To Do Your Best Work, Adopt a ‘Frugal Workload Mindset’
Having a sustainable workload provides you with enough time and energy to invest in yourself
A few months back, I wrote about The Sustainable Workload Loop —how I keep my calendar sane by managing more than just time. After all, scheduling a full day of work is futile if you run out of energy or motivation or focus halfway through.
Yet the goal of that process is sustainability, not productivity. Sure, declining the junk work and delegating the things I do not need to implement myself saves me time. Only doing the stuff I’m ready to get done cuts down on overhead and context switching too. It is necessary to keep me functional, but insufficient to make me more productive than my peers.
How I think of the difference is a bit of an analogy, so I’ll need you to indulge me a little here. Each person has a fixed amount of time, and a relatively fixed amount of energy, motivation, and focus per day. Since you can’t dramatically change how much of that mental and emotional effort you can spend before exhaustion, that’s what you need to budget for. The Sustainable Workload Loop helps you balance that budget. A balanced budget doesn’t mean you’re spending wisely though. It just means you’re staying out of that debt state where you’re scrambling to…
