During the first month, I was still trying to figure out exactly what and how I wanted to track stuff. I tracked my workdays and mental health for two months total, from late April to late June 2021. What I learned from tracking my mental health I ended up creating a notes section in my spreadsheet so I could summarize any relevant highlights and lowlights. She also asked me to note down how I spent my alone time, and any activities I noticed that exhausted or energized me. Why track everything else alongside my mood? We're looking for patterns, my coach said. How much work I rescheduled due to mental health Level of satisfaction with clients (scale of 1-10) Number of hours worked with and without calls Type of work (strategy work, client calls, projects) Time blocks I worked throughout the day (start and end times) Gut checks help me listen to my body, so I can isolate and sometimes trace the source of stress.Īside from mental health, I wanted to track: To help me identify where I was mood-wise, I fell back on an old life-saving strategy called gut checks that I'd learned during a birthparent seminar on handling grief. Knowing that my scale would be a bit skewed compared to "normal" stress, I came up with my own:Ĩ – 9 = minimal anxiety, highly functionalĦ – 7 = rising anxiety or depression, may still be partly functional for short periodsĤ – 5 = high levels of anxiety, or depressed and nonfunctional After that, all I had to do was figure out exactly how to track everything.īut how do you even track mental health? My coach suggested measuring my mood on a scale of 1-10, from worst to best. I needed something simple I could easily adapt and add to without having to learn a new software platform, so I decided to set up my tracker in Google Sheets. The outcomes I wanted were easy: more energy, better mental health across more days, and more insight into how I work best. But not only was stress messing with my motivation, it hadn't helped my bottom line, either. With Lacy's help, I pinpointed three major frustrations:įrustration #1: I couldn't seem to shake my overall lack of energy and had trouble concentrating on work.įrustration #2: Despite living with mental health conditions for over a decade, nothing had prepared me for this kind of stress, and I didn't know how to handle it.įrustration #3: Being the sole earner during a pandemic meant I had to earn. The first step of setting up my mental health tracker was identifying my main frustrations, ideal outcomes, and how best to measure them both. Creating a mental health and productivity tracker And it hit me: I needed a simple, tangible system to figure out how work exacerbated my anxiety, and I needed better ways to reduce stress, so I could be more productive-and healthier. Then I remembered what Lacy had said about planning for the worst days. I didn't even connect time tracking and mental health at work until one stressful day when I couldn't seem to get anything done and was ready to scream with frustration. I figured that would be more about setting boundaries than creating new systems. When we first started working together, I told my new coach, Lacy, that I wanted a business that supported my mental health. It's amazing what you can accomplish with a PPP loan and a really good business coach. "Plan every week like it's your worst mental health day" It was time to invest in myself and my business. Granted, no one expected how pandemic lockdowns and a recession would affect everyone's mental health, but I knew I needed help. Struggling to stay productive as I realized how unprepared I was to handle stress at work didn't help either. It's a weird shift, going from feeling invincible to barely being able to drag yourself out of bed each day. Good thing I didn't, though, because I eventually crashed. I got up early and stayed up late, went for long walks, breezed through work, and even contemplated baking bread from scratch again. And for a little while there in the early days of COVID, I was actually on an energy high.
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