Are These Your Monkeys?

I’m sick. I got my sister sick. I’m waiting for my wife and kids to get sick. How do you spell “waaaaah?”

And yet, we’ve got to get the work done, you know?

Here are some coping mechanisms I’m using to get stuff done this week and keep work time from going all Pac Man on personal time. I hope they help you, too.

1. Save your energy. Don’t put your dog into unnecessary fights. Say “no, thank you” more.

2. Pick the week’s big rocks.

3. Tackle the hard stuff first.

4. Unbuzz at the end of every day.

5. Close your email.

6. Put your phone on do-not-disturb.

7. Block social media sites for the day.

What about you? Sick or otherwise, are you letting work-time and personal-time blend together as so many Millennials seem to think is hip these days? How do you get it all done when you don’t have the energy or bandwidth to get it all done?

I like this passage I once read from Roy H. Williams when he was asked how he limits accessibility to avoid interruptions to his personal time:

Neither my clients nor my staff know my home phone number or my cell phone number. When I’m not at the office, I’m not at work. Walking out the door each night, I make peace with my decision to quit for the day by saying, “Let worlds collide, let millions die. I’ve done all I can.” The next day when I arrive at the office and find that planets did not collide and millions did not die as a result of my having left a few things undone, I happily get back to work.

If you allow your work to bleed into your personal time, you won’t get the most out of either.

What other solutions/tactics would you suggest? Or are Roy and I just sick in the head?