How to fully disconnect when you’re taking a day off

Here’s a familiar scenario: We find a rare day on our calendars where there are no important meetings and obligations. It’s a golden window of opportunity to take a day off from work. We take that day off, but emerge from the day-off feeling as if we’ve not accomplished meaningful outside of work, or as if we’ve rested enough.

Why? Work-related texts are still flooding our phones, demanding our immediate attention. Or there are some complex problems we haven’t figured out, and we can’t take our minds off those problems even as we try to relax.

The ability to fully disconnect is important in the modern workplace, especially when it demands that knowledge workers and managers tune in 24/7. By disconnecting temporarily, we are able to take that vital step back to see the bigger picture and to review if we are doing things right. We’d then return to our jobs a lot more refreshed, and with deeper perspective.

Having experimented with a couple of strategies in an attempt to desperately disconnect from an always-on work culture, I found that the following strategies work their magic:

• Identify burning issues that you’ll need to resolve before your day-off. Any unfinished business or unsolved problem will likely linger on our minds even as we try to relax on a recliner by the sea.
• Identify somebody to as a covering firefighter to ward off the daily humdrum of urgent but less important issues. This strategically accomplishes two things – it not only gives you the psychological safety of knowing that there is someone taking care of the office while you’re away, your covering colleague would also be able to finish off some of these housekeeping, administrative tasks for you.
• The night before the day-off, structure and timebox the day. Chances are if we don’t plan our day out, the day gets hijacked by a barrage of unfulfilling and unimportant tasks. We then finish the day, drained, feeling as if the day-off wasn’t worth it.
  • If you really have to get some work done, assign 1-2 hours to finish off whatever you need to do. Don’t let the work clog your mind and seep into the rest of your precious day. I found that allotting 30 minutes to clear my inbox early in the morning and just before bedtime really helps me protect the rest of the day.
  • Figure out what activities revitalize you, and schedule those activities. Even a leisurely trip to the supermarket to intentionally choose and pick groceries can be scheduled for it to be reserved as a priority. Scheduling my workouts and reading times helped me protect those times, and allowed me to derive more fulfilment from my day-off.

Taking a fulfilling, protected, and intentional day-off requires preparation. But it’s entirely worth it.

Joie de vivre

Yes, the title may seem pretentiously French, Francophile in its sensibility, and remote from the demands of the (East) Asian working culture. Nothing could be further from the truth. Enter Kenkō.

Before we begin, we need to clarify the obvious: what link is there between a French philosophy and a 13th Century Japanese Buddhist monk? Well, everything. Kenkō is famous for his Tsurezuregusa, traditionally translated as Essays in Idleness, but more accurately rendered as Notes from Leisure Hours. Joie de vivre, on the other hand, usually means “cheerful enjoyment of life; an exultation of spirit” (according to Wikipedia, which is accurate on this occasion). The former is a reflection on the impermanence of life and the beauty of leisurely, transitory moments, while the latter refers to a philosophy of joy. The young millennial may know it as YOLO, but really it comes down to this: if one is to grind it out, what is one to grind it out for, if everything is transient in the end?

One part of working woke surely has to be this: if one grinds, it must be towards a higher purpose, a legacy, that one might leave better lives in one’s wake – but one still has to live well if everything passes anyway. A life denominated by years on the screen, e-mails sent, salary increases, and performance gradings will pass… and what will one have to show for that? Have a cup of sake beneath cherry trees (in Singapore: a beer under a rain tree next to a bar!) with loved ones. They, and the moment, are as transient as the drifting petal (and a full cup of sake). Don’t spend that moment on an unnecessary e-mail. Go live. Then work to live. So that others, too, may live. It doesn’t need to be a beer, but it certainly needs to be life beyond the screen.

To enjoy work and rock at it, find the sweet spot right before you implode

When we underdeliver at work, life gets dull and meaningless. We stop holding ourselves to a higher standard. We settle for less, and we stop respecting our work that much. We end up with more time and leisure on our hands, but lose the fulfilment that comes with throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into our jobs.

Yet this generation suffers from grotesque, crushing overwork in the modern workplace. Work is the short-term espresso shot that fuels us and gives us immediate positive feedback that we’re making progress in life. But in the process, we become victims of the very burnout that renders all this progress meaningless. We sleep too little, eat too poorly, and stop connecting with the ones we love. At what cost?

It’s common to vacillate between throwing ourselves deep into our jobs, and then emerging from them completely shattered and exhausted. We then attempt to completely disconnect in fatigue and resentment. How is this ultimately productive and fulfilling for all of us?

