There are Days Where I Don’t Feel Like Working. So I Don’t.

This isn’t a post about whining or bitching.

This isn’t a post about hardship in life either.

At the same time, this isn’t about finding that pity party to attend and lament.

There are just natural off days, where our hearts and minds just won’t return to work.

What should we do?

First off, I truly believe that I am not a goof-off. By and large, I work 6 days a week and around 16–17 hours a day. There are concurrent projects that excites me, multiple inspiring topics that I want to write and publish for multiple publications within Medium, have virtual coffee sessions with my prospects and clients trying to understand how I can help them and so much more.

I love to be productive and busy. It brings fulfillment to me.

Now that is an individual choice of course, henceforth I do not recommend or force feed my perspective to the people I meet, those whom I speak.

I don’t usually fall off the bandwagon even on days when I wake up sluggish. I seemed to have found the formula to pull my ears back into productivity. I would ensure that I start off on the right footing first thing in the morning by heading down to the park for a brisk walk. I take brisk walks because the sensation of deeper breathing makes me feel good. Those mild rivers of perspiration would help to bring my soul from the Land of the Z-Monster back to Planet Earth. A few pull-ups in and I get invigorated and ready to go.

Then as the routine goes, coffee, light breakfast, Post-It scribbles, simple social media posts and I will be in the productivity house for the entire day. It is a self-sustaining, self-greased machine that needs no external sources of fuel. I burn my own fuel.

Yet, there are days where no matter what I do, there is just nothing I can do.

Take for instance, today.

I woke up with a heavy head and I could see planets orbit around me. I went for my usual morning brisk walk and for unknown reasons, I just couldn’t sweat.

Then one thing led to another.

I made a mistake of taking a heavier breakfast which led to a prolong food coma which lasted beyond the golden productive window in the morning.

Then I started watching YouTube because I couldn’t focus on typing.

So I hit on one thumbnail after another.

Before long, the entire morning went down the drain.

Yet, I am lucky.

Because days like this, though not that common (good gracious!), aren’t unique. They have appeared before and have taken me to wasteland. So, I learnt from my past experiences dealing with my bad days. Knowing that bad days such as these could strike anytime, I made the conscious effort to stash work outputs into my productivity savings account every single day.

Let me explain.

I Write in Excess.

Using Medium contributions as an example, I have always believed in writing in excess so I could publish my stash during my bad days. Naturally, it takes much less effort to touch-up the article drafts, finding the relevant hashtags and hitting the publish button compared to writing the entire article from scratch.

As I plan to write 1 long form article (measured by 5 minutes or more) and 1 shorter article (measured by 4 minutes or less) a day, I would only call it a rest when I am done with an additional shorter piece. That would bring my daily composition tally to 3, where I will publish 2 and save 1. This ensures that I have sufficient stash to support consistency in content publication even when I am suffering from a bad patch.

I Go For Quick Wins.

Feeling good during bad days are extremely critical for a rebound back to normalcy. I typically feel good from work so that would be pretty difficult to achieve when I am undergoing a bad patch. Let me use social media as an example in this sub-section.

I would be doing 1 post on Linkedin, Facebook, forwarding my latest YouTube contents into Twitter and answering the questions with the highest views and circulation on Quora. I typically plan for this piece of work for an hour a day in order to build my profile online. It is tough and necessary. During bad days, all bets are off. I wouldn’t be able to commit to that level of effort expenditure so I look at my purpose and do the necessary minimum. Instead of creating content, I comment. It takes far less energy to comment. This helps to keep my profile high and I get to make my presence felt.

Tough time — Tough measures.

Bad days — Simple and effective measures.

If 80 marks does the job of scoring an A, then I will scrape past that line during bad days and leave grandiose ambitions for the good days.

The point is — I still get what I want.

I Talk Instead.

While it might be difficult to produce work outputs during bad days, talking seems to be unaffected by the downtime. I don’t really understand why and I cannot wrap my head around it. For some reason, the fatigue of fingers through relentless punching of the keyboard doesn’t derail the natural propensity of our mouths. Pretty frankly, we just want to talk.

Just to be clear, I am not an extrovert.

I prefer spending time with myself.

I know I can still be productive during bad days, we all do. We just have to be aware of ourselves and what we can still do when we are not at our best. For me, virtual meetings work. I would arrange for a reschedule of conference calls and meetings to be pulled forward to this day so that I can give my opinions on the current progress of projects and sales pipelines. I would also take the time to go through the numbers, such as the cost of customer acquisition, the margins for bundled projects and etc. It never failed to intrigue me how our minds and mouth can function to think and critique when we couldn’t produce.

It just is.

My Simple Conclusion.

We don’t always have golden runs. We are bound to have bad patches when we run often enough. Being self-awareness is important and we need to know what we can do when we are confronting our internal emotional tsunami.

The below works for me during bad days and I hope they will work for you when you are hit with one.

1. Write in excess. Stash work away in anticipation that bad days will come. We just don’t know when. When they do, we are prepared.
2. Go for quick wins. No matter how, they are still worthy wins. Something is always better than nothing.
3. Talk. Thinking and talking is way easier than thinking, talking and producing. When we have enough stash, we can decouple them to our benefit.

Does it always work for me?

I would say that it works 90% of the time. There will always be the outlier days where I couldn’t even bring myself out of bed.

Extreme bad days require extreme coping mechanisms.

This is what I do.

I go with my energy flow.

I sleep.

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About the Author:

As a Consultant by training, I believe in making the complex simple.

Because simplicity adds value.

Simplicity helps us gain clarity, and clarity helps us to grow.

And if we are not growing, then what’s the point of anything else?

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