We live in a world where the ambitious, dedicated and determined are expected to be 'on it' every day. Anything less is a dereliction of duty, regardless of what's going on in your life outside the office.
Here's the truth; you can't be 'on it' every day. Some days you're recovering after an illness. Other days you're recovering after the kids have been up all night. Party animals might have the odd day here or there where they're feeling worse for wear.
Those days of sub-optimal performance are what I call 'sludge' days. Classic symptoms are being easily distracted, finding non-core activities intriguing and exciting, and worrying about your clothes too much. It's a day you feel like you're trekking through mud. It might be signalled by feeling tired, fidgety or demotivated.
The best thing to do is to recognise that you're having a sludge day, accept it and work out a coping strategy.
Buzz disperses sludge
Only one thing can actually disperse sludge; an inspiring conversation that shifts the sludge with a big or stimulating idea. Buzz beats sludge. Sometimes sludge days are actually good for generating those ideas if you accept the downshift.
If you have buzz deficiency then you can't win. That's why you need to identify some 'sludge work'.
Sludge work
Sludge work is work that you don't need all of your brain to execute. It's work which is perhaps repetitive and low risk.
What constitutes sludge work depends on what you do when you're whizzing along on an optimal day and the kind of person you are. Here's some that work for me:
- Read all the updates on tickets executed by the team; gets me closer to what's going on day today and updates that are notable will disperse sludge.
- Invoice related work; any that gets to me is largely repetitive.
- Research papers or blog posts; things you need to just get into your brain for use later.
Too much sludge
I think the odd isolated sludge day is fine. Two a week, or two consecutive sludge days indicates a problem, either with your personal life or your job.
There's a problem if the culture of the company indulges sludge days as they tend to proliferate. Some enterprise have a culture that permits bits of sludge (see below) to creep into a typical working day.
Bits of sludge
It may be appropriate to do some sludge work in an otherwise busy, buzzy day. So perhaps you have a circadian dip at 1400 to 1500 every day, just after lunch. This might be a great time to get through ticket updates done by the team in the last 24 hrs (see above). Then it's coffee time and off you go, back into the zone of optimal performance.
So that's how I handle those times of sub-optimal performance. In time, you could start to respect these times as opportunities to rest the brain whilst staying productive.
