Working in Surges: Discovering Your Work Style
I am a firm believer that a lot of my best music and work comes from how I choose to go about doing my work everyday. One word to describe my work style is surge. Just as a tidal surge brings enormous amounts of energy in short amounts of time, in waves at a time is the same way I do my work. This way of doing things seems to be my natural way of getting things done. Something I really want to stress is that the work all day, everyday style of working just does not cooperate with the way I naturally tend to work. As a matter of fact, I don't think that style of working works for most people, yet it seems to be what many people say leads to success. So here I am trying to understand how to balance working extremely hard without burning myself out. The light bulb for me starting coming on a few months ago after I had became burned out from trying to get my business off the ground. Now I can say that I have for sure found my work style by working hard in surges followed by periods of rest and it's what I found works best for me. One day at a time and one step at a time I'm continually trying to tinker with these surges in hopes to perfect my work style.
Rhythm and Flow
In basketball, coaches and players know that getting shots in rhythm tend to lead to a higher shooting percentage and better shooting efficiency. It's one of the reasons why I love watching the San Antonio Spurs. The way they pass the ball around to each other creates better shots for everyone because the players are shooting those shots in rhythm. I made the point about basketball because I think it definitely relates to how we get our work done everyday. If we're in rhythm it makes our work a bit easier and we tend to get more done very efficiently. The more we work within our rhythm and flow the more productive we tend to be. I usually do my best to take advantage of the times I am in this rhythm and flow while doing my work. We need to take advantage of these moments when we are in rhythm and flow because many times it leads to us producing our best work. The problem, however, is that for most of us our work day is not currently constructed around this way of working. Instead we are told to work in certain blocks of time that might not be the most ideal times for producing our best work.
"The Beautiful Game"
The Surge Method
This style of work is something that took me time to embrace. Early on, I was always trying to outwork everybody else and see how long I could work everyday. Let me tell you from firsthand experience, I don't think this is not only unsustainable but I also believe this is very unhealthy. As I stated earlier many will say that you have to work all day everyday in order to be successful which I believe is ludicrous. We all are different which means we all do not work the same way. For some, maybe they can work that way but for many others that is just not the case. Of course success is something we all strive to reach but we have to understand that we will reach our successes at different points in our lives using different techniques and methods. I started noticing that working in surges was waaayyyyyyy better for me. This has really helped my body and my mind because I don't find myself tired all the time nor do I have headaches from trying to pull extremely long hours for unsustainable periods of time.
Find Your Work Style
A major key to being effective with anything you're doing is to find your work style. Maybe you work best early in the morning before everyone else decides to hit the stop button on their alarms. Maybe you prefer hammering it out in the middle of the day. Or maybe you prefer working in blocks of time. Look,this will take some tinkering and experimenting with but I know for sure that you can find out how you work best. Take a step back, look in the mirror, and figure out how you work best. Don't listen to others trying to tell you what works for YOU. Don't worry about how the masses tend to do their work because they are not you. You are you and they are them. So go ahead. Write that article at 3am. Produce music at 11pm. Work for 3 hours straight then rest for the next 3 hours. It's your world so work how you work best.
When do you do your best work? How do you go about doing your work?
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