Monthly Musings - May

Calpol, peak performance, weeds, sea and sunshine

This past month has been a whirlwind.

Calpol addicts

Both kids have had time off from school / childcare because of various lurgies, which has meant very little sleep for us, and also a lot more juggling and balancing with work. But we’re getting good at this now, so whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger right?

I do think back to Covid, and wonder how on earth we coped with having a young baby at home whilst both working. Then I remember it was hideously hard and I stop wasting my precious energy on re-living the past. But every time I see this video, it still cracks me up.

Peak performance

I’ve also decided to evolve this newsletter to better weave together how productivity and time management work hand in hand with holistic ways of looking at our health and performance, enabling us to more easily get into a peak state of flow. This has been a passion of mine for many years and I’ve built a career around it, so I’m excited to share with you over the coming months different ways that you can utilise all aspects of the world around you to get yourself into ‘peak performance mode’.

Green fingers

I’ve particularly enjoyed my garden this month. Here in the UK the sunshine has finally graced us with her presence, and I’ve been pottering around barefooted doing as much as I can in the garden. I don’t know what’s come over me. Anyone who knows me, will know that all I have to do is look at a plant and it dies…. but miraculously they haven’t died yet and the garden is looking prettier by the day, considering how few flowers and many weeds are still in it. I’ve realised that gardening (particularly weeding) is a great way to get headspace and clarity, so I’ve been building it into my week and feel like my focus has improved.

Sand, sunshine and sea

Speaking of sunshine, I’ve had the pleasure of going back to the land of Aphrodite to see my family this month. Waking up to this view is breath-taking. It’s incredibly peaceful and I believe the perfect place for inspiration. I anticipate many future visits to this exact spot for the purpose of writing.

Here are few of my other favourite things this month:

Mouth Tape

Yes, you read that right. I wear tape on my mouth at night to encourage nasal breathing rather than mouth breathing. My oxygen and carbon dioxide levels have balanced out nicely and I don’t wake up feeling really thirsty or with a dry throat anymore. This means that, even though I’m still woken up to crying children throughout the night, at least I am more refreshed whilst tending to them, and I don’t feel like I’ve been hit by a bus every morning. Win!

I use the 3M Nexcare cloth tape, just a small postage stamp size over the lips to help them stay closed. I’ve been doing this for 5 months now and I will never go back to sleeping tape-less.

Speak Screen

Thanks to my AI, I have discovered that my iPhone can read any text on the screen aloud to me. I don’t always have the time to sit down and read as much as I would like to, so this tool has been amazingly helpful to keep up with my thirst for knowledge whilst also tending to a wriggly baby.

If you have an iPhone you can set it up like this:

Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content > Speak Screen

Then you use two fingers from the top of the screen to access it at any point and listen to a robotic voice reading the text of whatever page you’re on.

Forgiveness

I recently listened to a brilliant episode on the Feel Better, Live More podcast (Dr Rangan Chatterjee) speaking to Dr Fred Luskin, clinical psychologist and researcher at Stanford University who wrote the book Forgive for Good. He talks about the medical benefits of forgiveness and how past hurts are stored in our bodies. Although the thinking is not new, it was new to me, and I really got a lot out of this episode, it was fascinating stuff.

I’ll be back to normal programming again next week, hopefully feeling much more rejuvenated and refreshed!

I’d love to hear from you. What were your favourite things from the last month?

-Selda

If you’d like to delve deeper into how you can best maximize the time in your week, book me for a one-to-one productivity power hour.

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