Are you carrying work home?
One of my clients, a very experienced leader, is navigating a complex employee situation, and has become increasingly aware of how she’s carrying this situation home in her head.
She indicated that she’s spending a lot of time and emotion dealing with this at home and it’s getting in the way of being present for her personal relationships, especially being emotionally and mentally available for her children.
I know this is not an unfamiliar scenario. There are times when many of us carry work home and unintentionally allocate time to processing, thinking, and strategising and planning, as well as worrying and even ruminating.
Are you doing unpaid overtime?
The problem with this, of course, is that we’re potentially doing a significant amount of unpaid overtime and concurrently missing out on the downtime we all desperately need after our long and demanding workdays. We are missing out on being present and engaged with our families and loved ones. This habit also robs our energy and the attention we need for self-care and deep replenishment.
There is no doubt that taking work home mentally and emotionally is often the sign of a dedicated and responsible professional. However, it can easily be at great personal cost, and we need to find ways to being more strategic about when and how we engage in this.
What are we using this time for?
When we find ourselves mentally and emotionally preoccupied with work outside of our regular hours, we're often engaged in a range of activities, both consciously and subconsciously, that tie back to our professional roles and responsibilities.
It is helpful to understand how we are using this time, to make intentional choices about when to carry work home and when to find ways to park it and free ourselves of the intrusion of work demands when we are home.
While some degree of engagement with work outside of office hours can be beneficial for productivity and career growth, it's essential to maintain a balance. Employing strategies to help us disconnect becomes critical.
I have created a checklist below that allows us to deepen our reflection about how we tend to use this time.
* Problem-Solving: We may be ruminating on challenges encountered during the day, thinking through potential solutions or strategies to overcome these hurdles. This can often be a sign of a dedicated professional who is keen on resolving issues efficiently but can also indicate difficulty in disengaging from work stressors.
* Planning and Preparation: We often use this time to plan our upcoming workday or week, considering tasks that need prioritisation, meetings that require preparation, and deadlines looming on the horizon. It's a way to feel more in control and less overwhelmed by workloads.
* Worrying About Work Performance: Concerns about meeting expectations, delivering on responsibilities, and overall performance can dominate our thoughts, leading to a cycle of stress and anxiety that's hard to break. This worry can stem from a desire to excel in our roles and fear of falling short.
* Reflecting on Interactions: Reflecting on the day's interactions, considering feedback received, and pondering how to improve relationships with colleagues, clients, and supervisors. This reflection is crucial for professional growth but can also lead to overthinking.
* Learning and Professional Development: Some of us may use this time to think about new skills we want to acquire or knowledge we need to gain, planning for our professional development. This indicates a high level of self-motivation and dedication to our own career progression.
* Creative Thinking: For those in roles that require innovation and creativity, thoughts after hours might be focused on generating new ideas or solutions. Sometimes, stepping away from the formal work environment can spark creativity.
* Emotional Processing: Dealing with the emotional aftermath of challenging or stressful work situations. This could include processing emotions and managing feelings of frustration, disappointment, or even excitement about work achievements, which can affect one’s ability to switch off.
How can we speed up work disconnection?
The ability to expedite letting go of, and parking the work issues we are thinking about is a critical skill.
The three strategies outlined below could be helpful for when we're pre-occupied with work and want to expedite the process of letting go.
1) Process our experience - thinking through and reflecting on what happened and understanding it from our and others’ perspective is invaluable.
The reflective practice model of Gibbs (1988) can be very useful for this.
Description: What happened? Articulate the facts, don’t make any inferences or assumptions as to why things happened the way they did.
Thoughts/Feelings: What were you thinking and feeling? At the time what sorts of things were you telling yourself?
Evaluation: What was good about the experience/what areas did I do well? What was not so good about the experience/what areas could I improve?
Analysis/Synthesis: What sense can you make of the situation? What have you learnt? What have you found helpful in similar situations?
Conclusion: What else could you have done? What could you have not done? Could you have dealt with the situation any better?
Action plan: If it arose again what would you do? Would you do things the same or different? How will you adapt your practice, in light of this new understanding?
2) Process our emotions - to work through complex emotions, self-understanding, being clear on what's our stuff, what's the other person's stuff, and disentangling is critical. We can do that either with a supportive colleague or supervisor. But sometimes processing emotions is not just about having another person hear us. It's also about the process that we go through, articulating and putting into words and venting those experiences.
We can do this autonomously through saying it out loud, even if we don't have someone to listen to us. We might do this in the car while we're driving or find time to write it all down, using a journal. We might use a free transcription app like ‘otter’ to say it out loud and record it, so we can come back and reflect on it, if that's useful.
3) Trust ourselves – it is critical that we remind ourselves that we can trust our future self to work it out. I can trust myself tomorrow morning at 9am to reflect on this, or reflect on this on the way to work, but park things and let it go right now. We may need to remind ourselves, that we do not need to worry about this now or use our personal time to reflect on this.
We may need to be quite intentional at the end of each day, to remind ourselves, to park these things at work, so we can be free to go home and enjoy our personal lives and trust in our ability to attend to it when we’re at work next. In fact, when we come back refreshed and replenished, we may find it much easier to have clearer perspective and navigate the situation with greater ease.
While some degree of engagement with work outside of office hours can be beneficial for productivity and career growth, it's essential to maintain a balance, and not allow our work demands to gobble up our head space, our focus and attention as well as our time.
I’d love to hear your reflections on this.
How do you let go of things at the end of the workday?