A second energy-management practice closely related to whole-life planning is pruning. We all live with the illusion that we can have it all. But the people who are living the “have it all” have learned the secret of energy management, and especially the practice of pruning. They are concentrating their energy and creative efforts on a select group of activities that provide them with the maximum amount of productivity. And because creative insight and productivity are cumulative, they continue to maintain forward momentum as long as they are mindful of their energy.
If you want to have the energy to creatively engage with the important things, you need to carefully choose your creative priorities. We each have a threshold for how many creative problems we can effectively manage at a given time. Taking on any additional obligations or commitments will decrease your overall effectiveness, and removing too many will mean you’re settling for less than your full potential. You want to feel stretched but not overextended.
Identify Your “Red Zone” Activities
In American football, the red zone is the area on each end of the field inside the twenty-yard line. What happens in this area is a key determining factor in a team’s success or failure. Teams that easily advance the ball down the field but can’t score in the red zone will lose games. Teams that play great open-field defense but can’t prevent scores in the red zone will lose. Performance within this very small sliver of the field often determines the overall success or failure of a team.
As you examine your life, and especially your creative work, it’s important to be able to identify the red-zone activities that will really make a difference and generate forward momentum during the particular season you’re in. Some qualities that mark red-zone activities are the following:
- Activities that you can uniquely do or add value to because of your position or expertise and that move a project forward.
- Activities that increase your personal capacity to generate ideas, such as study, purposeful ideation, or intelligence gathering.
- Activities that provide cohesion or creative traction for your team in such a way that it increases future capacity.
- Activities that feed your energy, such as adequate sleep, exercise, or spiritual practice.
Your red-zone activities are likely to be made up of some combination of these qualities. Really pouring your energy into them not only increases your immediate productivity, but it also generates momentum in your life and work.
Similarly, it’s important to identify the activities in your life that could be described as ineffective, unnecessary, or damaging to your overall productivity, and prune them out of your life. These can be time wasters, such as needless shopping, relentless gaming, and excessive Internet browsing or TV watching, or they can be tasks that you’re doing out of obligation, habit, or routine. It’s not that these activities by themselves are bad or wrong, it’s simply that each of these activities is taking the place of something that could be more effective in helping you generate ideas or move your work forward.
* Source: The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry