Being Sick Is a Project

We count work projects, home projects, even side projects. But we forget that being sick displaces just as much time and energy. It’s a project we don’t want, but one we have nonetheless.

Many of us only think of “projects” as the big, visible work commitments: the big seasonal project, the hiring sprint, the new book draft. We forget that personal projects count, too.

‘Round here, anything that takes time, energy, and attention is a project. There’s nothing inherently different between a personal project and a professional/work project in this regard. The distinction between your personal self and your work self isn’t helpful here: there’s one you, with limited time, energy, and attention.

Projects like moving, renovating, getting your kids back in school or college, figuring out your new health insurance, or moving banks all take time, energy, and attention over time, aren’t going to happen on their own, and will displace other projects. They thus count as one of your Five Projects.

It turns out that being sick is a project, too. I’m writing this in late September, having just navigated my own three-week sick project, which is what prompted me to finally put this framework on paper.

One of the more frustrating aspects is that it’s simultaneously disruptive, not something you can control, and something you probably didn’t plan for. It barges onto your plate and takes up a project slot whether you acknowledge it or not. When you don’t count it as a project, you’re still trying to juggle five other projects plus an invisible one that’s draining your energy, attention, and morale.

The Three Phases of the Being Sick Project

Thinking about it as a project allows us to consider the three phases of being sick:

1. Phase 1: Sickwatch / Pre-sick

2. Phase 2: Acutely Sick

3. Phase 3: Recovery

Let’s handle each in turn.

Phase 1: Sickwatch / Pre-sick

During Sickwatch, you have a sense that something’s off. You’re more tired than normal, feel swollen lymph nodes, are a little congested, etc.

Some of us are so disassociated from our bodies and over-caffeinated enough to not really notice that we’re pre-sick. We can’t catch ourselves in a moment to get ahead of it. This is especially the case for illnesses that include symptoms that affect our cognition. At just the time we need to be more self-aware, we’re unable to be self-aware.

Despite the magical thinking that maybe it’ll just pass, what we do during Sickwatch can often determine how bad Phase 2 or Phase 3 will be. The trick is to start resourcing as if you’re sick because, by the time you notice it, you already are sick.

Phase 2: Acutely Sick

This is what most people recognize as “being sick”: acute fever, congestion, cough, body aches, etc. This phase feels like the core of the project, but it’s really just the acute stage.

The project work here is symptom management and containment: resting, medicating, hydrating.

While the symptoms are the most acute, painful, and terrible during this phase of the project, it’s also the simplest phase of the project. During Phase 1 and Phase 3, there’s a lot of over-commitment and negotiation, but during this period there’s just less will and motivation for many people.

Note that I said ‘simple’, not ‘easy.’ Parents and caregivers have it the hardest here, as the world they’re caring for doesn’t just stop while they’re sick and these roles don’t come with sick days. As hard as these scenarios are, it’s still clear that the primary goal is to get well, as soon as possible, and to do the least needed outside of that.

The other fortunate part about Phase 2 is that most of the people in our world know that we’re sick and, if they have a shred of care about our situation, are encouraging us to do what we need to do to get well. And, since the earlier phases of the pandemic, many people feel a responsibility to not get other people sick. The internal and external permission to be sick does a lot of work here.

As does Western medicine. We can all have our qualms about Big Pharma, but damn if steroids, antibiotics, and DayQuil aren’t something to be grateful for. (I so felt grateful for the steroids that got me out of sweating through my sheets during this round of being sick.)

Phase 3: Recovery

This is often the longest and most under-resourced phase of the project. You may be out of bed and functional, but your stamina, focus, and resilience are still diminished.

Unfortunately, this is often where we’re the most likely to undo the rest and recovery we’ve just made space for. We’re often so ready — or are required — to get back to our lives and work and feel the weight of the backlog and everything we’ve had to punt during phases 1 and 2.

