 previous ones this does get into some chronic illness stuff and if that's a thing that you need to not be hearing about then again like please don't feel bad about taking off or if you're just like desperately need a lunch I understand it's okay won't be offended okay so how many of you have answered busy when someone asks you how you're doing yeah oh yeah yeah our culture glorifies being busy our ability to endlessly labor to hustle all day every day is something that we're expected to take pride in so Stanford sociologists have actually identified this like concept of an ideal worker and they said that it is someone who works 40 hours a week or more preferably more without interruption until retirement while devoting the majority of their time and energy to work so they're always available and they prior to his work over everything else I am not an ideal worker I learned the hard way that working constantly and ignoring my needs was not a lifestyle that I could sustain at all and it actually in fact cost me my help and it's been I spent a lot of years recovering from that so I have Lyme disease which is with a Y and for me personally it's ranged anywhere from annoying all the way up to debilitating so I had a pretty wide range on that and self-care is essential for everybody so by no means feel like I'm not speaking to you if you don't have some sort of health problem that you're managing but as a professional sick person I've discovered through my own sort of bad bad mistakes that it's really non-negotiable for those of you that do and when I first got sick I thought that I could just kind of wheel my way through it that like I'll keep pushing and my body would catch up somehow I guess I don't know I don't know what I thought would happen and since none of my doctors knew what was happening with me I figured like everyone else must just feel like garbage too and they manage to work and have social lives and whatever and they're probably just tougher than I am so I got to be very much all about that hustle I finished an accelerated grad school program I worked long hours a full-time job I managed my own business I managed to get mono somehow I got so sick that I slept 22 hours in a row and I spent any time that I wasn't working barely able to move so it turns out that hustling is not like really all that great for you but we're obsessed with busy and we live in a world that facilitates it modern communication makes it really easy to always be on and there used to be like a really easy physical barrier to not working constantly it was called an office and you would leave it but now like your office is anywhere anytime and you have email and Wi-Fi and Slack and texting and you know social media and there's just there's no such thing as I missed your call and since you can always be accessible people expect you to always be accessible but does anyone actually benefiting from all this extra time that we're working employees certainly aren't organized science showed that most employees that feel the pressure to be that ideal worker I talked about earlier find it difficult to fulfill and or distasteful so either they're miserable they're failing or they're miserable and they're failing and it turns out you know other research shows that the best workers are happy healthy and well rested to the surprise of no one your brain needs downtime to function and we know this but you know we treat rest like a sin and sleep is something that you can put off a coffee or just ignore completely you know we say like I'll sleep when I'm dead which will be soon because we are not sleeping and it's terrible for you you know giving up sleep for work is a point of pride but it's just being cruel to your body for you know as I'll get into basically no reason healthy sleep is one of the best forms of preventative medicine and one night of sleep deprivation just one night makes you more susceptible to illness and infection and for their purposes sleep deprivation is less than six hours so I'm guessing that a lot of us are sort of in worse shape on that than maybe we had previously thought and you know longer term it affects your short your long-term memory from our formation your concentration decision making attention and a wealth of physical ailments but we don't value rest and you know we don't see leisure as an important part of being a human we see it as you know self-indulgence for privileged people or just laziness but the most significant achievements have been achieved because of downtime the brain needs rest and psychological distance to do complex work you can't just you know grind it out I had a design professor that introduced me to the bed bass and bus theory that your brain does the best work whenever it's occupied with other things and our friend Jeremy actually helped me make this point he said I could use these so he's working on a problem took a step back from it to do something else solve the problem and this is how your brain actually works right this is good you know you your brain runs background processes while you go look at adorable corgis and it solves problems for you while you're not paying attention to it and like I have numerous times called a friend over to help me with you know design problem because I've been staring at it too long and I probably have spent less time overall working on that project if I just you know took a break when I got burned out instead of trying to work through it so we're not benefiting from these extra hours but like our bosses must be right I mean we need to work these kind of hours to get the work done actually most of those hours are just for show the average salary work week in the United States is 49 hours and 25% of us work more than 60 and that's actually just salaried people that's not even counting you like freelance and contract folk but economists have found what they call a productivity cliff so yeah it's bad your productivity drops pretty steeply after 50 hours a week but just five more hours and it drops straight off a cliff like they call it a productivity cliff so people are spending an extra 10 or even 20 hours every week at the office and they're not actually getting anything done to show for it and as it turns out also to the surprise of no one exhausted employees or are more prone to costly errors and accidents so you're actually like negative working at this point when you account for all the time that you have to go back to fix the mistakes you made because you were exhausted so you're getting less than nothing done Harvard Business Review did a study at a consulting firm and they found that employees there were pretending to work 80 hour weeks so yeah this is not good advice we'll get to that but they they would you know say that they were putting in the time that they actually weren't the employees are said that to get by at that job to succeed there that you have to work this kind of long hours but they had just started working less without telling anyone and we're still congratulated on what great