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.

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.

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.

To stop wasting time, aim for fit-for-purpose meetings

We lose astounding amounts of precious time on poorly-organized meetings. Poorly-organized meetings take the following shapes:

• No agenda, or vague agenda. Someone usually calls for a meeting to discuss a problem or an idea, but there’s no clear outcome that needs to be achieved by the end of the meeting. Again, when there are no clear metrics, people fall back on visibly obvious proxies of signalling effort or hard work – in this case, just more empty talking and discussion.
• Agenda gets derailed. We lose focus, and we miss the bigger picture. Someone derails the conversation by going into the tactical or minor details that distract everyone else from the fundamental things that need to be solved. Worse, people start talking about what they had for lunch a few hours ago.
• Making people heard rather than solving the problem. In order to look and feel like we are giving everyone a chance to be involved and a chance to speak up, we often go round the table to make sure we include everybody’s views. But this often drags out the meeting for way longer than it’s supposed to take, and negatively reinforces the pain of long meetings in people’s minds.
• There’s no time limit. We mentioned earlier than work just expands to fill the vacuum. So if we don’t set a time limit for our meetings, our discussions will just naturally take hours. There’s no reference point for when to end, so ‘focusing’ or ‘prioritizing’ doesn’t actually mean anything.

If it’s a meeting to solve problems, then solve those problems. If the objective of the meeting is to learn about everybody’s opinions, then this meeting’s agenda should explicitly state that you want everybody to share their views. The main message here is that if we want to keep our meetings productive, we must set clear priorities, and clear timelines. Our meetings must be fit-for-purpose.

Even if we are not the ones leading these meetings, and even if we aren’t senior enough to change the way our companies approach meetings, we can shape it in small ways. Ask how long the meeting will take. Offer to set and communicate the agenda to all attendees. Be an active participant who reigns the group back if they derail. Or even ask ourselves – do we really need to attend this meeting or can we just get stuff done after people are done talking?

If you’re senior enough, experiment with new ways to keep meetings effective – perhaps even change up the physical structure of a meeting room to keep people on their feet. Or incorporate Jeff Bezos’ two-pizza rule to ensure that just the right people for the job are there. Or just ask yourself – could this be an email?

Make your meetings fit-for-purpose so that you’ll free up precious time to do high-quality work. We don’t have to be a slave to meetings.

‘Hustling’: A feel-good ethic that mistakes volume for value

“You are either all in, or don’t bother trying. You can sleep all you want when you’re dead. Every time you stop working, remember that someone out there is outworking you.” Sound familiar?

Lately, the way we view work has been invaded and influenced by an onslaught of ‘hustle porn’: a barrage of messages that suggest that the only right way to engage in work is to put in more than a 100%, and to write off everything unrelated to work as a waste of time.

Think Elon Musk sleeping 4 hours a day and catching naps on random conference room floors in Tesla factories. All in the name of making our companies an empire. All in a noble mission to exceed one’s own limitations. It feels good.

But many other entrepreneurs and successful people have started to resist this notion that unlimited work is the only way to be successful at the office and in life. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit has spoken out against ‘hustle porn’. Jason Fried and David Hansson, the co-founders of Basecamp, argue that you can have a calm company and still be wildly successful.

‘Hustle’ is not reality. To make it our only reality is misguided, unhealthy, and ultimately unproductive. The following are some results of an unbridled ‘hustle’ culture:

• Convincing ourselves that we’re giving 110% feels good, but is a hollow notion. It satisfies the ego, because it convinces us that we are doing all we can to achieve success in this life. Surely we can’t have regrets and we can’t be sorry if we are ditching everything else and putting in all of ourselves. But beyond making ourselves feel good, do the hours we put in truly count?
• We end up mistaking volume, for value. ‘Hustling’ is just another visibly ostentatious, effort-signalling proxy to measure our outcomes at work when we don’t have proper metrics.
• Sleep deprivation produces horrible decisions and a frantic workplace. A sleepless work ethic sounds fancy and heroic, but sleeping just 4-5 hours every night produces an irritable workplace. We get angry faster. We become highly irritable. Sub-consciously, we are motivated to make decisions that produce short-term benefit. We come up with quick fixes that plug gaps but do not fix fundamental problems.
• Work and life are not a zero-sum game. The void of our personal lives and the lack of outside human connections will be toxic for organizational culture.

Instead, try 80/20-ing. Treat time in the office like a precious scarce resource that should be optimized. Aim to achieve 80% of impact within 20% of your time. ‘Hustle’ within 9 to 5. And then enjoy the heck out of the rest of your time.

The New Normal: Work can reach you anywhere

We’ve all been through this painfully familiar scenario. After an exhausting but fulfilling day at the office, we return to a quiet home to gather our thoughts and to sit in silence. Our energy tanks are depleted, and are in need of renewal. Just as we’re about to turn in for the night, the phone buzzes ominously.

“Hey, sorry to disturb, could you take a look at this urgent question?”

More often than not, these requests aren’t at all urgent. They come in at these invasive weird hours because of the following forces:

1. Technology has achieved the ability to allow for smooth communication between people anytime, and anywhere. While this has created immense value of the world, this means you’re also at the beck and call of every text message, call, tweet, post, tag, email that’s being sent to you. We now live in the world that’s not starved of communication, but starved of attention.
2. It’s incredibly convenient for our colleagues to send messages without considering the true urgency of the matter. There’s no short-term incentive for our colleagues to care whether they are interfering with your down-time.

Even if no one expects us to answer work-related texts, the time we spend clearing a work-related text includes the time spent ruminating and thinking about work when primed by the text message.

Our phones place the world’s resources in our hands. What they don’t tell us is that we also hold in our hands the world’s expectations to respond, react, and reply to things. Though an uncomfortable reality, we have come to accept it as the new normal.

To choose an optimized life of calm, we need to start by being aware of these little boundary violations. To be aware of the ways these ‘urgent’ requests creep a little into your personal bubbles of refuge. By starting with awareness, we then start to slowly challenge these norms.