As much as we may want it to be otherwise, we’re still not done with the project. We may spend as long in Phase 3 as we were in phases 1 and 2, which, yes, means that “normal” activities and projects don’t get full focus and progress.

You know the deal, though: the more we neglect this stage of the process, the longer it takes. The relapses, crashes, nagging brain fog, or cough that just won’t go away keep us in the project; staying in the project longer creates more head trash, over-commitment, try-hard, and poor performance that can create a negative spiral that keeps us in this phase.

The goal of Phase 3 is the same as the others: get well and fully functional as fast as you can. “Finish strong” applies here just as much as other projects.

5 Ways to Get Through the Sick Project

I unpacked the three phases of being sick because, like any other project, seeing its phases gives us clues to how we might navigate it better. We may not be able to influence or control all the factors that may prevent us from being sick, but we can spend as little time in the project as possible.

Luckily, unlike other best work projects, there’s little about being sick that incentivizes us to linger in or stall the project.¹

I’m going to make the obvious explicit: if a medical professional you trust provides a different course of action, follow their counsel. I’m only here to give suggestions on how to manage your work and life outside of your illness.

My assumption is that you’re activating this project when you’re in Phase 1 and still have some capabilities to get ahead of it. The closer you are to Phase 2 (or in Phase 2), the more the playbook below is going to feel either tone-deaf or unrealistic. Hold onto it for the next time you’re in Sickwatch — you will be there again.

Here are five ways to make this project smoother:

1. Surrender to it as a project as soon as you can

Ideally, during Phase 1, you’d start resourcing as if you’re sick. Counting it as a project means you probably need to pause, drop, delegate, or routinize some other project.²

Remember: what you do in Phase 1 influences how long and bad Phase 2 may be, which influences how long Phase 3 may be. You’re negotiating suffering at this point.

2. Adjust plans, with a special emphasis on accounting for Phase 3

This step is about self-expectations. If you’re doing this step early in Phase 1, it’s easy to just account for Phase 1 and Phase 2. The sniffles+cough seems like it’s going to be a 3-5 day ride, so you think about what needs to shift for the next 3-5 days.

The reality for many of us, especially as we age, is those 3-5 days barely account for Phase 2. Phase 3 can be another week or two.

This one, in particular, has been hard for me to accept and understand. Before my forties, my sick cycle was this 3-5 days. I would go into Sickwatch (Phase 1) for a day or two, crash for a couple of days (Phase 2), have a day or two of getting back into things, and I was good to go.

Now, I know to add at least another ten days on the backside of the post-crash days. And, even then, I’m learning that fourteen days creates more margin and ease for me.

The easy math / guideline for me is thus three weeks from when the project is activated, assuming I take Phase 1 seriously. Try three weeks as your planning factor and see how it works for you.

Remember, it’s not three weeks of the acute Phase 2 that we’re thinking about here. We’re thinking about how long it takes to be back to normal and the displacement of everything during that period.

3. Preemptively communicate and reset expectations

The previous step was about self-expectations. This one’s about setting expectations for other people.

I’ll say what you already know is true: your other projects are going to slip and be impacted by your being sick. What you’re trying to do here is minimize the impact.

From a mindset perspective, try to anchor how you’d feel if someone you cared about was sick when you’re communicating what’s going on. You’d probably be compassionate and understanding about the situation and likely wouldn’t expect effusive apologies for someone else being sick. In the case of important deadlines, you’d probably prefer to have an adjustment that’s realistic than a cascading deadline situation.

As with most project disruptions, the goal is to preemptively communicate that work may be delayed so people can make alternative plans if they need to. If you’re somehow magically able to keep things moving on timelines you committed to before you got sick, great! If not, you and your collaborators will deal with less shuffle stress.

4. Navigate Phase 3’s temptations

Phase 3 is where good intentions go to die. You feel human again, which makes it incredibly tempting to say yes to everything, overcommit to make up for lost time, or add extra deliverables out of guilt. This is exactly how you end up back in Phase 2 or stuck in a months-long recovery cycle.

