Take Time to Deload Some Areas of Your Life So You Are Better Equipped For Your Next Phase
--
Our best ideas often come when we take our foot off the gas. Taking planned time away from busy work could help us imagine and strategize our next phase and possibly avoid burnout.
I came across the expression “deloading” in an old blog post by Tim Ferris where he explains how he uses the concept in several areas of his life. This is a sports term that means:
A back-off week, or deload, is a planned reduction in exercise volume or intensity. In collegiate strength-training circles, it’s referred to as the unloading week, and is often inserted between phases or periods. Quoting from Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning: “The purpose of this unloading week is to prepare the body for the increased demand of the next phase or period,” and to mitigate the risk of overtraining.
— from T Nation
The idea of taking a week to prepare for the increased demand of the next phase is worth exploring as we often go from intense work to a complete stop when we take a break. Instead of being a welcome rest, the brusk change often becomes a time of unravelling, resulting in “dead time” as Robert Greene calls it.
Many of us try hard to avoid burnout and I feel that the deloading as a way to “mitigate the risk of overtraining” can be helpful to us.
What if we schedule some time (half a day might be enough), not off, but of deloading and unloading, to prepare for the next phase? Instead of managing our business or our workload, we look at it as a CEO or creator. We’d take a bird’s eye view and take some distance to assess our goals, systems and productivity. What’s working? What’s not working? What improvements could be made? This would be a time of reflection only, no day-to-day work, a time to reconnect with our vision and adjust our next steps and direction.
