Dear Dartmouth,
We’ve been focusing on the importance of taking time to replenish and recharge for your wellbeing this month. We are hopeful that you were able to use at least part of the break to step back from the hamster wheel of busy-ness and productivity and offer yourself a chance to rest. It has been a year of varying degrees of challenge and loss for everyone in our community, and it is not realistic to expect your energy to be a bottomless resource. When we’re offered opportunities to pause and restore ourselves, it’s really important to take full advantage.
That said, it can feel very difficult to “shift gears” from being in full-on productivity mode to genuine relaxation, and then back again. This is even more true in an environment that reinforces your desire to achieve or produce in order to gain external validation. At Dartmouth, this has likely contributed to what some call the “work hard play hard” culture. In this culture EVERY activity including the things you do for fun over your weekends and breaks can either produce feelings of guilt, or FOMO, or simply become new opportunities to go all out – pushing your own limits in the hopes of some recognition that may or may not come your way.
With all of that in mind, as we head into S21 we want to encourage you to consider experimenting with a new mindset for how you approach both your on-time and your down-time as a way to sustain your energy and your wellbeing over the course of a term. One example of this mindset comes from the work of Greg McKeown on what he has termed “Essentialism,” or the “disciplined pursuit of less.”
McKeown suggests that the word “priority” entered the English language in the 15th century but was never used in the plural (i.e. “priorities”) until the 20th century. This insistence on the singular makes a lot of sense, given that while there can be many important things, only one can be the most important at any given moment. But we have strayed further and further from this recognition, creating a world where concepts like “multitasking” have become the norm. And all of this can make it harder than ever to sort out what matters most at any given point in time.
As such, many of our lives can look or feel more like the image on the left at the top of this post. Our energy – an exhaustible resource – becomes diluted across a number of different activities, each demanding a certain amount of attention and focus. Moreover, the cognitive demands of switching from task to task further depletes us, draining our ability to do our best work and obscuring our ability to perceive where we need to put our attention as urgency begins to outweigh importance.
As a result, you may find that the characteristics in the “non-essentialist” column below better describe your life than those that make up the “essentialist” list:
If you’re ready to try something new, McKeown’s process for embracing essentialism is simple and powerful:
- Explore: Determine which activities will carry you furthest toward your goals
- Eliminate: Let go of as many non-essential tasks or activities as possible
- Execute: Put your energy into what matters most (see the image on the right at the top of this post)!
You can implement this process several ways. It can be a daily or weekly reflection where you consider all the things you want to accomplish in a certain time frame and rank them according to priority. Once you have them ranked, cross off everything except the ACTUAL priority at the top of the list, and schedule some concentrated, focused time into your planner to advance that priority before considering any of your other demands.
It could also be a larger process that you undertake prior to launching into each new term (or for those of you about to graduate, whatever will come next). Consider what is most important to you this Spring (i.e. where you want to put your energy) and what is siphoning off your energy needlessly (i.e. where you no longer want to put your energy) and then plan your involvement accordingly.
In either case, this might involve learning how to say “no” or establishing some boundaries which can feel risky or awkward at first, especially if some expectations have been established regarding your responsiveness to the needs of others. There will always be external demands on your energy and attention, some of which will be things that you “have” to do, regardless of how much you may actually “want” to do them.
The goal, however, is for this process to be empowering for you. To quote McKeown, “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” Ultimately, this is about more than time management, and even more than energy management. It’s about taking ownership of the life you want to create for yourself rather than following someone else’s lead.
Next month, our wellbeing theme will shift to “Purpose on Purpose,” and we’ll continue to explore this idea of a more intentional approach to both your daily life AND the life you want to be living in the future. We hope you’ll join us on this journey. And as always, we are here to support you along the way. Please explore what we have to offer, and don’t ever hesitate to reach out!
Take care and be well,
Todd