A way to look at it differently, is to find that sweet spot just right before the edge of tumbling into a cycle of exhaustion, take two small steps back, and operate at a momentum that keeps us fulfilled and on our toes, yet still provides space for us to catch a couple of breaths. This means that if you think you can power on and crush that report by two in the morning, maybe consider getting an early night in – and crushing that report by eight in the morning after feeling completely rested.

The ability to find a state of heightened balance can go a long way.

Defend Your Time Fiercely

This community believes that the key to loving our work and to stop exhausting ourselves in the process, is to defend our time fiercely.

A big cause contributing to employee burnout comes from:

• The failure to respect others’ time. We’ve seen this manifest itself in bosses calling for meetings and discussions without a planned end time. Or long meetings in which a lot is discussed and explored, but nothing is acted upon. Or lunch meetings because, you know, who cares about your lunch? Or meetings that drag late into the evening because, you know, who cares about your own time in the evenings? Or a series of calls and texts to our own colleagues, demanding that they respond immediately to your request, because you know, who cares about your own workload? The failure to respect others’ time, and therefore the assumption that one can demand or fill it up in any way we like, comes from the fundamental belief that others’ time are inferior to ours, and therefore should be subordinate to our own needs.
• The failure to respect one’s own time. Apart from others demanding that we surrender our own time to them, we also fail to respect the precious time that we have for ourselves. We don’t get enough sleep. We don’t spend enough meaningful time with social interactions that matter. We don’t spend enough time on activities, hobbies, or interests that give us fulfillment. All this potentially compounds and cascades into a life that is devoid of energy and purpose. We inevitably tire ourselves out in the process.

The solution is to treat our own time as the most scarce and precious resource we have, and to defend our time fiercely.

This takes courage, because we need to be brave enough to question existing norms about how others should request for our time – and to change those norms bit by bit, day by day. This also takes a bit of reflection and discipline to identify and decide what truly matters to us, and to spend more time on things that matter instead of letting our own time evaporate into thin air – mostly while on social media.

No one else is as incentivized to care about and protect our own time, as much as ourselves. To achieve balance in life, we need to start defending our own time.

To Enjoy Your Job, Don’t Be Beholden to It

Sometimes, the problem why our work lives are completely out of balance is because we need the job too much.

• We need the job to give us meaning in our lives. But when it is the only or biggest source of meaning in our lives, we clamber onto the job and would do anything to be able to feel a sense of achievement from it.
• We need the job to give us the money. Money that we need to spend not only to keep us alive, but also to give us material comfort and status. To give us a steady stream of restaurant meals, new clothes, that latest phone model, the latest thinnest laptop. All to make ourselves feel like we’ve made it, we’re getting somewhere, we’re making progress.

We need our jobs so much we’ll put up with a toxic culture, or with a general level of baseline misery. We may stop enjoying our jobs altogether – and stop enjoying a majority of our waking hours in the process.

The solution is not to be so beholden to our primary jobs. Develop something we’re proud of outside of our primary modes of employment, so that we don’t need to rely on just one thing to keep us fulfilled. Develop multiple income streams that keep money coming in from various sources, so that we can work because we want to, not because we have to (it makes a big difference!).

We can also realize that we don’t need a lot of material comfort in order to be truly happy. Research shows that beyond an annual income of $75,000, our day-to-day happiness doesn’t really experience an increase. Often, trying to increase our income at all costs comes with a burdensome level of responsibility and obsession with earning as much as we think we deserve, then we often forget that we also deserve balance, peace, and the capacity to take a step back.

If our jobs are not our one true passion (for 99% of us it tends not to be the most important thing), then to achieve freedom is to find meaning and money from other things in our lives. And fulfilment and purpose are contagious; the energy we gain from our side interests and hobbies may spill over into our work and give us renewed energy for it.

Yes, It’s Fine Not to Answer Your Phone When You Have to Focus

Smartphones gave us the magic and power of 24/7 connectivity. It sounds like a dream for the modern workplace. Bosses are able to gain access to their staff all day, all night, into the weekends. Staff are able to remain plugged in, and keep a pulse over what’s happening and what needs to be solved by the minute. It sounds awesome to unlock those latent after-hours that workplaces didn’t used to be able to tap on.

But what are the long-term, bigger-picture effects of constant connectivity on the quality and depth of our work? Has anyone thought about that in our workplaces?

