balance intense work with deep rest

With the lines blurred between work life and home life thanks to the ongoing pandemic, it’s natural that many of us have become the victim of work addiction, especially those who are working on a new venture, side hustle or start-up.

But we have to remind ourselves that continual work without sufficient rest never leads to long-term success. As Robin Sharma writes in his book The 5 AM Club, “Longevity really is a key to legendary. This is one of the main keys to your rise to iconic. You really must learn how to balance working intensely and brilliantly with deep rest and recovery so you can remain fresh and strong over a long career.”

When it comes to working, whether for yourself or someone else, you must be both intense and intentional. We live in a whole new world right now, and excellence is the name of the game. Unlike the industrial age, it’s not about how many hours you put at work, but how much high-quality work you put in the hours. The quality of your genius in those hours determines the quality of your performance, and hence the quality of your results, it’s as simple as that. 

You must think and work like a sprinter, not a marathoner. This is what the greatest business people and creative producers do — they work in bursts of intense focus and energy and then they pull back and spend a good amount of time resting and recovering. 

Keep oscillating between high-intensity work and deep, mindful rest, so that you achieve your optimal work-rest ratio. That’s the best and most effective to protect your most precious assets — time, energy, focus, willpower and talent. As Sharma writes in the book, “Top performance truly isn’t a linear game. Elite accomplishment is much more like a heartbeat, more like a rhythm, more like a pulse. If you want to show up as a great master — over decades so you literally dominate your domain for an entire career and lead a life you love well into old age — you absolutely need to alternate High Excellence Cycles, those periods of intense and fantastic output, with times of meaningful recovery, Deep Refueling Cycles.”

PS: If you’d like to learn more helpful insights to maximize your performance, I suggest you get my new book Daily Productivity. In this short book, I have extracted the knowledge and wisdom from the best books on productivity, time management, and the art of extraordinary performance in a form that is easy to digest and consume (even if you’re not a reader!). Every meditation has been crafted to give you either the essence and the formula, if you will, of the subject at hand, or a groundbreaking idea introduced by the respective author. 

I’m sure the condensed timeless knowledge in these meditations will assist you in navigating through the complexities that come with working in the modern world. The fundamentals to achieving better results and mastering the art of stress-free productivity will never change and that’s why it’s crucial that we learn and practice them in our day-to-day life to advance forward both personally and professionally. You can get your copy of Daily Productivity here.

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