Crunch and Release:
How Your Life Rhythm Predicts Your Future

As Tony Schwartz, author of The Power of Full Engagement, will tell you, renewing our personal energy is just as important as expending it. Being more productive is not about managing time. Instead, it’s all about managing energy.

Photo Credit: fonitronik

Productivity is based on your life rhythm, staying balanced between crunching and releasing, working hard and playing hard, fully engaging and then completely detaching.

We can’t burn the candle at both ends and expect long-term achievement. The only viable lifestyle solution is one that allows as much down time as up time

In short, we need a freakin’ break.

Crunch and Release

I read Tony’s book, The Power of Full Engagement, a few years ago and I am amazed at how often I refer back to it.

There is one pivotal lesson repeated over and over that I apparently need to hear over and over: recovery from hard work is just as (if not more) important than the hard work itself.

When we proactively plan our breaks, and use them intelligently, we give our mind and body the chance to rest, rebuild, and renew. When we fail to rest, we completely shortchange ourselves and end up burned out, stressed out, and accomplishing less and less over time.

Here is a great video of Tony explaining this concept in more eloquent terms.

How Your Life Rhythm Predicts Your Future

Darren Hardy’s book, The Compound Effect, puts Tony’s concept into a perspective that most of us can intuitively understand. Imagine that for 10 years you came home from work every day and drank 2 beers. Now imagine your best friend came home from work and ate 2 salads instead.

All else being equal, after those 10 years passed you would be carrying an enormous amount of extra weight and your friend would be sporting a trimmer physique.

That’s the power of tiny habits over time and that’s exactly how your rhythm of life predicts your future.

When you go to work every day (which we can call working, crunching, or expending energy) and then you return home from work (which we can call resting, releasing, or renewing energy), you know what it means to experience the rhythm of life.

Working and resting is the norm. We all do it, though the frequency, duration, and intensity of each area is radically different. The key is to find the harmony between those elements (frequency, duration, and intensity) for both working and resting.

It’s easy to predict your future when you know that those elements are either in or out of balance.

Planning to Rest

The example of drinking beer versus eating a salad highlights the choice we have when we take a break. We all know we need to rest, but how we use our rest periods is just as important as how we spend our working hours.

It’s very common to plan your work day, but how often do you proactively plan your time after work?

Do you put as much thought and energy into your evening routine, sleeping habits, and morning routines as you do your hours at the office?

According to Tony, and from what I’ve experienced firsthand, the recovery periods are crucial and it makes an enormously positive difference when you take your break seriously.

What Does Your Rhythm Say About Your Future?

Based on where you are right now, what does your daily rhythm of crunching and releasing say about your long-term future?

Are you heading towards wild success or a colossal burnout?

What would it take for you to spend a few minutes a day planning a more intelligent resting period?

If you could optimize your recovery between working sessions, what would you do?

When your energy is off the charts and you feel fantastic, what factors caused that to be true?

Next Week

On the blog next week I will be sharing a strategy to monitor progress on your biggest goals by playing games and taking your temperature — well — sort of.