The problem with constant connectivity, is constant distraction. People can’t focus anymore. When people have to solve deep problems, or to work out tough tasks, the following commonly happens:

• Our focus gets hijacked by a constant stream of requests and tasks from various parties, not just from our bosses. These requests and tasks are usually comparatively non-cognitively demanding. But in trying to multi-task, our fractured attention is not in a position to be able to bury deep, to wrestle with tough concepts, and to figure out complex problems. Academics, government policy staff, strategy guys in big firms, software engineers – all of these people need to carve out mental space and capacity for deep work, yet their phones steal that away from them.
• What also happens is that people start to resort to working after-hours, or at unearthly hours really late at night, to get real work done. When most of our day is filled with an unending barrage of low-cognition tasks and wasteful meetings, we end up doing real work only after the work day has ended. This eats into your time to recharge, or to get some perspective about the larger picture of your work.

A solution is to put your phone away during the times you have to buckle down and focus. No, it’s not rude – we need to set and shape a culture that respects and upholds high-quality deep work to prevent a state of constant distraction from taking over. If we fear missing out on important things from our bosses, we can set tailored alerts on our phones to ring or buzz if certain bosses text or call us. The rest, is just noise that will hold you back from achieving what you need to do.

Humans naturally work in sprints. So outside of those sprints, we can take time off deep focus and turn our attention to these low-cognition tasks. Just by shifting these tasks around and consolidating them into structured blocks that respects humans’ natural productivity and focus cycles, we can get a lot more done within a shorter amount of time. And we can take that well-deserved break in the process.

Saying ‘No’ doesn’t make you look weak

Most of us find it incredibly difficult to say ‘no’ at work. We don’t dare to turn down additional assignments and responsibilities even when we are up to our necks in tasks. A couple of reasons why we are so afraid to say ‘no’:

• We think it communicates weakness. We are scared it makes us look incompetent, or low-capacity. We are fearful that our bosses would write us off as people who can’t make the cut.
• We think it communicates laziness. Naturally, no one wants to gain the reputation of being unmotivated and slothful.
• No one else is doing it. Peer pressure is a powerful thing. If everyone is accepting mounds of additional tasks without question, we’d look awfully weird if we were the only ones trying to say ‘no’.
• We need the job too much to give our lives meaning, or money. Sometimes we can’t say no because we need the money to satisfy our material wants. Sometimes we can’t say no because there’s nothing much else outside of work that gives us meaning. Both can be problematic.

The truth is that if we learn how to strategically say ‘no’ the right way, to things that don’t matter, we don’t end up looking weak or lazy. We end up gaining credibility as effective people at work. Here are a few tips to try the next time work piles on too much in the office:

• Stop short-term thinking. Develop resource-awareness. We need to start by assuming that we have finite energy, and finite time. Any assessment of whether we can handle additional work has to take our finite energy and time into account. We have to understand that at some point, if we take on too much, some other task or assignment will naturally be compromised. There is no ‘muscling’ through the additional work, praying that our lack of sleep or lack of energy will solve itself somehow. That’s short-term and narrow-minded thinking.
• Don’t say ‘no’ outright. Say that we’ll have to prioritize. People who give work to you can’t reasonably know about the rest of the workload you’re facing. Even if they are your direct superiors, they cannot reasonably experience 100% of whatever you’re going through. It’s important to communicate and share with them the stuff that’s already on your plate, and to include them in the prioritization process. Most bosses aren’t malicious, and will realize that they too would have to prioritize if they were put in the same situation.
• Convince your boss (and yourself) that your current work will get better. You’re creating protected time for your current assignments, and creating time and space will allow you to achieve higher levels of quality. Don’t let them – or yourself – forget that.
• Turn down requests to join projects or teams if the additional workload will damage the quality of our current work. We have to bear the courage to say ‘no’ to things that don’t matter, so that we can maximize our time and energy for the things that do. If everything looks or sounds ‘important’ to us, we also have to consider how important our long-term momentum, capacity, and health are in relation to this additional piece of work coming in.

There are many other ways, and situations where we will have to say ‘no’. We need to start by realizing it doesn’t make us look like less of a good worker. It can help us protect our focus and energy so that we can excel at whatever’s already on our plate.

We are Not Conveyor Belts: Changing our mindsets about knowledge and information work

The Industrial Revolution enhanced manufacturing processes in Europe and in the United States, and brought a huge wave of economic progress beyond the early 1800s. Many people still see this golden era as an inspiration to drive today’s productivity and work structures. But what got us here won’t get us ahead in an age of knowledge and information.

