Shawna Samuel
If your life feels unbalanced, it's usually because you don't think you have enough time. And while we're all stuck with 24 hours in a day, I'm going to share with you an incredible framework for structuring your days better, like a well balanced meal. This episode will help you create a well balanced calendar. This might just change the way you think about your entire schedule. And it's so easy. Let's dive in to episode 33 of the Mental Offload Podcast.

Intro
Welcome to the Mental Offload podcast where we talk about women balancing work and life. It's the podcast that combines leadership, feminism, and coaching tools so you can tackle it all with more confidence and less stress. Here's your host Ivy League MBA certified feminist coach and corporate warrior, Shawna Samuel.

Shawna Samuel
Hello offloaders. We were recently on vacation and it was a dream for my 5 year old because we were eating in restaurants so almost every day she had access to her favorite foods. So my daughter is one of those five year olds who only wants to eat pasta, bread and chocolate ice cream. Not even baguettes, like plain white bread, which for a French child is like anathema. So now that we're back home, one of the things that's been on our mind is how do we introduce like more vegetables, more protein, get this girl to eat a little bit more balanced meal. And so I've been thinking a lot about balance plates and balance diets for kids. So if you're in this space too, so much solidarity. Oh my goodness, toddlers are tough on this stuff. But it strikes me that we do the same as adults when it comes to our time. We tend to really over index in one or two areas and want to have that be the bulk of our time diet, so to speak. And So what we end up doing is we end up squeezing some of the things out of our time diet that are actually really healthy and necessary. And the result is that we end up feeling unbalanced in our lives and in our days. So I'm going to go through the four elements of a balanced time diet and tell you a little bit more about each of them and how to create more balance in your calendar so that you can feel more balance in your life.

So I'm going to go through these in no particular order, just to give you a sense of what the four areas are. And as I go through them, I want you to really think about how much of your day is devoted to each of these. The first one is deep work. We all need some time for really deep, focused work on our calendar. Now, when I talk about deep work, what I mean is something that requires real flex of your mental muscles. This could be strategic thinking time, or sometimes it's going to be executing a really challenging or precise task. It could be writing a legal brief, or maybe it's creating the skeleton for a deck for an upcoming presentation, and you really need to figure out how the storyline or facts are going to fit together in that presentation.  Deep work is going to be often specific to your role, but I want you to think about how much time you're spending on deep work in any given day. And I also want you to think about how much of that time is actually uninterrupted. Because the thing about deep work is that it usually requires some dedicated focus and concentration. Deep work is often not so deep and not so effective if we're subject to constant interruptions. So deep work is going to be one of the essential pieces of a balanced time diet.

The next way of using our time or what I call dirty diaper tasks. This is the kind of work that you don't love doing, but it's on your list for a reason. And that reason is typically because you don't want to pay the cost of a not doing it. Like with a dirty diaper. It's not pleasant to change diapers, but you know what happens when you let a baby sit in a dirty diaper for too long? You end up with a much bigger mess to clean up down the line. So most of us know dirty diapers. We just need to hold our nose and do it. Maybe for you a dirty diaper task is filing your expense reports or maybe it's something that's more home related like filling out school forms or could even be something like cooking. So the dividing line isn't going to be home or work. It's going to be like, is this a task that you enjoy or not? And not just do you enjoy it, but is it also advancing a big priority or not? Dirty diaper tasks typically are not things that advance a big priority, but they need to get done. And sometimes they need to get done day in and day out. Now these first 2 uses of time that I'm talking about tend to be a net drain on your energy. So doing deep work, this requires, like I said, a lot of use of your mental muscles. It's going to be a net drain on your energy, even if it is advancing a priority. So think about deep work and dirty diaper tasks as net drains on your energy. Now, the next two that I'm going to talk about are a net gain in terms of energy. And I really want to make that point right here because what he'll be able to see is that if your day is over indexing on deep work and dirty diaper tasks, it is going to be a net drain. And if you aren't offsetting that with things that provide a net gain in terms of energy, it's no wonder that you're feeling exhausted or overwhelmed or frustrated or just plain tired. So let's talk about the net energy gain activities that you want to have as part of a balanced time diet. Rest. You probably knew that I would say this, but I'm not just talking about night time and I'm not just talking about sleep. I really want you to think about rest that you take during the day. Now, for some, this might be in the form of sleep. You might be someone who enjoys a good nap. I've never been a great napper, so naps are not part of my rest strategy. But for some people, and in some cultures, naps are very much a part of the rest strategy during the day. But even if you aren't a napper, there are other ways that you can take rest. And I want you to think about rest activities overall, as these are things that require a low level of both mental and physical energy.

