Becoming Less of a Workaholic

After seeing this reel on instagram, I laughed out loud for a good few minutes. But afterwards, I had to ask myself, “why do I relate to this so much?”. Although I may not always have specific contracted hours as described in the reel, more often than not, I have found myself working late at night due to poor time optimisation. Today’s post will focus on this.

When it comes to working and deadlines, I’ve straddled the line between being a night owl and being an early riser. When I was in college, I would stay up all night to finish assignments and I’ve done the same for client work also. While there’s a sense of achievement that comes from finishing said tasks, it can be a one way ticket to becoming a workaholic.

I didn’t realise that this was a problem for me until a few months ago. I was sick with the flu but I prioritised the work that I “had” to get done more than my recovery. Someone close to me asked me why I was working while I was sick. They further went on to say that while they thought I was hard working, they felt like I had a conflict with work and life. At first, I was defensive but after some deep thought about their point, there are definitely some ways that I display a poor work-life balance, mainly through late nights and striving to meet a deadline no matter how I was feeling.

Although I admitted that I was a workaholic, I wanted to cut myself some slack and accredit it to having a lot on my plate, but that was a cop out for poor time management. At times I would wake up with no schedule and just fall into whatever I needed to do that day. This would result in working late at night as well as poor boundaries with freelance clients, answering calls and texts outside of working hours. While others would see me working late nights as a badge of honour for being a hard worker, I didn’t see it like that. Something needed to change.

Time Optimisation

Falling into tasks meant that at times I found myself doing a lot of things that didn’t move the needle. To combat this, I started creating 2-3 hour time blocks in my calendar to help me know what area of work to focus on. At the start of each day, I also started writing a list of what I needed to get done. I didn’t view this necessarily as a to-do list, it was more to be aware of the full scope of what I had to do. From this list I would try as much as possible to focus on tasks that move the needle. Applying the 80/20 rule, I started thinking what’s the minimum amount of work I have to do to make the most amount of progress.

Boundaries

I’ve started putting in place some boundaries to stop me from being a workaholic. On Sundays, I try not to do anything but go to church and spend time with my family/friends. I don’t usually reply to clients or anything work-related on the weekends or after 6pm on the weekdays. Most importantly, I have implemented a hard stop at 10:30PM and turn off my laptop and wind down my device usage. Although I have the capacity to be a night owl, there’s something great about waking up early and getting most of my tasks done before 12PM. I also really like my sleep.

Exceptions

With everything, there’s exceptions. Sometimes the hard stop might not apply, especially in situations where I’m working on a feature for Finsho or personal projects and get a random burst of motivation to finish something. I try and keep this to a minimum though. Other times, something may come up that makes it not possible to do anything in a specific time block and I’m ok with that these days. I have come across the term lifestyle design recently and since then, I’ve been trying to design my life and make a schedule based on my wants and interests.

Designing my Life

I’m also looking at my habits (good and bad) and trying to see where I could be more productive and optimise my time. This experiment is something that I will discuss in the next few blog posts but time is something that I have been thinking about more often. I have made a lot of progress in many areas over the last year but there’s a part of me that feels like I could’ve done certain things in a shorter amount of time.

However, I’m realising I need to give myself grace for what I didn’t know then and use what I know now to improve. After each day, I no longer feel stressed if I don’t finish what I set out to do. I’ve realised that ultimately all you can do, is all you can do.