In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor popularized the theory of scientific management, or Taylorism: applying the use of empirical methods to labor productivity in order to maximize economic efficiency. Workers’ tasks were clocked to the second, recorded, and optimized. Lunch hours and break times were tracked and kept to a bare minimum. To this day, we see vestiges of Taylorism in our corporate culture. Clocking our 9 to 5, and then some. All in the name of clearing more emails. Getting in more meetings. Delivering that extra report.

Here’s where they’ve got it all wrong. In knowledge and information work, the quality and volume of our work is determined by factors beyond the mere amount of time and effort put in by human workers. We are not conveyor belts. The sooner we start acknowledging that all of us are not conveyor belts, the faster we can get to creating and shaping great workplaces.

Great and balanced workplaces begin with the notion that human productivity in knowledge and information work is not rigid and formulaic. It is not a fixed output determined by the input of time and effort. Many other things come into the picture: Inspiration, creativity, understanding the psychology of peak flow states.

We are not conveyor belts. We shouldn’t treat ourselves like one.

How to start Working Woke: Seek change on four levels

In order to achieve a calmer, more balanced, and more optimized life, in which we can be a rockstar in both the office and in our own lives, we need to seek change at four different levels:

• Mindset and Beliefs. To work woke, we need to start by developing the right mindset and beliefs about how work features in our lives, and how important the rest of our lives are in relation to work. We can’t help ourselves if we believe that work must be a constant state of suffering and it must engulf our lives entirely. Believing that the new normal exists is a start. For each little experiment and method we try to balance out our lives and to achieve calm, we must fundamentally want and believe that we can optimize both work and play.
• Assumptions. To work woke, we will need to discard some assumptions we’ve held constant all along. Meetings don’t need to be useless. Vacation does not need to be a guilty pleasure that we feel bad about.
• Habits. Bad habits in fitness and spending get worse, compound, and ruin everything down the line. The flip side is that good habits also compound. This website will address the science of building habits, and will share positive habits to optimize our lives one step at a time.
• Methods. These will be actual tips, tricks, and experiments to slowly claim time, autonomy, and purpose back from bad systems and people who’ve stolen it from you. Timeboxing is one of them.

This website will be a collection of articles that will break down problems and will share possible solutions on how to seek change on each of these four levels.

It is entirely possible to do great work and not exhaust yourself and crowd out the rest of your life in the process. Let’s get there.

Quarterly Getaways: A way to recharge and stay in control throughout the year

Back in the day, school was demanding but balanced. It was balanced because the workload was seasonal (building up to graded papers and tests), and because there would always be a scheduled break at the end of the term. Even if the term happened to be going really badly, we had a chance to hit pause, take a step back, and take a breather before starting on the next academic season.

But ever since we started working full-time in a large firm or started our own business, there were times where we just continued working until the days started blending in to each other. There were times we started running on fumes. At the point of exhaustion, we take breaks, but often haphazardly. The mind doesn’t have a predictable resting point to look forward to. It’s psychologically difficult to stay afloat when you don’t know how long you have to tread water for.

Perhaps there are some meaningful parts of our schooling structure we could take a lesson from. I experimented with one of these: quarterly getaways. Every three months, I would go on a self-imposed vacation out of town, alone, for about a week (five to seven days).

Quarterly getaways solve a couple of problems:

• They give us a scheduled break to look forward to. I could work really hard for up to 10-12 weeks, because I knew that there was going to be a rejuvenating break at the end, the light at the end of the tunnel.
• They allow us to resume and reinforce positive habits. There are a couple of things that result in a happy fulfilled day at work: adequate sleep, some exercise, and eating proper food at regular intervals. Additionally, perhaps some quiet reflection, reading, or quality time spent with people who matter. Sometimes these things don’t get to happen because work just takes over our lives. These quarterly breaks provide a golden opportunity to get back to making these habits and routines a part of our day.
• They give us the space and capacity to remain focused on the bigger picture. Some degree of reflection about where we are going and how our work supports these life goals is important. We often don’t get the chance to do that if we’re constantly hamsters running helplessly on an endless wheel. Stopping for a week allows us to resurface from under the water.
• Of course, they allow us to rest and eat healthily. It’s important not to forgo sleep in order to see all the sights and explore all the places on our checklists. Holidays can be an amazing reset button only if we let them, and only if we place ourselves in the right structure and conditions.

Try scheduling getaways throughout the year. They need not be limited to every three months, and they need not last a week. The getaways can be flexible to adapt to your unique employment conditions – the trick is to schedule them so that we can psychologically internalize upcoming resting points and look forward to them. Your mind and soul may thank you for it.