The body budget

A task would be manageable one day and difficult the next. I'd leave something unfinished, struggle to start or get irritated by something small. I put it all under laziness. Once I'd assigned the label, I stopped investigating.

The label told me almost nothing about what had changed between those days. It gave me even less to change before the next one.

A different set of questions

The idea of a body budget gave me a different set of questions. What had the day already asked of me? What was still occupying my attention? Had I slept, eaten, moved? What had I done to recover?

I use "budget" as a metaphor for thinking about demands and recovery. I can't measure a balance and I don't use it to explain a health condition. Its value is that it makes me consider the day around the task.

Something specific to adjust

At work, this has changed some ordinary decisions.

I try to put demanding work and difficult conversations earlier in the day. I decide some tasks in advance, so starting doesn't also require choosing among everything I could be doing. I tell people what I'll do and give them a date. Having someone expect a result helps me follow through.

None of those choices guarantees a good day. They do give me something specific to adjust when a day goes badly. Moving a task is a smaller, more useful experiment than trying to become a different person by tomorrow morning.

Sleep, food and movement belong in that experiment. I find it easy to count them as time taken away from work, then ignore what happens to the work when I neglect them.

The hardest part is what I do after I've run out. I can spend the rest of the afternoon feeling bad about the work I haven't done. That makes the unfinished task occupy even more of the day without getting it any closer to finished.

I still have days when I run out at four. On those days, I take a walk and eat something. The work may still be there when I return. At least I haven't spent another hour using it to argue with myself.