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Pre-2020 we spent 8+ hours in the office, plus maybe an hour or more commuting, turning our workday into about 10-11 hours of our day, on average. But, as I mentioned, part of that was just commuting, and part of that in-office time was spent interacting socially with coworkers, going to get lunch, etc. Now? We wake up and start working. (If you’re lucky and plan you might even get a chance to shower before work.) You eat at your desk. You work right up until 5-6PM and you simply shut down. Again, you’re lucky if someone doesn’t still email or “ping” you after that. So, for many of us, our workday might still be 10-11 hours, or it might even be a bit shorter, but it’s ALL work, and as we just saw, the reality is that around the 6-hour mark our productivity started to dip. The key then, to not burning out, is to make that day flexible. Instead of demanding you put in “x” hours each day/week/month, we should simply lay out what work needs to be completed, what the deadlines are, and give workers the freedom to find the best way to accomplish that. Maybe, for some, they will want to really focus for 4 days per week and have the extra day to live their lives. For others, it might look like working some in the morning, some in the afternoon, and then again in the evening. Not everyone is going to fit into the same bucket when it comes to finding the balance that allows them to do their best work, and also have a life. Don’t force them to fit into the bucket you like. That’s how you burn them out.
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It grabbed my attention because it’s something I hear quite often, often in combination with the other, more obvious, “complaint” about working long hours.
And yes, the word complaint is in quotes because we all know that when we mention the hours or the back-to-back meetings, we complain about it, but we are really bragging about how busy we are for one simple reason. Busy people are in demand, they are important.
But, are they really?
I think this article, while helpful, also hints at a larger societal problem that many of us have been thinking about and that is what role our work plays in our overall lives and our sense of work. Working all the time isn’t just something we sometimes do. It’s part and parcel of being “important” in our society. Let’s face it, when someone tells us they disconnect in the evenings and weekends, our first thought is not “Oh how healthy”, it is much more to be “Oh you must not be very important then”.
Until that perception changes, I don’t know that we’ll make much progress, but it does need to change. Our work plays far too much of a role in our self-worth and therefore is it is far too easy to take advantage of employees.
This quote from Kevin Love is something that just stood out to me because it’s something that I think is so important to understand. Not just for a professional athlete, but for any of us to remember about our own line of work, or to remember when it comes to young people in school:
“You can’t achieve yourself out of depression,” Love says. “You can’t achieve yourself out of that high-level of anxiety.”