Tool 60 · Develop yourself
This exercise is not medical and does not hand out wellness advice. It looks at your actual week and reaches a plain conclusion.
A guided 18 to 22 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
If the answer is a sentence rather than a date, you have probably said it before.
Recurrence is the evidence. Tiredness on a Tuesday is not.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I would not ask how tired you are. Everybody is tired and it tells you nothing. I would ask what recurs, because recurrence is the only honest signal in this territory.
Then the end date. Almost every demanding period is described as a phase. The real ones have a date, a condition or an event attached. The others have a sentence attached, usually after this quarter or once this project lands, and the sentence has been said several times already.
I would also be careful about who chose this. A person doing two jobs because the rent demands it is not making the same mistake as somebody who could stop and does not want to. The advice that fits one is insulting to the other, and most writing about this subject cannot tell the difference.
And if something physical keeps happening, that is for a doctor. Not for me, and not for a conversation like this one. Get it looked at, and then come back to what the week is doing to you.
What you'll get
01
The real week
02
Actual recovery
03
What recurs
04
Temporary or structural
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Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
What your body is actually being asked to do.
02 · Test it
Write down the actual week for seven days, without improving it.
What I would do
Describe the real week. The intended one is not evidence.
Look at what recurs rather than at how tired you feel today.
Find out whether the end date is real or a story.
Take anything physical to a GP rather than to a conversation.
Change one structural thing, not ten habits.
Test it
When did you last genuinely recover?
What keeps coming back?
What was supposed to end this, and when?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that you are doing too much. Two alternatives usually produce more. A demanding period can be intentional, bounded and entirely sustainable, and occasional tiredness proves nothing, so the honest finding may be that this is fine. Or the reverse, and more uncomfortable: repeatedly promising yourself recovery later while maintaining permanent intensity is itself the evidence, and it tends to be visible to everybody except the person doing it.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Further thinking
The Burnout Challenge
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Long Working Hours and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke
Mika Kivimäki and colleagues
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
Book
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Forty years of research arguing that burnout is a mismatch between a person and the conditions they work in, not a deficiency in the person. Worth the time if you are about to redesign your entire life on the strength of feeling depleted, because the two are easy to confuse and the remedies are not remotely the same.
Article
Mika Kivimäki and colleagues
A meta analysis across more than half a million people. It puts a number on something usually discussed as a feeling.
Book
Matthew Walker
The most widely read case for treating sleep as structural rather than optional. Some of its stronger claims have been challenged, so read it for the questions it raises about your own week rather than for its warnings.
Book
Oliver Burkeman
The title comes from a simple observation. An average human life is surprisingly short when expressed in weeks. Burkeman challenges the idea that becoming more productive will eventually create enough time for everything. It won't.