work they were doing what does that tell you that some people have shady work practices yes please don't do this don't do not had your time on and lie to your boss and say you saw a cool talk at OS fields instead of do it don't do that but it also tells us that even in client services where people will tell you that there's just no way around always being accessible you have to do it you can reorganize your work in a way that gives you a consistent schedule that gives you less hours and still hits the metrics that your company values a lot of different kinds of work anything from meetings to doing cardio can benefit from spending less time doing them because you know you're more focused and you're more aware of how you're using your time because you know you have less of it so their experience where these people are making a show of devotion better like in secret working reasonable hours it shows that it's possible to do that so we're ruining our health we're missing out on our own lives our bosses are getting shoddy work and everyone's miserable why are we doing this part of its Henry Ford's fault you know he decided a hundred years ago that 40 hours was the amount of time people should work and we went done like let's never reconsider that again Henry Ford sounds good but also we're rewarded for it leaders who have made personal sacrifices of their own time or their health sometimes they have trouble accepting that there are other ways to succeed even when they're confronted with evidence of it so you know even if with research that you're effectively wasting these hours we still feel like that's a measure of success and so people that succeed there are praised and they're given promotions where you know in other countries where people actually take their vacations they be chastised for being inefficient and we reward it and anyone who says anything against it is lazy if you don't want to hustle then I guess you just don't want to work I don't know you know that's the attitude that we have toward it the flip side of this reward for constant working is a feeling of guilt that we get when we're not productive and the like productive person is a virtuous person goes as far back as you know ancient Greece Protestants turn work ethic into a religion that you know you can get into heaven by always being working it's even in Thomas a tank engine cartoons where the only good train is a useful train it's literally everywhere so is it any wonder that whenever people are curating their social media existence that it's you know focused on hashtag hustling busy's no longer a complaint from us it's a point of pride you know oh how are you doing oh so busy man really busy like it's it's a thing that we're proud of and we don't even honestly value what you're doing as long as you're doing and you're always doing we're confusing basic self-care like rest with laziness and you know chronic overwork we're not recognizing for what it is which is a failure of project management we're equating busy with productive we're choosing quantity over quality we're valuing hustle over health healthy so now rest instead of being something passive is an act of resistance so let's resist ideal workers do not take care of themselves healthy workers take care of themselves this is my too long didn't read on self-care and I honestly if you get like nothing else out of this talk I really hope that it's this taking care of yourself does not make you lazy it doesn't make you weak it doesn't make you indulgent or selfish or bad employee it makes you a person that has needs and if you're doing it right you know taking care of yourself makes you a healthy like a happier healthier person and a better employee it's better for everyone all around for you to do this and so self-care take it takes a lot of different forms it might be filtering your social media feed to get rid of things that cause you anxiety with no benefit that one's feeling real relevant lately it might be you know asking for help either you know from friends or something formal like medical leave or checking with your you know employee assistance programs it might be doing things that bring you joy and they can be small things it doesn't have to be you know jet and off to Fiji but for everyone it's just like honestly basic like bottom line care that people are neglecting in themselves sleeping enough eating enough you know relaxing moving your body in a way that makes you happy whatever that is for you and I know that these things are important because for a while I was not doing any of them I was keeping up appearances but you know I wouldn't admit that I needed more rest than my friends did or that like I couldn't pull all nighters or live off of Dorito tacos or whatever delicious thing and still function so I had this cycle where I would just push way too hard and then crash and I wasn't asking for help I didn't even tell anyone that I work with that I was sick at all and if I'm being really super honest I still have a lot of family and close friends that don't know how much pain I was in and how sick I was but I got a treatment plan and I got better and I learned absolutely nothing about taking care of myself at all I took it as an opportunity to work non-stop I had a full-time job I run a photo business I easily was pulling 60 hours a week and I spent my weekend shooting I was never not working I actually had to set alarms so to remind me to eat lunch or I would just work straight through them so instead of my cycle of you know pushing too hard and crashing I was just pushing too hard and then pushing harder but the hours have to come from somewhere so you know I wasn't getting enough sleep or exercise or you know doing any of the things that kept my immune system from just like giving me the finger and walking out I don't know if immune systems have fingers it's a metaphor so a year later I was sick again and in fact I was much sicker than I was the first time around but since I needed to see a specialist and I live in the boonies that meant a five-hour round trip to go see my doctor at least once a month and you know my sickly didn't accrue that that fast so I couldn't hide my illness from the people that I work for anymore and this is the part where I learned about self-care making time to care for yourself matters because it's your health and protecting it is serious business this was in the news it was a couple of years ago but an Indonesian girl actually worked herself to death she you know a combination of not sleeping and pounding energy drinks killed her and I you know it's not common this is a really extreme example of course but she's also not the only one that this has ever happened to your health is a very serious matter the stuff matters caring for your brain and your body is important and work can be a huge part of who you are but it's still a part and it's something that you can't do if you don't look after yourself when we get overwhelmed and stressed we let the things that are easiest to overlook slip and