On to week five of Dr Amantha Imber‘s energy experiments. This week, and the stop doing list, was all about boundaries (links to the others are at the bottom of this post).

As she says in the instructions, “you can’t out-energise a life full of energy-draining yes’s.”

Think of your energy like a mobile phone battery. You can have the best charging strategies in the world, but if you’ve got 47 apps running in the background, your battery will still die by lunchtime.

I’ve had a little experience with this already.

The planned stop doing list experiment

This week, I chose the stop doing list, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as I start planning the next quarter.

The list is made up of tasks

• you resent doing
• aren’t your unique strengths
• don’t serve your long-term goals.

and for this week, to chose one task and stop doing it.

As you know I work from home, and there are always household tasks to take care of – can’t refuse to do those no matter how much I resent them.

And as a general rule, I rarely take care of tasks, aside maybe from marketing, that I consider aren’t my unique strengths.

Though I can’t say I’ve ever thought about my unique strengths might be either.

For that matter, who’s to say if I practise, I wouldn’t find they become my unique strengths? Like the book covers.

Which left tasks that don’t serve my long-term goals.

And by now, there aren’t many of those.

While the website does serve my long-term goals. it’s a five day experiment, so I chose, (once again), to stop fiddling with the website.

The stop list outcome

I’m not sure what would have come out of this experiment had it been an ordinary week.

But DB was admitted to hospital, and so it became an extraordinary week.

I’m grateful he’s back at home, but he has some healing to do before he’s back to what you might call normal again.

As you might imagine, I found it was hard to concentrate on anything, particularly with poor, fretting Clever Girl who doesn’t understand English and therefore had no idea what was going on aside from her normal routines being interrupted.

It quickly became apparent that I wasn’t in a fit state to take care of anything much without f*cking it up…

And so the “stop doing” list, morphed into a “do this all you want” list.

Because it’s easy to spend a few moments tinkering with the look and feel of a website, and it’s hard to do too much damage if you leave the core functions alone.