Impact vs. duration

I left something out in my 'first visit' post: the Energy Measure sheet.  This is something I need to fill in once I have at least a week's worth of activity diaries under my belt, and it was something I had difficulty understanding during my consultation.

It works like this: I have to look back through my activity diary, and categorise my activities as high, medium or low energy requirements.  The examples given were things like, "Blogging: 30 minutes", or "Mowing the lawn: 10 minutes".  And my scientific, logical brain was refusing to take in the time component as a valid part of the entry.  Surely, if "mowing the lawn" is high in energy requirement, it's high whether I do 10 minutes or 20 or 30?

I've forgotten, now, the words my consultant used to explain it to me.  One sentence made it all so clear: it's about limits.  If I do too much of any one activity, I cross a limit, head into meltdown, and crash.  Two lots of ten minutes can be lower in total requirements than one lot of 20 - as I discovered today.

Mopping the floors
Mopping is a Friday morning activity.  We have two enthusiastic dogs (and one of them has drool like raw egg white), so mopping has to be done fairly regularly.  Sweeping (a daily chore; see 'dogs', above) is normally an evening task.  Which I did not do yesterday (Thursday).

I felt pretty awesome this morning, so I set about sweeping, then mopping, the downstairs floors.  (Do not attempt to mop an unswept floor in a house of dogs.  It gets nasty).  It turns out that doing both tasks one after the other is too much.  Neither job is particularly onerous on its own, though mopping is definitely harder work than sweeping.  Both jobs together, though, exhausted me.  By the time I was done, I was weak, shaking, kinda confused - and the knock on effects have lasted all day.  At no point have I recovered the 'awesome' I felt this morning.

Lesson for the day: 1 + 1 != 2, at least in the world of energy requirements.