When you’re struggling with your mental health, getting through your workday can feel a lot harder than usual. If your workload is making your anxiety, depression, or other mental health difficulties worse, it’s not always the quantity or type of work that’s the culprit. Sometimes it’s that your workday isn’t structured in a way that suits your natural rhythms or your mental health challenges.
Structuring your workday well can help with a wide range of difficulties, from depression and anxiety to ADHD and bipolar disorder. But there’s no one-size-fits-all version of a mentally healthy workday. What’s right for you will be based on self-knowledge, experimentation, and balancing your needs with the needs of others.
How can you figure out the best approach for you? First, I’ll describe some specific strategies tied to particular mental health challenges; then I’ll discuss mentally healthy time management in general.
Strategies for Specific Mental Health Challenges
Let’s start with some advice that may help people who deal with common mental health issues.
Anxiety and depression
Whether your anxiety or depression is chronic or short term, it can make you more likely to avoid certain situations and prone to procrastination. For example, you may find yourself feeling extra sensitive to any signs someone is not happy with your work, but you may also avoid addressing it rather than tackling it head-on. If this sounds like you, consider structuring your days to make avoidance and procrastination more difficult. For example, create short deadlines for steps in a project rather than one deadline for the whole thing. Or, have a set time of day when you take at least one small step forward with a task you’re avoiding. Making progress on tasks you’d prefer to avoid will stop the stress from getting even worse.
ADHD
Many mental health challenges cause people to struggle more with planning and seeing the big picture. This is temporary in the case of problems like depression, but more chronic with issues like ADHD. If you feel overwhelmed with planning, try to enlist the assistance of others, when they’re willing. For example, ask a client to map out deadlines for each stage of a project, or make planning with others a consistent part of your schedule.
Bipolar disorder
Some folks with mood disorders, especially bipolar disorder, struggle a great deal when their rhythms are disrupted — for example, if you’re asked to do shift work or to take an early-morning flight to a conference. If you need a consistent schedule for your mental health, consider asking your boss what adaptations are possible.
Any mental health condition
You’ll find many examples of the accommodations you can ask for in the United States by searching online or looking at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s website. Anyone with a mental health challenge of any sort should familiarize themselves with these options.
If you deal with a mental health condition regularly, look into the options available under the Americans with Disabilities Act sooner rather than later — and well before you’re in a crisis. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your issue doesn’t warrant accommodations if it objectively does. And note that different countries use different terms for similar legislation. For example, the United States uses “accommodations,” whereas the U.K. uses the phrase “reasonable adjustments.”
If you’re comfortable, talk to your manager about your condition and why a particular accommodation would be useful to you. Your therapist can help communicate only relevant information without excessive personal details. For example, they could write a letter to your boss to ensure you’re comfortable with what they are disclosing.
In general, when you have a mental health difficulty, try not to be constantly overchallenged, but don’t completely avoid challenges and triggers either. For example, if you have social anxiety, then sprinkle activities that trigger your anxiety among activities you feel confident with. (For me personally, this means working with people I know well most of the time but working with new collaborators some of the time.)
Strategies That Anyone Can Use
The following steps can help anyone support their mental health at work, whether they deal with a condition chronically, occasionally, or somewhere in between. These strategies also work for people who have subclinical problems (for example, a degree of anxiety but not enough to have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder) or people seeking to increase their resilience against mental health difficulties or relapses. If you have an active mental illness, including high-functioning depression or anxiety, note that self-care and time management aren’t substitutes for actual evidence-based treatments. The strategies mentioned here are supportive; they are not treatments.
Build strong habits around deep work
Developing strong habits around how you work — including how you do deep, focused work — will help you feel in control of your life and schedule.
Why? Consistent routines add structure to our days, boosting our sense of control. Our brains get accustomed to performing sequences of behaviors and eventually start to do these almost on autopilot. A common example of how behaviors become automatic: Within a few months of learning to drive, we all turn on our car, put on our seat belt, release the brake, then look in our mirrors — without really thinking about it. The same thing will happen with your productivity habits if you’re consistent with when and where you do your job. If you do deep, focused work during the same slot in your day, like 10 AM to noon, keeping up that habit will become easier and more automatic over time, even on days when you’re not at your best.
But this will only happen if you’ve got well-established, consistent habits. If you sometimes do your focused work at 10 AM, but other times you try to do it at 1 PM, you won’t experience the full benefits of how habits reduce your need for discipline.
Anyone can benefit from this strategy, but particularly those who have episodic mental health challenges, like depression, or those who go through periods when their concentration is poor due to anxiety and rumination or worry. If you have strong habits for when you focus on work, it’s more likely you’ll get your work done. Keeping up your important habits during stressful times can protect you against the risk of unraveling. It can help you feel steady, stop your confidence from eroding, and ensure you don’t have added stress from piles of undone work.
