Less Transition Leaks, Less Exhaustion
We all know the feeling of getting to the end of the day and finding ourselves ridiculously exhausted – so exhausted that getting up and making dinner feels like a herculean task.
There are lots of reasons for that exhaustion – being an entrepreneur is hard. But one of the main reasons for your fatigue is the energy that you lose when you’re transitioning between tasks: I call these phenomena transition leaks.
Let me explain. Most of us are doing five completely different tasks each day. We switch from sales calls to client calls to folding laundry to answering emails to messaging our virtual assistant to making dinner or helping a child with homework.
Each of those tasks requires a completely different skillset and type of mental focus – which means that there’s a moment of transition between each task. You have to take the time to regroup, open a new folder, open a new document, maybe switch locations, figure out where you left off on the task, and start working
Every time we transition from task to task like this, we lose energy and time. In fact, research shows that it takes an average of 23 minutes to regain focus after a distraction.
Different parts of your brain are activated every time you switch between tasks – even tasks as simple as answering a team member’s question while working on a report or attending back-to-back meetings.
Interesting, right?
This means that if you do five different tasks in one day, you’re losing an hour just in transitioning between tasks – and that’s not even counting how much time you lose to the fatigue of repeatedly resetting.
And this, my friends, is exhausting.
But there’s a way to combat transition leaks – it’s all about planning your weeks so that you’re doing similar activities together on the same day.
For example, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays could be client appointment days. Fridays might be for meetings and sales conversations. Mondays could be days to work on long-term projects.
Maybe you put all of your writing tasks together on one day so that you’re batch-processing five newsletters at a time. Maybe you’re shooting a whole month’s worth of videos on the same day.
My invitation to you this week is to take a look at your weekly schedule and see if you’re doing a lot of task-switching – whether that’s between business and personal tasks or between tasks within your business.
If the answer is Yes, think about starting to put similar tasks together on the same days. When you start to plan your weeks like this, you’ll find that you gain so much energy and your tasks are so much easier to get done.
If you’re looking for some support in organizing your weekly schedules, I invite you to check out my Breakthrough Planner, which I designed specifically to help entrepreneurs manage their daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals and plans.
Purchasing a Breakthrough Planner ($32) also grants you automatic (FREE) access to our next Breakthrough Planner Day – we have one coming up on September 14. On Planner Days, we come together virtually to walk through how to make the most out of the Planner.
Here’s to transitioning away from transition leaks!
