What’s the Relationship Between Your Patterns and the Quality of Your Experiences and Work?

Last week I talked about why I was sticking with a productivity experiment that I’m hating. In case you missed that one, I’m exploring what happens when I try to radically alter my schedule in a way that goes against my circadian rhythms.

After a few weeks of thrashing through it, I’ve decided that it’s time to start shutting it down. In an upcoming episode of the Creative Giant Show, Angela and I talk more about this experiment, but the chief takeaway for me was this: I do think there’s far more malleability in our working routines and biorhythms than we normally think there is, but I don’t know that going through at least six months of changing them all will be worth it in the end.

What I’ve instead decided to do is be more firm and lean into my early-birdness. It’s easier for me to get up at 5 or 5:30 a.m. and go to bed at 9 p.m. than it is for me to be on a bi-phasic schedule.

But what this experiment also taught me (again) is how to take naps throughout the day and to take more seriously my early-afternoon slump. That’s the upshot of radically changing your workflows, habits, and rhythms: you get to see what’s really working, and you get to see, with new eyes, patterns that you’ve overlooked because you’ve just been on a default.

Defaults are powerful, but something's being powerful doesn’t always mean that it’s good. (Tweet this)

Speaking of workflows and defaults, after experimenting with publishing two podcast episodes a week, we’re going to be going back to one episode per week. It was more than twice as much work to produce two shows, and it doesn’t appear that you and we are getting twice the return. So we’re just going to go back to our standing mantra of focusing on quality and consistency rather than quantity. I have some ideas about a show flow that I want to try out, too, and publishing once per week will help us make that a reality.

Food for thought for today:

• What’s the relationship between your patterns and the quality of what you create and experience? What changes in your patterns and defaults might produce better experiences and work for you?