I was away for the past week for some much needed R&R. A thought occurred to me while sitting in the sand listening to my eclectic playlist of the moment – what I needed for recharging my batteries now versus how I recharged them in the past is completely different.
This may sound intuitive but I know that so many of us fall into our patterns that we end up repeating year after year that it can be hard to realize that our patterns are no longer efficient. Before I could spend six hours at the beach, an hour or two taking care of the random emails and calls that continued to come in and then outside/group get away time before calling it a night. There wasn’t a need to completely disconnect from work because where things were at allowed me to be at full charge without completely disconnecting.
Last week that wasn’t hat I needed at all – I needed a hard disconnect for the full week to get back to a full charge. It felt very strange leaving my phone in the house as I went down to the beach. Having no way of hearing or receiving status updates was jarring. By the end of the week it seemed natural to simply have my ringer on complete silence and only doing a 2 minute run through email to make sure nothing had burned down.
Showing back up today I feel reinvigorated in a way that I haven’t in the past 10 months.
It makes me wonder what other patterns I have set for myself throughout a typical work day that need to be changed. I’ll certainly be looking into it.