My Favourite Metaphor

The Metaphor

Disclaimer that I did not come up with this, and I heard about it a while ago. It’s also important to remember that while metaphors are great to reason about, they are fundamentally flawed, as they try to generalize across different situations.

To the metaphor: Imagine your energy capacity as a suitcase. And all the things you need/want to do are clothing items. We all have the tendency (at least I do!) to toss things into our energy suitcase.

• A cool side project, let me hack on that!
• Of course I’ll spend few hours this weekend helping you move!
• I can afford a few hours a day to work on my side-gig!
• I can spend 1 hour a day going to the gym!
• Lets go camping this weekend, I’ve been trying to go outside more!
• I’ve always wanted to cook X, let me learn!
• I’ve been wanting to read this book, an hour a day should be easy to come up with!
• If I take on this project, my boss will be impressed - I can do it!

The suitcase has capacity

We sometimes fail to realize that our energy suitcases have capacity. At some point, after you’ve tossed in enough items, the suitcase won’t close. That’s what how I would define burnout.

Many people experience burnout, it’s that feeling when you are so overwhelmed with things you have/want to do, that you start dreading each and every one of them and make no progress in any.

Make sure you can always close your suitcase. Once it overflows, you can’t close it, and if you can’t close it, all your items will spill everywhere when you travel!

The path to closing an overflowing suitcase

The most important thing when you are getting close to overflowing your suitcase, is to notice that you are overflowing it.

There are three main ways to prevent/fix an overflowing energy capacity suitcase:

• Remove clothing items from the suitcase, it’s okay, you can get back to them!
• Fold your clothes properly! If your items are well organized, you can fit more of them!
• Spend the energy to get a bigger suitcase, with more capacity (trying to increase your capacity takes capacity of itself!)

Removing items from the suitcase

Removing items means accepting that you have limited capacity and explicitly prioritizing some commitments over others. Maybe it’s okay to wait on that promotion at work, accept that you can learn that cool technology at a later time and prioritize the things that matter most to you.

I personally struggle with this, I find it hard to say no to new commitments and even harder to drop commitments I’ve already made. I’m trying to get better but it’s a work in progress.

It’s important not to take it as a sign of defeat that you are dropping a commitment and instead, a sign of responsibility towards the items you decide to prioritize.

Folding items properly

This means taking each item, relative to each other item, and ordering them while thoughtfully considering how they all fit together. In practice, this means:

• Proper time management & planning. Ensure that you dedicate blocks of your focused time towards commitments. Before you go ahead and commit to a task, think about how it fits in your current schedule. Better yet, use a calendar app and observe when you’ll do it.
• Limiting distractions. Turn off notifications on all your devices, clear out your work space, let others know that you’re in focus mode (I find noise canceling headphones great at this in an office environment).
• Regular retrospectives. Look back at your commitments over a certain time period, did you over-commit? How did you feel? Were you overwhelmed? Were you bored? How were your energy levels?

All the above should help you make the most out of your existing capacity. However, no matter how much you fold your clothes, if you have too many clothes it will over flow. It’s critical not to take the above as a silver bullet and instead evaluate if you simply are committing to too much.

Increasing the capacity of the suitcase

It’s really hard to increase capacity of physical suitcases, but luckily for us the metaphor breaks here. We can increase our own capacity, although not significantly in a short-time period. There are various ways we can increase our capacity:

• Being healthy. This includes sleeping well, eating healthy balanced diets, staying hydrated, regular exercise and keeping a healthy mental health. A single one of those health contributing factors can decrease your energy levels dramatically. It’s important to also realize that health is often times a privilege, and not something that can easily change.
• Having strong support circles. This can include a partner, family, friends, colleagues, etc. Having people you can lean on can help create the safety needed to free up more energy capacity.

The takeaway is that all the above require capacity of their own. Eating healthy usually takes more effort (or money, sometimes both), exercise takes time and energy, building a support circle takes effort nurturing those relationships. However, even though those take capacity to free up capacity, the gain in capacity usually outweighs the cost although they might take some time to bear fruit.

Why I’m writing this

I’m writing this because I realized I’ve been overwhelmed lately. I wanted to write out my thoughts, and I quickly remembered this metaphor and wanted to let my brain ramble about it for a little.

I’m currently re-evaluating how I spend my time, if you have ideas or thoughts around this please reach out!