to a spesific task when I dont have an energy to finish it by that time.

I come up with another conclusion : be fluctuative is okay. stop judging yourself the world is already cruel why you have to be cruel to urself? how come you let the season have its own seasonality while you dont allow yourself to be seasonal sometimes? Don’t expect yourself to always have bloomy spring. summer breeze is okay, greasy reddish leaves on autumn is romantic or even the quite white cold winter is beautiful too. why you judge yourself and hope that everything should be at its peak when the nature clearly give you the sign there will be peak and valley out there.

Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash

In fact we all agreed that Alternating Current (AC) that have sinusoidal patterns in electrical engineering system is more beneficial and flexible rather than Direct Current (DC) with constant pattern graph. (ok I started to sounds boring but who cares)

Photo by Severin Demchuk on Unsplash

The point is I just wanna say that : when you are at your seasonality that is okay. when you dont always at your peak that is okay. Au Revoir !