Our most precious resources include not just our time and energy, but also our attention.

I have observed that attention is finite. I see that in my students and clients, and I see it in myself over the course of a typical day. Attention gets used up, and we need to rest to replenish it.

But to the degree that we can focus, we can conserve our attention in order to accomplish what matters most.

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It was a year ago — good old Friday the thirteenth — when everything shut down for me.

We had already made the decision the day before to shut down my schools in Atlanta, but somehow I thought Maine had a little more time. However, that Friday was my last morning at my favorite coffee shop. They were wearing latex gloves to collect the cash. The pandemic anxiety had arrived — and the virus, too, was already circulating. Life as we knew it was over, and it still hasn’t returned.

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Nebulous tasks are always the easiest ones to put off.

Even if you have clearly defined what you are going to do (“Write first draft” or “Fill out recommendation form”), there is an ugly amorphousness to certain things on our to-do list. We just don’t know how long they are going to take, and we suspect that it isn’t going to be a fun experience to do them. This one is going to require an uncertain amount of effort, attention, and focus; that one requires us to pull something out of ourselves that we aren’t sure we have. It makes perfect sense to choose something smaller, better defined, or practiced.

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Back when I worked six/seven days a week and had no life and no hobbies, I didn’t understand the benefit of taking time off.

I saw only what it would cost me; I didn’t know that, in addition to the obvious pleasures of rest and relaxation, time away would actually make me more effective in my work.

Now, I marvel at how taking an afternoon or a day or a week to completely disconnect from work will result in a surge in productivity, creativity, and satisfaction when I return.

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There are times when that elusive quarry known as “productivity” is impossible to get ahold of.

Grief, stress, and anxiety are like RAM-intensive applications running in the background of your mind, hogging all the resources and leaving you with only a sliver of processing power to complete your work.

Sometimes, you can still spend the afternoon putting in the time and going through the motions. A day of being present in body only isn’t much of a setback. But if you’re working from home — or worse, working for yourself — day after day without being able to focus, you might need to do something differently. In this article, I’ll share my tips for being productive when I’m exhausted, distracted, or overwhelmed and the work still has to get done.

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