September Update: Mana Points

Hey team.

I Tried Something Last Month

One of the issues I've been struggling with (surprising no one) is overcommitment. I don't just mean professionally, but across all aspects of my life. It's the cocktail of ADHD symptoms: 1) my history with hyperfocus makes me aware of how much I can accomplish when I "hit my groove" and I assume I can operate at that level on command, 2) rejection sensitivity makes it hard to say "no" to things, and 3) general time blindness that makes it hard to predict how long a task will take or how much energy it will require.

This has been a year of flame-outs for me, where I have taken on a lot of things, and, every time it looks like I'm slipping a deadline, I have doubled down rather than call something off or push something back. And it has led to a lot of personal and professional failures, and not-insignificant financial problems.

I've been staring into the abyss of this trend trying to think: how do I commit the correct amount when I am, like, neurologically bad at predicting how much work a task will take and what I will be capable of on a given day?

So I tracked it.

For two weeks in September, I tracked my "mana points" in a spreadsheet. I put tasks on a 5-point scale, with 1-point tasks being minor effort and 5-point being significant. I assigned tasks to different, color-coded categories and made plans each day (well, most days) laying out what I was gonna work on, budgeting my time, and making predictions as to how much energy they would take. And, as the day went on, I logged what actually happened, how long things actually took, and how much mana they actually drained. After two weeks, I had some hard data on where my time and energy is going, where my predictions differ most from reality, and which burn rates for energy are sustainable and which will lead to a flame-out.

What I enjoyed about this process is it was entirely descriptive. Pure research. This was not about optimizing efficiency, it was just about learning my patterns. I highly recommend doing something like this if you, like me, struggle with making feasible plans.

Takeaways

• Obviously there is no objective measure of energy, so my starting assumption was that a productive day would consume about 20 points of energy, and I set my 5-point scale to that. I quickly discovered that, at that level, anything more than 15 points was exhausting, so that's how much I over-estimate my energy levels! My best days, where I got most of my list done and finished feeling productive but not too tired, were 12-14 points, and going over 15 a few days in a row led to short-term burnout.
• Ongoing projects (e.g. videos, freelance gigs, podcasts, event-planning) take, on average, 30% more energy and 30% more time than I usually assume.
• It turns out there is a lot more method to my madness. Days that I felt weirdly lethargic, like, "why can't I get myself to work??" suddenly made sense when I looked at the mana tracking for the week: I had gone over-budget on mana two days in a row, and had reflexively gone under-budget another two days until the average was back to about 15.  I even found myself resistant to work on mornings when I knew I'd be busy in the evenings, and realized it was because the workload later that day was high enough that I needed a chill morning to not go overbudget and burn myself out. These were both unconscious processes, but, noticing them, I was better able to predict when I'd be at full capacity again.
• Chores overwhelmingly take less time and energy than I think, so I don't need to dread them as much as I do. (Except dishes. Washing dishes always takes more time than I think.)
• Surprisingly, emotional distress does not kill my productivity. What it kills is my executive function. I can work while stressed or unhappy, I just can't make plans. If a plan is already in place, work can actually be a nice distraction.

There is more, but the rest is a bit more personal than I wanna share here.

Generally, I think this will help me more accurately assess my workload, and I can break this process out whenever a project seems to be taking a lot of effort. I can recalibrate my predictions and maybe learn to call a project off early when it's more effort than it's worth.

Other Stuff

Anyway, sorry there was no release last month. I was... busy.

-I