How to Prioritize Your Work With Low Energy in Midlife
Today I am foggy and a bit tired, almost as if my head is cut off from my body. It is very similar to how I feel when I have congestion or allergies, and I do not believe that is it. I simply am in a stage of a space holder where descending into my cave is necessary. A moment in my business cycle where the loose items I began need some loving attention. It is a time when I get to stand in the sun, walk Suri, record my thoughts on my voice note and reflect.
This is not the kind of rest where I crawl into bed. It is the slow kind, filled with creativity, and it still keeps me steady in knowing what my one priority is because I am still tending to the Soul of My Business.
There is so much that we hold as women in midlife. I have carried it in my head, and on my task list, and on my phone, and in my notes app, and in a notebook, all at the same time. I don't believe I have the brain capacity or the energy to hold all of that information and then make all of these different micro decisions and plan so far in advance. It is exhausting and you may feel the same. Cheers to you sister in your peri and menopause season of changing how you live with your business!
So this morning, with not much fuel in my system, all I had to do was ask for my priority list.
How I do this now
For the past three months I have been working with Claude, connected to my calendar, my Notion boards, and my Slack channel. I call her Hana, and she is my admin and ops manager. All I need to do is communicate an idea I have in my head, or an appointment that needs to be listed, and it gets saved and turned into a task for me. Then I stop holding it.
That is the whole setup. The recipe below is the part you can use today, with or without any AI.
Recipe One, for a day when you do not have much fuel
Here are the questions I invite you to ask yourself when it comes to your workload.
That last one is the one that keeps me from feeling as if I am always behind.
I asked Hana what my priority list was today, and this agentic AI shared three action items.
Write this letter. It is the one thing that is top priority because I send it to you every Tuesday.
Finish batching Sunday's letter, the blog and the four social pieces.
Fix the invites for Wednesday's Sacred Strategy podcast recordings and the guest forms with new Zoom URL links.
Everything else on the board moved to tomorrow, and I did not have to make that decision in my head first thing in the morning, which meant I wasn't feeling overwhelmed or ashamed for not getting straight to work.
In actuality, I feel as if I am always present. I know exactly what I need to get done. There is always time, space, or energy to get one thing done, and that is so important. Besides that, I have been washing all my washable rugs, I ate some delicious congee with bok choy and chicken, and then I return to my desk to sprinkle a little more business magic before I get up again.
I do not think about all the other things. My attention does not move into all these different areas within my business, nor do I have multiple tabs open trying to complete three projects and not getting a single one finished. When I have a moment, I sit down, I get to work on that thing, and then I move forward.
Recipe Two, and this one also needs no technology at all
Do you know how many little tasks you have stored in your brain that you know you need to complete? When you are writing a newsletter to your list, there are so many steps to make that happen, and the same is true when you are scheduling your next circle and all the emails that go with it. I can list all the little steps because I've created this interesting habit of breaking down everything I do so that it takes up less space in my mind and instead space on my Notion page.
That habit is the actual recipe, and I built it long before any of this was connected to something like AI. Hana can only hand me back what I have already noticed about my own work, so the noticing has to come first, and that part is not only free but it is helpful because you are systematizing your business like a badass CEO.
So whether or not you are comfortable or aligned with AI, I invite you to do this for one week. Every day, keep track of every single little detail of work that you do.
It may feel like this is not helpful, or that it is really too much to go step by step, line item by line item, of every single action you take. And what if you played along with me, yeah? Focus on one big task and only one. Gather that information for a week anyway, and here is what you will see.
The execution of it starts to feel fun, because you are not holding all of these different tasks. It is just one thing. You have got this list going, and it feels good to check it off. You can print it, you can color it, you can put stickers on it.
And then you will notice what you actually get done each day, and what your actual priorities are.
When you are ready for another kind of support, whether that is a Notion board, or a Slack channel, or putting all of it together with your Large Language Models, or LLMs (Gemini, GPT, Claude, CoPilot, etc), you will already have all the information you need to make it work.
If the recipe you need this week is a different one, how to hold space as a coach is the one about holding a woman inside her own question, and why Manifestor coaches go quiet instead of asking for help sits with the part where you do not ask at all.
And if you have not met your own magic and medicine yet, the quiz takes about a minute and will tell you which archetype is running your business. The LUSH Business Academy is where we build the systems together, and our next Stay Sacred and Build Circle is Monday, August 24, one live hour from 4 to 5 PM ET.
xoxo,
Sora
