Working long hours is not a badge of pride, it's a sign of sloppy thinking. The culprit? Being always available.
When you never shut off, three things happen:
1. You open yourself up to interruptions. And getting your creative flow back after an interruption takes time. Over the course of a day, this process of getting back into the groove dramatically increases the time it takes to accomplish something. And,
2. You make yourself more "indispensable" to your team, which means they will continue coming to you for help rather than finding a different way.
3. You don't give yourself time to recharge and come back to your work with renewed energy and creativity.
The question is, given all the knowledge about the benefits of focus time, why don't you actually turn off so you can reach your creative potential and love your whole life again?
It's because you are paying more attention to what you think are other people's expectations than to what it is YOU want to create.
In other words, you are human.
It's fascinating how we can know all the productivity tricks and still find ourselves overworking and pretending we're okay with it, or like we don't have a choice.
That's why shifting your mindset around overwork is the first step to getting your life back.
If you are proud of your commitment to your business and team, as evidenced by how little life you have for yourself and your loved ones, your mindset needs to evolve.
If you leave Slack, email, and your office door open while doing the thing you know you need to do, again, your mindset needs to evolve.
If you find that the only time you have to do your best work is after everyone is asleep, you guessed it, your mindset needs to evolve.
More accurately, it doesn't need to evolve. Simply, if you want more life back for yourself—the very source of your life—then changing your thoughts about productivity and your work is the first thing you need to do.
After all, you don't need another hack or trick. The problem is not in your productivity toolbox. It's between your ears.
You think that being available and responding to everything is how you create value. That's because, as a human, we are literally wired to respond to other humans as the most important thing we can do. It's natural that you would feel an overwhelming draw to be always available.
It's the higher thinking part of our brains—more recently evolved in our journey through deep time—that allows us to know that we won't die if we mute Slack and let emails sit. In fact, we will be more alive if we're doing the things that matter to us and communicating that to the people in our lives.
Everyone will benefit from us putting our creative output first and really sticking with it.
You owe it to yourself, your team, and your family to prioritize your most important output.
That's how you get back your time and your life. You let everyone know that this is what you're doing. Then you resist the urge not to do it. You won't die. You will thrive.
If you want to develop a plan for focusing on your most creative work and cutting out the noise, line up a free strategy session with me here:
