When Jonathan Frostick realized he was having a heart attack in April—sitting at his desk on a Sunday, prepping for the work week—he thought about his wife and his will.
He also thought: “I needed to meet with my manager tomorrow, this isn’t convenient,” prefacing the comment with an expletive.
The 45-year-old financial-services worker survived, and changed his life. The non-negotiables on his calendar now are thrice-weekly swims and dropping his youngest son off at nursery school. In his (fewer) hours on the job, he says he’s calm, decisive, above the fray. When he has too much on his plate, he leaves the work for another day. He insists on 30-minute meetings that stay on point.
“I’ve been stressed once since the heart attack,” he says. “It’s like this switch now. It doesn’t matter.”
But back then? “I was my work,” he says.
We put in too many hours; we don’t take vacation; we can’t say no to that 6 a.m. conference call. Underneath it all is something bigger: an emotional attachment to our jobs that exhausts us and squeezes out the other parts of our identities. For years, we were told to find meaning and purpose at work, while other parts of modern life, like church, receded. Then came the pandemic.
Sure, some employees leveraged remote work to sneak in noon naps or shirk one job with a secret second gig. But for many, work has become our lives. We sat down at our computers in the spring of 2020 and haven’t let up since. Now we can’t figure out how to turn it off.
Can we learn to care less? (Ideally, without having a brush with death?) What happens if we let go, just a little?
Not much, assures Sarah Knight, who ran her own experiment a few years ago. After suffering a panic attack in her Manhattan office, she decided to pull back from the perfectionist tendencies that had propelled her to senior editor in the publishing industry. She stopped taking business lunches. She left the office by 6 p.m. She traded her blazers and high heels for Gap corduroys and tennis shoes.
No one seemed to care.
“I was like, I could have been doing this the whole time,” she says.
She left the corporate world, moved to the Dominican Republic and wrote a book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck,” about opting out of the draining or useless things in your life.
“You have to be able to ask yourself: Is this real? Is this really a thing that is part of my job? Do I really have to do it?” she says.
Sometimes the answer is yes. Business lunches might be crucial to continuing to earn a paycheck. But something else probably isn’t, Ms. Knight advises. As much as a quarter of the stuff you’ve taken on over the years may be an unnecessary time suck. Let those things go, she says, just like an old sweater that no longer sparks joy.
Easier said than done, of course. Workers don’t live in a vacuum. Some bosses have unreasonable expectations. Tasks have ballooned as colleagues leave in a wave of quitting or companies opt to stay lean after layoffs. Nearly 90% of workers said they’d experienced burnout over the past year, according to a summer survey from people analytics firm Visier. More than half said their workloads had increased during the pandemic.
Some companies say they care, but does any CEO actually want employees to be less obsessed with work? Firms have tried to combat burnout—with listening sessions, extra days off—but many employees say they end up wedging work in anyway.
“If I ask for everything and need it tomorrow, obviously my team is never going to feel like they relax and take a true break,” says Katie Burke, chief people officer at HubSpot, a Cambridge, Mass.-based software firm. Workers there told executives that meeting-free Fridays were nice, but relaxing deadlines and putting more people or technology on projects would help more.
The company is working on it. At a recent meeting, Ms. Burke instructed her team to lay out three things they wouldn’t do before the end of the quarter, “no matter who asks you to do them.”
Productivity might slip in the short term, she says, but easing up helps with keeping and attracting workers.
“A vibrant life outside of work,” Ms. Burke says. “Everyone wants that.”
Next step: figuring out what to do during all that extra time you used to spend working. Janna Koretz, a psychologist and founder of Azimuth, a Massachusetts therapy practice, counsels people in high-pressure careers on learning to let go and delegate to capable colleagues. One issue she observes: Overachievers often throw themselves too zealously into new hobbies.
Instead of jumping into marathon training, try a 5K, Dr. Koretz advises. The idea is to make extracurriculars sustainable, not to pile on a different kind of stress. And remind yourself that taking a full lunch hour or logging off early to head to your child’s soccer game doesn’t make you a bad worker, she says.
“It doesn’t mean, ‘I’m going to get fired,’” Dr. Koretz says. “It doesn’t mean, ‘I’ve given up.’”
You might end up being better at your job. With less on your plate, and more perspective, every task will stop feeling like a fire drill and you can focus on what matters.
Anton Strömberg, a program manager with a digital education organization in Stockholm, used to spend three days attempting to craft the perfect email, “as if the world would fall apart if I made one mistake.”
Obsessing killed his creativity. Raising his hand for everything left him overwhelmed.
Now, in meetings, “I just sit there quietly and wait for someone else to take it on,” he says. “I buy myself time. I take a deep breath.”
For Nate Holdren, a professor in Des Moines, Iowa, the challenges of pandemic work—trying to discern his students’ reactions during remote teaching, helping them navigate Covid-19 crises—left him questioning his own self-worth.
“It’s like, not only did that session not go well, but maybe I’m not good at this,” he says. “It’s really easy to keep going over and over and over it again.”
Recently, he bought a T-shirt and notepad to try to shift his outlook. In capital letters, both declare: “I just work here.”
- Excerpts courtesy Wall Street Journal
