Some days, maybe even most days, I am really productive.  I wake up, work out (or not), formulate a plan while showering, and execute it.  Those are good days.  I get to the end and I can say “yes – I did what I set out to do today!“.  Or maybe “I had a plan, I made a list, and I got some of the way through it – tomorrow I will finish it!“  I am sure you know what I mean.  I hope that everyone has days like those.  If for no other reason than this: days like those serve as incentive to get through a “revving” day.

What’s a “revving” day?  Revving is my term – I have never heard anyone else use it.  It’s how I describe the situation when my brain starts looping.  I have so many things on my plate, all going on at the same time, that I fail to execute on any of them.  I am in effect paralyzed into inaction. I am stuck in neutral – my engine is just “revving”.  I might look like I am making progress to people around me, but in reality I am just shifting things from one side of the room to the other (mentally, not physically). On a revving day, I never formulate a plan.  I never get to the point where I can begin to accomplish anything.

Obviously, a revving day is really really bad for productivity.  Its doesn’t even have the beneficial side effects of a “mental health day”, where you just check out and focus on yourself for a day so that the next day you return refreshed.  On the contrary, subsequent days (for me) tend to have lower productivity than before I fell into the mental morass.

This happens to me from time to time (last fall it prompted me to write a forum post). Recently I have had some things go on in my life that are making me “rev” more than usual.  While this is pretty bad for me personally, it has forced me to examine the “rev” cycle to try to break it – because if I don’t things are going to get really bad professionally and personally.  Here’s what I have learned:

• Concentrating on the problem REALLY doesn’t help.  Since I am already “revving”, I can’t focus on anything this big long enough to solve it.
• Drinking, while an classic tactic for me, doesn’t help.  It is distracting, and it sometimes slows down my mind, but in the end alcohol is a depressant and that’s just not a solution. Mostly it makes me sad that I am not getting anything done!
• Sleeping sometimes helps in that when I wake up I am no longer paralyzed.  However, most of the time I can’t sleep because I am too wound up – a vicious cycle.
• Working on really, really mindless, tedious tasks that require almost no concentration can get completed.  As a side effect, those tasks can also break me out of my “rev” cycle.

This came as a surprise to me.  Apparently the monotony of something like mopping the floors or vacuuming the house helps my head reset!  Not every time, but enough of the time that I feel it is worth a shot when I start feeling like I am “revving”.  And when I feel myself slowing I start doing things that are a little more worthwhile, clawing my way back to productivity one task at a time.

I am guessing that some of you know what I mean by all of this.  If you do, how do you break your “revving” cycle so you can get back to your usual, productive self?  Let’s discuss it in the forums.