So rest during your day might look like just sitting down with a cup of tea doing some restorative yoga poses. I just went to a yoga nidra class, which is a breathing class, very restorative, low mental physical energy type of activity. So that would count as rest. Sometimes even a slow walk would be restful. Not a speed walk. A speed walk would not be rest. But if you're taking kind of a slow, leisurely walk, that might count as rest for you. But for some of you, if you have the kind of commute where you can actually sit down for a longish train ride, that may be restful if you are actually taking rest and disconnecting during that time. And so just notice it's not necessarily a specific checklist of activities that provide rest. I really want you to be looking at does this activity in my day require a low level of mental and physical energy? And if the answer to that is yes, it probably counts as rest in some form. Now the last area, the 4th element of this balanced time diet is fun.

Now, people will always get up in arms when I talk about fun because we're not supposed to be having fun, are we? So I'm going to put out a whole episode just about this area because I think especially for high achievers, for go getters, for people who have built our careers on working hard and our ability to get a lot of stuff done, fun can feel frivolous. And this is not necessarily the case. So let's talk about what counts as as fun. I really want you to think about it as you know, this can be things that include connecting with people that feel like play, maybe have some movement involved. Because when we're younger and especially for our kids, we know that they learn through play and we tend to forget this as we get older. We remove play, we remove fun from our days, and sometimes we even remove connection. But we know that these things are restorative and they help us grow fun. The way that I think about it is that it requires energy to execute these things, but ultimately it's a net gain of energy. Like, you know, those hybrid cars that they recharge the battery when you hit the brakes. They need to be in motion to do that kind of recharging. But it still is a net energy gain for the car. It's different from just turning the car off, right? That's how you want to think about fun. It does require energy, especially to get started, but then it really helps to recharge you.

It produces a net energy gain. So fun is going to be very individual, but it might be having some time to connect with colleagues or connect with your family at the end of the day. It might include actual play with your kids or maybe it's play in the form of a pickleball league that you're part of. But the point is that it should feel like fun. It should not feel like drudgery. And when it comes to any of these four areas, one woman's trash is another woman's treasure. So I've given you some examples of things that you might think about in each category, but your mileage may vary with each of these. So to give you an example, let's take an activity like running. This would be a dirty diaper activity for me, but for a client of mine, this definitely falls into the fun category. It's very restorative for her. Or an activity like cooking. My husband finds cooking restful, almost meditative. It's something that he doesn't really want to give up in the evenings. I find ordering take out is Restful. So your mileage is definitely going to vary. And I want you to think about not what works for your friends, not what works for someone that you read about in an article, not what works for me. And This is why I'm not giving you a specific checklist of activities to do. I want you to think about what works for you. So think about what in your day and what on your To Do List you'd consider deep work or dirty diaper activities, fun and rest. So how much of each of these areas do you really need in a given day? Well, let's start by assuming that you're getting 8 hours of sleep and remove that.

