Member-only story
Stop Categorizing Your Life as ‘Work’ and ‘Everything Else’
It will only lead to burnout
It’s important to take time off from work. I know this. You know this. The person sitting at the desk over there finishing projects at 7:15 on a Friday evening knows this. And yet when it comes to actually implementing breaks, many of us struggle.
I certainly do. As a small business owner, I’ve let myself get to the brink of burnout more than once. There have been periods when the vortex of bills, client demands, and the stress of an “always on” attitude have made me physically sick. And on the other side of things, during the stretches where I’ve been thriving at work, it’s often been because I was barely hanging on in other areas of my life — my side hustles, my friendships, and my relationship with my fiancée.
But cutting yourself some slack isn’t a sign that you don’t take your work seriously — on the contrary, it’s a way of making sure you produce your best work. Research backs this up: According to a study at Stanford University, when we overwork, we run the risk of actually underworking. After 50 hours a week, the study authors observed, productivity drops sharply each hour; after hour 55, we’re essentially useless.
But in order to really recharge, it’s not enough to just close our laptops and open Twitter on our phones. Instead, we need to be intentional with our time. In her book Making Work Work: New Strategies for Surviving and Thriving at the Office, time management coach Julie Morgenstern writes that people often make the mistake of dividing their lives into two parts: work and everything else. But, in fact, there are multiple elements to our lives outside of work, and it’s important that we balance them all.
To do so, Morgenstern writes, it helps to break things down into three broad categories that need our attention: physical health, escape, and people, which form the acronym PEP. It’s been a helpful shorthand for me as I’ve worked to prioritize rest and build more balance into my own life. Here’s how that’s going:
- Physical health: This includes sleep, exercise, and eating healthy meals — anything that helps restore your body. I’ve been making sure to break up the days I work from home with visits to the local sauna to unwind. I also…
