Six ways to do more without depleting yourself
When we’re ambitious about our life and work, how do we pursue multiple activities we really want to do, while keeping ourselves sustained? I’m often challenged by this, and from what I’ve heard from you, I know I’m not alone.
For me, I’m not seeking balance when juggling the mix of activities, nor is the pull to do a lot driven by productivity culture. Really, I just have a genuine interest to soak up all that I enjoy across my life and work.
And yet despite that desire, I struggle at times with feeling overwhelmed and unfocused, overthinking how I’m using my time, or not creating enough breathing room.
Does any of this resonate?
What I really want is to be able to enjoy the work without the tension. To be in flow and at peace with my choices, rather than second-guessing where I should be spending my time. I want to be able to stay fresh and focused, not drained and stretched.
A simple frame helps me here. Humans naturally move between two states: using our energy, and restoring it.
Below are six practices, three for each state, to keep ourselves sustained across all we want to do.
Six ways to do more without depleting yourself
HOW TO USE OUR ENERGY
Think in projects, not open streams of work. One way to escape overwhelm is to turn an area of interest into a discrete project that has a start, middle, and end. Creatives, like the choreographer Twyla Tharp, do this to give an ambition parameters and a way to allocate time and resources without it feeling like it will last and demand resources forever. Tharp specifically uses a technique she calls “The Box.” It’s a literal box that holds all the ideas around a dance that she can archive when it’s complete.
I know I benefit from such a structure. For example, when I wanted to learn more about writing a book, I took a Tiny Book Course to create a container and a project that was timebound.
Know what each pursuit actually needs from you. To help get focused, get clear on what a project requires of your effort and energy at that time, as it can vary. Some work requires long uninterrupted blocks, while others take shorter increments. Paul Graham, co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, offered an example of this way of thinking when he delineated between a Maker’s Schedule (requires longer, deep work blocks) and a Manager’s Schedule (cut into shorter blocks usually for meetings).
I experienced something similar when writing my book. For example, I found I could write my manuscript’s first draft in one-hour daily writing sprints, but the full manuscript that I sent off to my publisher needed deep work blocks of at least three hours. Being clear on this upfront can help us better manage our time and energy across all we want to do so we can calendarize longer stretches of time rather than leave them floating. Similarly, we then know what we can squeeze into smaller time windows.
Design your days so the juggling happens by default. Several artists structure their days so they don’t waste mental energy debating what happens. Twyla Tharp takes a cab to the gym at 5:30 am every single day. When he’s writing a novel, Haruki Murakami has a set routine he follows every day from the time he wakes at 4 am until he goes to bed at 9 pm. He said: “I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.” When your days have enough structure, you stop negotiating with yourself about what gets attention, you gain focus, and you commit to where you want to spend your time and put your energy.
A secondary note of importance: Murakami also acknowledged that such a routine, inclusive of the creative work, requires stamina. It’s why he included exercise and relaxation as part of his habit. Sustaining ourselves supports the work.
HOW TO RESTORE OUR ENERGY
Create anchors for recovery, too. Even when we’re doing activities we enjoy, we can find ourselves depleted if we don’t invest in downtime. As my acupuncturist reminds me almost each time I see him, “Energy is energy,” regardless of where it gets applied (like thinking, exercising, ruminating). We can also find ourselves frustrated when we don’t make time for the non-negotiables in our lives. What can help is to make a commitment to those priorities, just as you can with your daily schedule.
For example, Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, kept Tuesday evenings with his wife sacred for over thirty years. Nothing got in the way of him leaving at 5 pm to hold to that commitment. He wrote: “If you had something to say to me on Tuesday afternoon at 4:55, you had better say it on the way to the parking lot.” He credits it with keeping him sane, and it became his own definition of success, writing: “I resolved a long time ago to not be one of those entrepreneurs on their 7th startup and their 7th wife. In fact, the thing I’m most proud of in my life is not the companies I started, it’s the fact that I was able to start them while staying married to the same woman; having my kids grow up knowing me and (best as I can tell) liking me, and being able to spend time pursuing the other passions in my life. That’s my definition of success.”
Document to get it out of your head and find your way back. One of my frustrations over the years has been either my brain not being able to let go of something I’m working on or having to find my train of thought when returning to a project after time away. I’ve learned two tricks to help me find more ease in my workflow, both of which help you not lose your work or your flow.
For one, to be able to walk away and not ruminate, I get next steps and unfinished tasks and ideas out of my head. According to research, doing this (making a plan for unfinished tasks) frees mental energy.
I also document my train of thought and give myself a prompt on where to start next to make it easier to return to something without the friction of figuring out where I left off.
AI can help here if you’re comfortable using it in this fashion. Share your work and ask the AI tool to create a reminder prompt for you to start back up where you are leaving off.
An added benefit of creating these notes for ourselves is that they give the Default Mode Network (DMN) of our brain room to work on it in the background. Sure, we need full breaks, and stepping away doesn’t stop the work. To me that’s a win-win.
Leave gaps—the pause is part of the work. In Japanese aesthetics, “ma” is intentional negative space. It gets applied in painting, calligraphy, floral arranging, and more. When we juggle a lot, the instinct is to fill every moment. But the gaps between are where integration happens, where you recover for the next push of effort put against a project. Without the space and pauses, our batteries get overdrawn, leading to depletion. As I shared in a recent podcast episode, creating and allowing such space has been a challenge and a commitment I’ve been working on myself. But we can give ourselves more space, knowing that the rest and recovery are actually part of the work.
All of these approaches for both using and restoring our energy show that structure can be our friend. Such scaffolding, even empty space, allows us to do all we want and need to do.
Based on the range of your pursuits right now, which of these six tips would you want to experiment with to pursue what you want and sustain yourself?
Want to get insights, tips, and tools on how to live with Sustainable Ambition? Join in here. Welcome!
Sustainable Ambition offers a strategic approach for pursuing our professional and personal goals in a way that is motivating, meaningful, and manageable from stage to stage, rather than be all consuming in a way that compromises other important aspects of our lives or sacrifices our well-being.