Everyone wants to feel energized during the workday and to have adequate remaining capacity at the end of the day to put into living their life. While it’s a career-long daily practice, you can experience workday vitality more often by adhering to some fundamental principles.
What is Workday Vitality?
Workday vitality doesn’t have a strict definition, but we can pretty easily recognize it in practice by taking a look at what it is not.
A lack of workday vitality means ending the workday energetically drained. Maybe there’s a feeling of being spent from conflict, experiencing persistent strong emotions, or stress/anxiety. Perhaps you’re cognitively depleted and have nothing left for activities requiring deep thought or decision making in your life that evening. You feel tight, crunchy, or otherwise janky in your body.
When you routinely have workday vitality, things may be hectic, but you take the events of your day in stride. You are not “in the grip” all day or feeling like you are just trying to make it through the week. You don’t feel drained by challenging interactions and other workday frictions. You actually have energy “left over” for your life. You take breaks when you need them and aren’t solely fueled by caffeine, sugar, or convenience food. When the evening comes, you can wind down and drift easily into a restful sleep. Weekends are enjoyable, without work on your mind. Relaxing in general is not a struggle; you can ease out of work mode and be present to life.
Workday Vitality Principle #1: Take Care of Your Physical Body
You already know you should get enough sleep, eat your vegetables, and get out for some exercise. Implementation within your hectic workday and life is the challenge.
Even small tweaks in sleep hygiene, practical nutrition, and movement can add up to a more energetic you who feels good in your body. Choose one of the following areas to focus on next week: nutrition, sleep, or movement. Brainstorm a list of all the small actions you could take to improve in that area.
Examples for nutrition might include eating an apple (or whatever fruit/veggie suits you) everyday at work as your snack, adding a green side salad to whatever you were normally going to eat for lunch or dinner, taking time to do realistic meal planning on Sunday evening, or taking a true lunch break each day without screens.
Examples for sleep hygiene could be setting an evening cutoff time for screens, buying bath bombs or shower steamers for a wind down ritual, or selecting some sleep-friendly guided meditations to listen to.
Examples for movement can include going for a 5-minute walk mid-morning and mid-afternoon (whether around the office or outside), asking your colleague to do a walking meeting with you instead of your usual sit down, or doing some natural stretching movements between calls.
Once you’ve got your list, select the actions you are going to experiment with. Contemplate what it would take to make them a priority and what obstacles are likely to derail you in following through.
Workday Vitality Principle #2: Cultivate a Clear Headspace
You’ve experienced the awesome feeling of a clear, fresh headspace that lets you do deep thinking, to find interesting solutions to tricky problems, or to get in the zone and find flow. But can you create that headspace on demand?
The first step is to become adept at recognizing the state of your headspace, usually by tuning into your inner dialog and mental chatter. From there you can employ specific tools and techniques to that help you re-establish clarity and mental bandwidth.
There is a proliferation of resources that can help busy professionals cultivate more mindfulness in their workday. Find the app, guided meditation, framework, coach, or other resource that works best for you. Be willing to experiment.
Workday Vitality Principle #3: Judiciously Allocate Your Workday Attention
There is fierce competition for your attention, all day, every day. The benefit of learning to manage and allocate your attention more effectively during the workday is that you’ll feel less drained overall and will be able to spend more of your day feeling productive.
A counterintuitive but potent strategy for being more judicious with your attention is to step back and develop tools and techniques to mitigate distractions and draining scenarios.
These might include:
- Understanding extroversion, introversion, and otroversion in general and for you specifically;
- Building interpersonal savvy and communication skills since this can be an underlying source of distractions;
- Cultivating modern workday competencies (e.g., dealing with ambiguity, having managerial courage) so that you can solve problems and make decisions faster;
- Developing explicit strategies for managing your workflow within the context of your available energy and the hard landscape of your day (e.g., meetings, deadlines) and fluid landscape (e.g., discussions, decisions, chat);
- Planning for intentional transitions between meetings, ad hoc conversations, and other typical-for-you work contexts.
As you develop deeper proficiency in the above areas, you’ll find that your attention is easier to focus overall.
Workday Vitality Principle #4: Proactively Manage Your Work-Life Portfolio
Think of all of the things you want and need to do at work and in life as belonging to an overall portfolio of responsibilities that you manage. How good are your systems for organizing everything? Are they well-integrated? Do you trust them or do you worry things are falling through the cracks? Are you disciplined in reviewing them at periodic intervals?
There is no one best system for managing a work-life portfolio. Digital, analog, a hybrid – whatever works for you is the best system for you. However, there are a few characteristics of a trusted system that helps you proactively manage everything:
- You have a process for capturing or identifying everything that is on your plate across work and life now, and to the extent possible, in the known future.
- You define at a sufficiently granular level what needs to be done by you (versus someone else) and what kind of personal energy it will take.
- You are able to reference your projects and to-dos on-demand so you can choose what task to do in any given moment, given your current priorities, time and tools available, and energy level.
- You establish, and follow, a systematic review practice (usually weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually), so you stay current on the contents of your portfolio and look ahead to what’s coming up.
Workday Vitality Principle #5: Practice Tactical Downshifting
At the end of each workday, it’s important to be able to disconnect – literally and figuratively – from your work. You both deserve to have your energy and attention focused on your life outside of work, and also your brain needs a break to recharge so you can be productive the next day.
For many people, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch to deactivate their brain from work mode and set it in life mode. Downshifting refers to taking actions to incrementally ramp down out of your workday so you can make an intentional transition into your evening.
Here are four key elements of a post-work downshifting routine.
1. Intentionally make an end to your workday.
The purpose is to clearly signal to your brain that you are finished working. You might create a little routine where you shut down your computer programs in a certain order and tidy your desk.
2. Move your body and take some deep breaths.
Physical movement and intentional breathing helps with resynching your mind and body. Since it is easy to ignore the body during the workday, it is important to bring it back online. This isn’t about doing a full workout (though that can be a great activity between work and life). It is about doing a few movements consistently at the end of each workday, regardless of other activities you may do. Incorporate some deep breaths into the movements you do and also take 3 to 5 rounds of slow, intentional inhales and exhales in stillness.
3. Lighten your mood and laugh.
Incorporate a bit of levity into your downshifting routine. See if you can literally laugh out loud at least once. This is one thing social media is great for. There is no shortage of funny things online that you can access on demand such as a stand-up comedy clip, a portion of a TV show that you know makes you laugh, or videos of cute animals.
4. Find some gratitude.
Putting yourself in a grateful state of mind helps you to keep some perspective and not be so fixated on whatever may have happened at work. Write down or make a silent list of everything, small and big, that happened during your workday.
If you’re really feeling down after a tough day, just repeat the following silently.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to work.
I’m grateful for the lessons I learn (even if they suck in the moment).
I’m grateful for my perseverance and grit.
Your downshifting routine doesn’t have to be lengthy, consistency is key. Experiment until you find a series of activities that works for you. You might want a different one on Friday to signal the workweek is done.
