One of the biggest challenges for me when I started working freelance/self-employed was how to maintain the structures of ‘work’ that help me most, but adapt them to the way I work best. For a long time I expected the frameworks or productivity tools/hacks that I’d used as a student or in the workplace to somehow be applicable to my own work and to serve me the same way. But it wasn’t the same. Still, I struggled on, pushing things when I should have been softening, ignoring when I should have been listening, swinging wildly from micromanaging and rigidity, to loose, free-form approaches.
Things changed for me when I began to notice patterns in the way I worked. I paid attention to not only what work felt easy or satisfying, what work felt hard or unrewarding, but especially to why these things felt that way. I sought to understand what contexts produced these effects, what circumstances, who else was there, how I was feeling in myself at that time. I thought that I was investigating external factors, but in reality much of it came down to an internal aspect: energy. I began to realise that for me, my personal energy levels have the greatest bearing on the work I do. And that all work is in essence a transfer of energy. Some tasks give me energy, some consume it and some are neutral. And, depending on how much I already had to begin with, sometimes that equation can push me into a depleted state, or it can carry me into a heightened state. What I needed to acknowledge and understand was that transaction.
Once I began to change my lens on my work in this way I started planning differently, I started being more particular about the types of projects I did, the teaching I said yes to, the events I took part in. I began to budget my energy rather than my time, more mindful of the benefits or compromises that this flow of energy offered. It wasn’t always perfect but it did enable me to re-contextualise work that I had to do, things I couldn’t say no to or that were fundamental parts of being self employed, to see them as things that would suck the energy from me. And so I learnt not to timetable too much of them at once, or at the same time as things that needed my best energy. Similarly, I began to see some activities as useful ways to boost my energy, to provide an injection of motivation during difficult times. My metrics for evaluating had shifted from the bland, corporate measure of success (financial, social, numbers etc) to an intuitive, personal system based on how I wanted to feel, how I wanted to be within my work.
This focus on my energy levels within the work feels to me like little currents or eddies within a wave or a river, smaller localised things contained within something bigger. That something bigger, for me, relates to the changing of light in the changing of season, and the influence that has on my own rhythms and energy levels.
I have always found winter hard, but it was only once I left education and full-time employment that I realised just what a massive shift I went through each year. Working for myself, not being tied to strict hours or days, meant I could observe the struggle clearly. The lack of energy, the difficulty getting up in the morning, the crash mid afternoon, the low mood. Things I’d just explained away as being tired from work, rather than a lack of essential light. Now, having experienced a number of winters where I paid attention and took steps to ameliorate the effects of the darkness, I know what to expect and when things will happen. I understand what my capabilities and limits are within this, and I no longer plan or say yes to things that are unreasonable and outside of my ability to give. This awareness has been invaluable in the last couple of years, as my energy is unpredictable due to long Covid and I navigate balancing my physical health and work demands even more.
This is why my personal reflecting, reviewing and planning takes place at the seasonal markers – the equinoxes and the solstices. Because I can feel the connection to the light strongest at these times, because I know they herald either a physical shift in myself or a mental one. Having an appreciation of the seasonal wave, that contains my smaller energy eddies, enables me to prioritise my needs within my work in a way that I never could when I just made one plan once a year. It’s also why I don’t put too much emphasis on the official New Year, knowing that I tend to experience two points of new energy, new beginning feelings – one in late March as spring emerges, one in late September as autumn unfolds. These are the points where I might want to start new things, not in January when I am in the depths of the greyness, nor in summer when it’s too overwhelmingly bright and fizzy to focus.
This is what I’ve learnt about myself and what I follow now. I construct my year around the overarching rhythm of the seasons, and how they affect me personally, with an awareness of how each individual element within that is itself a microcosm of energy exchange. And this feels like the best approach for me, even when it sometimes puts me at odds with the world (especially the rhythms dictated by capitalism).
Questions for reflection:
What have you noticed about the work you do – the way things feel best, when things don’t feel good?
What is the common factor present in all this, for you?
What lens would you like to interpret your work activity through?
Are there rhythms or cycles that influence you?
What points throughout the year feel like good places to take a pause and reflect? (based on key events or moments that mean something to you)
How can you support this new personal rhythm of reflection?