Impulse commands you to get back into things as quickly as possible and commit full force to get caught up. Wisdom calls you to dial it back to 60-70% because Phase 3 is still part of the project.

Don’t commit to more new stuff than you have to and preemptively recommit to bonus / “nice to do” creep that often occurs with existing commitments. Understand the creep for what it often is: insecurity, guilt, or shame about being sick.

Watch especially for guilt-driven overcommitment. That “yes” to an extra meeting or taking on someone else’s urgent task might feel like you’re being helpful, but it’s often just guilt wearing a productivity mask. Remember: you planned for the three-week window for a reason. Stick to it.

5. Invoke cold start routines to get back in the groove after Phase 3

If you’ve been sick (meaning in Phase 1 - 3 of being sick) for the last three weeks, it’s normal to not be on point with your routines, plans, conversations, and so on. Even if you do what many of us do and start invoking cold start routines in Phase 3, it’s good to do a run-through when you’re fully well.

Why? Because it’s normal to have forgotten, misremembered, or mis-prioritized things at the early start of Phase 3. Even just feeling the pressure to get back into things and attend to the (perceived) urgencies skews our thinking, decision-making, prioritization, and delegation.

Even if you don’t have explicit cold start routines, I’m encouraging you to allow yourself a few focus blocks to re-immerse yourself in your goals, priorities, strategies, plans, projects, and tasks.

That could look like looking back over the last few months and weeks of your Momentum Planners. It could look like reviewing your annual or quarterly strategy deck or OKPs. It might mean tending your Idea Garden, dropping in the ideas that have come up while you’ve been sick, culling ideas that have lost their spark, resequencing what you’ll be working on, or re-reading incomplete drafts and the breadcrumbs you left yourself.

The real goal of running through your cold start routines is to re-balance from the task-completion mindset that many people naturally adopt in early Phase 3. We often know we can’t take on the Big Rocks in Phase 3, so we start ticking away at tasks — especially tasks that seem urgent. It’s always easy for the task-completion mindset to spur us to finish the urgent and easy tasks rather than push the important and challenging projects forward; it’s even easier for this to happen in Phase 3, such that we spend 3-6 weeks just pushing easy tasks forward while our most important work remains paused.

The sweep at the end of Phase 3 ensures that you limit this task-tacking before it turns into unintentional strategic drift.

The More You Treat Being Sick Like a Project, the Fewer Projects It’ll Displace

Being sick is just one example of the invisible projects that drain our resources while we pretend they don’t exist. Once you start seeing these hidden projects for what they are, you can stop wondering why it feels like you’re always behind and start making choices that actually reflect your reality.

The irony is that the more seriously you take being sick as a project — accounting for all three phases, adjusting timelines realistically, communicating proactively —the less it actually disrupts your life.

When you plan for three weeks instead of three days, when you resource Phase 1 properly instead of pushing through, when you respect Phase 3 instead of rushing it, you often end up sick for less time overall. And even when you’re not, you’ve at least prevented the cascade of dropped balls, broken commitments, and makeup work that typically follows illness.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is admit what’s already on your plate. Especially when what’s on your plate is keeping you from getting to your plate at all.

1. The obvious exceptions here are when being sick gets us out of other things we don’t want to do. But note that it’s not so much that we want to remain acutely sick as much as it is that we want the sick note.

2. I recognize that ‘surrendering to being sick’ requires a level of economic security and workplace flexibility that not everyone has. If you’re working multiple jobs without sick days or in a role where your absence means real hardship for others (or yourself), these suggestions might feel impossible. The three phases still exist — your body doesn’t care about your job requirements — but your options for managing them are constrained. Do what you can within your reality. Even small adjustments, like communicating earlier or being gentler with yourself in Phase 3, can make a difference. Big love and I’m on your side, too.