Being productive with chronic health conditions
by Sierras · 52 things on NewTwos
- Lynette Bye blog post
- Invest in your capacity
- Spend time trying to find treatments as early as possible
- Talk to specialists, try medications, adopt new routines, learn new ways of moving
- Get enough sleep
- Adapt your environment to support you
- Set up autoreply, get an electric bottle cap for medications, build in redundant systems
- Make your key habits robust and flexible
- Plan ways to do things that help even when other work slides
- Build routines flexible enough to adapt
- Make a scaled-down habit list with one or two items that you follow when you're not feeling up to your full normal routine
- Learn your warning signs and pay attention to them
- Plan responses that will leave you ready to be productive again tomorrow
- Plan on not being 100%
- Give yourself buffer time with goals
- Slow down and respond to new conditions
- Figure out your limits
- Not a binary choice between "push yourself" and "accept your limits"
- Try to find where your limits should be and when you want to push yourself more
- The goal is sustainability -- can you maintain this threshold without burning out or further damaging your health?
- Criteria for deciding limits:
- Are you exhausted all of the time? Does increasing time off work reduce the exhaustion?
- Is your pain increasing? Experiment with gradually increasing activity levels.
- Are you experiencing sudden changes? Check with a doctor.
- Does taking a break substantially improve your symptoms?
- Is your physical health impacting your behavior? How costly could these changes be?
- Trying to do more
- Constantly checking in with yourself might cause more stress and heighten awareness of symptoms
- Prioritize ruthlessly
- You have more limited capacity than other people. However, this usually reduces the amount you can do more than the importance of what you can do.
- Do just the most important tasks
- Try to avoid failing with abandon
- Don't write off the entire day or an entire task by default
- Try the 5-minute test
- Do I feel able to do my top priority task for 5 minutes?
- If not, do I feel able to do easier work?
- If not, what break is most likely to leave me feeling better later?
- Also use for self-care, like "Can I do 5 minutes of exercise?" or "Can I spend 5 minutes figuring out which meds I need to order?"
- Work up slowly
- Set goals based on what you've done previously
- Increase your work in small chunks so that you have time to learn the necessary habits and notice when you're overexerting yourself
- When you experience a setback, recalibrate and go more slowly
- Cut yourself slack
- You don't need to compare yourself to others
- If you're testing how much you can do and finding the limits you need to respect so you're not too tired or in too much pain, then that is the upper bound of what you should expect of yourself
- You're not slacking off
- You're pushing through something that is genuinely difficult
- Chronic conditions have an up-and-down cycle. Managing your productivity is about learning to negotiate that cycle.
- Resources & Acknowledgements
- Elizabeth Van Nostrand: My resentful story of becoming a medical miracle
- CDC self-management of chronic conditions
- Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Conditions (book)