Create routines to do tasks without imminent deadlines
Tackling tasks with imminent deadlines may feel intuitive and obvious, but if all you’re getting done is what’s right in front of you, you’ll generally feel a lack of control. When you accomplish important small tasks that don’t have deadlines but that do need to get done, on the other hand, you’ll feel like you’re managing your life well. Regularly set aside time for these kinds of small administrative tasks. Whether it’s getting back to a colleague about a collaboration that’s weeks away or finally scheduling that appointment with the doctor or therapist, admin tasks create a lot of mental drain. You think I should do that but don’t. And those thoughts keep recurring. To-dos that roll over from one day’s list to the next don’t feel good.
In my book Stress-Free Productivity, I observed that I can do up to an hour of admin tasks before I start my deep work, without disrupting how much deep work I get done. The reason I focus on my admin tasks first is that if I attempt to get to them after deep work, I’m too tired. And checking off at least one “life admin” task (something not related to work) per day keeps them from piling up and creating mental clutter and stress.
Your work and your patterns of attacking it might be different from mine. What’s important is that you observe your patterns and sequence tasks accordingly. For example, say that realistically you’re only productive for four days a week. Consider accepting that rather than fighting it. If you notice that all you manage to do on Fridays is phone it in, see what happens if you’re honest about it. Experiment with organizing your schedule accordingly — get your must-dos done Monday to Thursday — rather than criticizing yourself for the limitations of your focus and discipline. Accepting our limitations can sometimes have a paradoxical effect: Self-criticism takes up a lot of energy, so when we stop doing it, we have more energy for more productive things.
Use an unfocused mind to get things done
A huge part of why work can feel so overwhelming is the false idea that we should be focused and undistracted all day. That’s not possible, and not necessary or desirable, especially if you’re trying to do anything innovative.
It’s more realistic and mentally healthier to have a mind that’s alternately focused and unfocused, because during our brains’ unfocused recovery time we make creative connections without even trying to. For example, you’ve probably had a brilliant idea for a project while taking a shower or going for a walk, right? When we’re unfocused, pathways that felt murky while we were concentrating can suddenly become clear. Problems we couldn’t solve from up close up suddenly become simpler.
So rather than trying to force your brain to do task after task, let it relax and wander after you’ve been productive for a while. Personally, I achieve this through a combination of walks, errands, chores around the house, and entertainment (like reading a blog post in the middle of the workday).
I need to let my mind wander most after deep work sessions or when I’m feeling overwhelmed by how to prioritize. If I take a walk when I’m feeling mentally cluttered, my unfocused mind usually does my prioritizing and organizing for me. If you’re stuck on an assignment and aren’t sure what to do next, rather than stressing about it, let your mind wander for a bit. That way you’ll be able to mull over ideas without just staring at a blank page.
Unfocused time can also be hugely helpful to people experiencing mental health challenges at work. For example, someone with social anxiety needs breathing space to recover from feedback or to adjust to the working styles of new collaborators. Likewise, someone with depression needs opportunities for small bites of pleasure, like a leisurely coffee in a sunny spot, to bolster their mood.
Making time to be unfocused should become a regular part of your habits. Maybe you can do your deep work in the mornings and then treat your afternoons as opportunities for serendipity and wandering. However you do it, find ways to let your brain off the hook for a while each day. And remember, the more you’re doing novel or innovative work, the more you’ll need mental down-time to recover from the toll of it. Very challenging work involves lots of mental and emotional fallout, including disappointment, uncertainty, and frustration. If you expect yourself to be firing on all cylinders at all times, you’ll shy away from doing the types of novel and challenging work that require unfocused recovery time.
What Managers Need to Know
If you’re a manager, make sure you understand how the previous advice will help your staff both feel better and do their work better, and familiarize yourself with the types of accommodations that help people with specific mental health challenges. You can do this by simply searching online, talking to HR, or asking a psychologist to do an education session for your workplace. With the latter option, explain to the psychologist in advance how your workplace functions so they can consider types of flexibility that won’t be excessively disruptive.
Learn from your staff about what their difficulties are and what would help them, and of course, never judge them negatively for their mental health. A particular difficulty doesn’t say anything about their talent, dedication, or their quality of work. Since people may be reluctant to ask for accommodations, remind staff regularly that you’re open to requests and that you welcome honest conversations about mental illness and health. Be as creative as you can in making accommodations. Your job is to bring out the best in your people, and you’ll do that by supporting their mental health in the ways they request.
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Structuring your workday to support your mental health and structuring it to do your best work don’t have to be at odds. Using the tips from this article, you should see improvements in both your mental well-being and your productivity.