In my previous article on work-life balance I described leadership strategies to guard balance for other people. At the organizational level balance is enabled by a well-constructed boundary between work time and rest time. A great leader succeeds when the boundary allows the organization to operate at high speed without burning out its people.
I am lucky to work for an organization that has a smart culture around work and rest time. We need to run hard very often but we always find ways to get people rest before too long.
However, despite the organization’s savvy for balancing work and rest, I’ve found that managing my work-life balance is still a challenge. Even in a great organization, there is a huge personal dimension to maintain that balance. My experience is that finishing work and heading home doesn’t always mean my mind finishes work and heads home. This is the personal battle for work-life balance: can you take advantage of the opportunities for balance your organization is providing? Or is work mentally washing over your seawall and swamping your rest time?
In order to think about how or why our work mentally carries over our home time, I think we need to identify where work stress is coming from.
Your subconscious is making trouble for you again
The key assumption that underlies all my thinking on managing stress is that we have two minds at work: our conscious mind and our subconscious mind. Conscious mind is the home for all of our deliberate thinking. We can choose how to occupy our conscious mind, or at least try to. Our subconscious mind is always at work but we cannot control what it is working on. It operates in a place we can’t see, hear, touch, or smell. But we can feel it. Or more accurately, it can make us have feelings. We may not be able to put a finger on exactly why we have those feelings, but they are there. I think it’s critically important to acknowledge that our subconscious mind is a main combatant in the battle for work-life balance.
When we physically leave work, taking advantage of a boundary between work and rest time, we usually can disengage our conscious minds. Our subconscious mind creates trouble for us because it will continue focusing on work even after we arrive home.
Our conscious and subconscious thoughts about work each create stress in their own way
I find that conscious thoughts create stress when I’m worried that I will not be able to complete my work. I may have a challenging task that I’m not sure I will be able to do well. Or, more often, I have a huge volume of work and not enough time to do it all. Perhaps you have a co-worker you find particularly difficult to work with. Any of these situations can create conscious stressful thoughts about work. I do not discount the toll this kind of stress can take on a person, but I think this is the less difficult type of stress to deal with. If you can consciously identify the problem that is the source of your stress, you can identify actions to attack it.
Our subconscious mind creates stress that is far more dangerous. Subconscious stress is rooted not in worry about specific challenging tasks, but in general uncertainty. It is born from the inarticulable complexity of leading many people to achieve many objectives. It lurks around the edges of the tasks we carry out each day, growing in our subconscious a little every busy day. You can never quite put your finger on the source, but you know you’re feeling it.
The subconscious stress of uncertainty is dangerous because it sneaks up on us over time like fog forming over still water. Before long it’s like a cold, wet blanket on all your home time. Even if you don’t notice it, your family and friends will see clearly that you're experiencing some kind of stress and you’re not fully present. Home time doesn't help you recharge to go back to work if you're still stressed out about work all weekend. If work can mentally invade your rest time, you will lose the work-life balance battle.
There's only one way to try to fight back. You need to take some of the time your organization set aside for resting and dedicate it to doing a little carefully chosen work to establish your own personal defensive work-rest boundary. When I feel carryover work stress about to ruin my weekend, I will sit down with my computer and take a limited set of actions with the goal of eliminating sources of uncertainty about my work. I’m going to consciously take actions that are likely to help calm my subconscious mind.
Take conscious action to try to calm your subconscious
My first attack is always my email inbox. An inbox full of unread messages is like a dark cave: there is probably nothing dangerous in it but until we find out, our subconscious can run wild with negative possibilities. An unread email is nothing but an uncertainty generator, a little trickle that when added to its twenty or thirty neighbors can form a flowing river of subconscious stress. Whatever your normal system for dealing with email is, get to it. Open the messages up, turn over those stones to see what lies underneath. Clear the messages out, even if you're just turning them into tasks to do later. Tasks are certain. Whatever those emails contain, they’ll be less stressful once they’ve been opened, read, and either deleted, saved for reference, or turned into tasks to do another time.
The task list is the second target. If your list is like mine, every task has a diligently assigned due date, and most of those dates are in the past. Rather than let a gang of overdue tasks stare down my subconscious mind in red text, I assign new due dates. I also tend to decide some of the older tasks have been overcome by events. At some point in the past I thought I needed to do something, but that was then and this is now. I’ll delete them or mark complete. The main idea is to go through every task on the list and validate that each still needs to be done. It'll surprise you how often you can delete things from your task list with little consequence.
The next step is to add to the task list. Aggressively. Any thought floating around in your head about something you think you need to do needs to be corralled into your task list. Things in our minds are uncertain. Our subconscious loves to chew on them when we’re trying to rest at night or on the weekends. Capture those ghosts and contain them in your task list, where you can see them in black and white. Once they’ve been captured in your task system, your subconscious will stop worrying about them. You’ve converted the stress associated with those tasks from the lurking, uncertain subconscious kind into the easier to manage conscious kind.
I find a huge sense of relief in the combination of an empty inbox and a culled task list, even if the task list is still long. Everything I need to do is right there in front of me. There's nothing hiding. My conscious mind may look at the list and worry about getting it all done, but that’s the easier kind of stress and it’s more easily addressed. What is important is that we've removed the fuel for our subconscious stress factory. We've burned off the fog by writing it all down.
Once I’ve won the battles of my inbox and task list, it’s time to visit my calendar. I like to look at the upcoming week. It’s important to get a refresher on what's headed my way. But more importantly, I like to roughly plan out when I will work on important tasks. Naturally there won't be time for all of them, so I must prioritize and make some choices. Again, there may be conscious concern about what I will have time for, but at least I know what I think I can or cannot get done. That information is very useful. And more importantly, if my subconscious was churning over some event sneaking up on me in the near future, by focusing on my calendar I’ve hopefully made it conscious.
At this point I've wrapped my arms around all my work. I am consciously aware of all of it and I’ve decided what I'm going to do and what I'm not going to do on purpose. Hopefully, I’ve managed to vector any work thoughts from my subconscious into my conscious mind or into my task list or calendar. This is where I stop. This is the culminating point of my attack on work stress. I retreat back across friendly lines to home time to enjoy my weekend knowing there's nothing lurking. I know what I'm going to do the moment I arrive at my desk Monday morning and I'm not going to waste any more of my weekend worrying about it.
I may not have actually completed any work during my rest time, but by taking action to attack uncertainty, I've guarded my own mental wellness and I've prepared for the week. I’ve taken the high ground to maximize my output during upcoming work time so I can maximize my enjoyment of the following rest time. That's my victory condition in the war of work-life balance.