So we're just going to talk about your 16 waking hours. A good balance time diet for most people is going to be 4 hours of each of these types of activities, right? So 4 hours of deep work in any given day, 4 hours of dirty diaper activity, 4 hours of fun, and four hours of rest. Now before you panic about that, let me break this down because I think there were a lot of misconceptions about what we do and what we can do in a day. So let's just take deep work. For example, I think if I asked 10 women on the street would they like to be doing more than four hours of deep work in a day? I think most would be like, yeah, if I really want to be productive, I need to put in more than that. But when researchers have really looked at our capacity to do deep work, human beings tend to Max out at about four hours of deep work in a day. If we try to push beyond that, we become massively more inefficient, requires more energy and longer periods of time to get things done, and the quality isn't always there. So trying to go beyond four hours of deep work in any given day is really not an evidence based approach to using your time, so I'm not going to recommend aiming for that. Start with four hours when it comes to deep work. Now let's look at a different area of our time. Let's take fun for example. You might be thinking, Oh my goodness, how would I ever get like 4 hours of fun in my day? That seems astronomical. But if you think about our definition of fun as requiring a little bit of energy but ultimately a net gain, things like connection, things like play, things like potentially movement. When you just think about the number of hours that you spend in meals either with your family or with colleagues, or time that you're spending connecting with your kids, maybe throw in a little bit of exercise or movement into the mix, and before you know it, you've got 4 hours right there.

That said, I want you to think about this as a target and not a hard and fast rule. When I work with clients, we sometimes need to make some changes in the mix to make this really both work and support that individual. So that having been said, if you're not getting anywhere close to these numbers, what do you do? Well, you can either change your schedule or you can change your mindset around some of the activities on your schedule. So for example, to make this really concrete, if you've noticed that you're over indexing on net drain activities, you might decide to put some time limits on those going forward to specifically build in more time for the net gain activities, the fun, the rest. Or you might decide that you need to change your mindset around some of your activities. So for me, I always considered exercise a dirty diaper activity in my day. And then I had a physical Ed requirement in college so I had to do something and I noticed I just went for what seemed fun, which was a dance class. So later on in my life when I was like, I really need to get out there and do running or some kind of like weightlifting or whatnot, I was noticing it just really wasn't something I considered fun. And so one of the things that I've done is just really tried to change my mindset around exercise. And that means for me, I almost always gravitate toward dance related things and that's OK. That's what makes this fun for me. You can also think about this in a work context.

So in my product development job, at some point we had to convince people to give up a day for an innovation session. So people from all different parts of the business, this wasn't necessarily the way that they wanted to spend their day, but we needed them to be there and we needed them to be engaged and not like typing away on their laptop and taking calls in the middle of the session. So we looked for ways to make it fun. We booked a big loft space. We brought in outside experts, some great food. We built in some game and play time. By changing the setting and the setup of the activities to really favor connection, play, new environment, we were able to really get people into the mindset of like, this is not a dirty diaper activity. This is fun time in the session. This meeting was much more successful because of that. Now I want to just make a note here that when it comes to introverts and extroverts, one of the things that we know about introverts and extroverts is that they get energy in different ways. Extroverts often get energized by being around people and being in contact with people, where for introverts that can often be quite draining. So do introverts and extroverts need to balance their days in different ways so.

Introverts do not necessarily need different amounts of time from extroverts when it comes to like how to set up your days. I would still think about aiming for four hours of each of these kinds of activities. But what's going to change for introverts and extroverts is how you categorize these activities. So, for example, let's take networking for extroverts. This might live in the fun space going to a networking event. I'm an introvert. For me, that would not naturally be in the fun space. So I know that I either need a way to set up that event in a way that it's going to be fun for me, or I know that it's going to be a dirty diaper activity in my day and I'm either going to need more rest or more fun to make up for that. So this really is going to be individual to you. And the more time you spend playing with this and learning about how you can set up your day in a more balanced way, the easier this is going to feel and the more impact you're going to see. It's just going to compound in terms of impact. But I want you to know there's no perfect here, and that's OK.

Even though I've been giving you some recommendations. Our work and our lives don't look the same every day. And so your schedule is not going to be a perfect four hours on each of these every single day. What you want to look for are overarching patterns. Are you consistently not getting enough time for deep work, for fun, for rest, even for dirty diaper tasks? When you start to think about your time in this way, you've really got a fantastic framework that helps you know what you need to dial up or dial down in your schedule. Because when you've got balance in how you're using your time, you're going to feel much more balanced overall. So take some time today to think about your time diet and use this framework to bring it into better balance.

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