Four Ways I Stay Productive When I’m Sick

Full disclosure: I was laid up on my couch most of last week. I spent almost four days sniffling and dizzy with a weird flu-ish thing [but I'm superstitiously avoiding the phrase "swine flu"—I don't want it to come back]. And while I’d have liked nothing more than to spend the duration of my illness lying around, drinking tea and watching old episodes of Serenity and Six Feet Under, I had deadlines I couldn’t ignore and deliverables whose due dates were looming.

While I know that pushing myself to work when I’m not feeling well isn’t going to make me heal any more quickly, I’m certainly glad I did a little bit of work during my illness—it’s made this week a lot easier. So much easier, in fact, that I’ve decided to make this my Getting Things Done go-to whenever I don’t feel well. Here’s how it goes:

• Research and study. Look at what everyone else in your field is doing, and see what you can learn from it. Catch up on reading your RSS feeds. Learn a new skill, if you can handle it. Have a good friend bring you a stack of magazines, and work through them in a marathon reading session interspersed with naps. Last week I worked through bits of a CSS tutorial series and looked at knitting patterns for future projects. I also spent some time with the blogrolls of some of my favorite bloggers and browsing Digg to find new sites to read, and worked through a several-thousand-post backlog in my RSS reader.
• Correspondence. Write informal letters to your colleagues or clients, especially ones you haven’t spoken with in awhile. Answer all the email in your inbox [the ever-elusive Inbox Zero]. Even though I was too stuffy to talk too much on the phone, I sent a handful of emails to old friends, caught up via IM with some bloggers and artists whose work I love, and emailed all the clients who have orders going out in the next two weeks to make sure their payments are on the way.
• Polishing past work or improving your current web presence. Although it’s not something you want to do when you’re not completely clear-headed, it’s an especially relevant task for web workers and bloggers whose old content has to be kept up-to-date—and non-bloggers who display their portfolios online, too. Last week, during some of my clearer moments, I revised some of my web page’s static content with more recent information, a task I’d been putting off for weeks.
• Planning for future action. Figure out what you want to do, and how you’re going to do it. This was especially helpful, because while the dizziness made it nearly impossible to focus long enough to write a whole blog post or exercise my shaky-at-best Photoshop skills, let alone hold a pair of needles or operate a sewing machine, I still made a little bit of progress. For me, this meant making plans for expanding my line of knitwear for my Etsy shop and coming up with new ways to promote it, brainstorming blog post ideas and future topics, and solidifying my own editorial calendar in for the next couple of weeks.

What do you do to stay productive when you’re not feeling well? Share your experiences in the comments?

Amanda Lee Anderson is a writer and editor living in Cincinnati, Ohio, and New York City. She writes about fashion, music, productivity, and happiness. Read her blog or find her on Twitter.