self-care is really easy for us to overlook we leave ourselves as the last lowest priority and we suffer for it but it's important to remember that your body is not the enemy it's working hard to support you and it deserves a little compassion from you so you know give your body and your brain the resources that they need to support your work and your life and you know your creative process and whatever it is that you do but because you're busy you know we're all so busy you might think that you don't have time for self-care but your immune system gets wrecked by bad diet and no sleep and too much work and something's got to give and you'll waste more time being sick than if you just blocked out the time for self-care in the first place I had a baby last year which is mostly just an excuse to show you this photo so once like once or twice a day he wants to sit with me for you know maybe ten minutes like it's a super small request from him and much like the things that you need to be doing are small requests like remembering to eat lunch or going to bed at a reasonable hour they're just tiny little bits of self-care that you can do and I've learned that I can either give him this thing that he needs just the small thing that helps him get through his day of being a tiny person in a world that's still kind of new to him or we can all suffer I mean so I can keep working while he clings to me and I'm stressed because he's upset and he's stressed because he's not getting what he needs and we're both miserable but you know to my point instead of taking that ten minutes I've now spent twice as long muddling through this task while my blood pressure creeps ever higher and then we still have to go sit down anyway so that we can both get back to somewhere that's calm and happy like he wanted to do in the first place and it's a thing that I should have learned in grad school when like I would skip lunch to keep working and end up sleepy and hangry and you know you could like I'd have been better off if I'd have just taken the five minutes to make a damn sandwich you can finish almost any task you know faster more effectively and more happily if you keep yourself in a good you know condition to do it but you know this I mean you know what's best for you you know how to do it the trick is making the time for it I didn't say finding the time I didn't say finding the time because you rarely just like stumble into a magical pocket of a free time it's been gifted to you you know I mean you're making decisions about how you spend your time so it's one thing to say you should take care of yourself and live your life to the fullest and there's tumblers full of you know inspirational things like that but it's it's entirely another thing to do it many of us either want to work or have to work and so it's a matter of making time to both do the work and to care for yourself so how do we do that the first step is admitting you know that you have a problem and the second step is telling people that you have a problem when you're working from home with a kid it's really easy to get wrapped up in parenting Instagram with like their Pinterest worthy parties and their bento box lunches and their perfect clean little children and then seeing that all day makes you think that like you must be doing it wrong with your filthy kid eating a corn cob half dressed but then Jennifer Daniels tweets about her kid pooping on their patio I think see this happens to other people too it's not just me so in the same way kind of seeing people post about long hours hustle and how they love that grind makes you think that you're doing it wrong you who need sleep and food to function and you who are able to recognize that you work better if you keep your anxiety levels down or you that knows that you can't pull all night or so you schedule your work in a reasonable way so that you have time for these things like our culture is making you feel like you're doing it wrong so I'm you know up here to tell you that I need that stuff too breaks and vacations and you know looking at adorable corgis at the park like you can be successful and still do those things I'm telling you and scientists are also telling you that you that you can achieve that I work for myself I'm our kids primary caregiver and I do take time for self-care a lot of the culture is implicit so actually explicitly stating your needs and concerns it can start to really change your workplace and it can help to normalize policy change for other people so when my husband was deciding how much leave to take for the little guy he talked to other dads at work and guys that were public about it that were willing to talk to him they really helped engage what his company was okay with which in a lot of places can be worlds apart from you know what they say is okay or even what you're legally entitled to I know whenever I first got sick I wasn't talking to anyone about it but seeing other people discuss their chronic illness work with people you know that their employers to to figure out a plan for them seeing other people being public about it helped me to be public about it and now I'm just yapping about it to anybody at conferences so you know you taking more leave encourages other people to do it you using your vacation time encourages other people to do it you opening up conversations about your needs encourages other people to do it so if you're in a position where you have a little bit of power or even just you know a privilege of pushing back you can help to spread that attitude and if you're in a position of authority if you're like a manager a supervisor or running the joint your habits set the tone for your workplace you have a lot of power just in how you choose to work speaking up also lets the people that you work for know what matters to you bright horizons to the study that found that father's stress about work-life balance more than college savings or career advancement which were two issues that they thought that they cared more about so the study actually found two things that dad stressed over balance but also that their employers didn't know that they had assumed other aspects were higher priority and they were wrong your boss can't help you if they don't know that there's a problem to help you with and a lot of employers are so afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing that they don't do anything when they see an employee struggling so you know they don't want to invade your privacy or make it worse so you can open up a conversation with them that focuses on solutions that help you do well this is a big one ideal workers do not have boundaries at all and there's there's no right way to fight for boundaries how much you can afford to push back is totally tied to you know how much you need that job and how you think they'll take it there's a lot of like really glib advice to just quit your job if it's not the most perfect one ever and it's not really all that practical or helpful to anyone like I said maybe you need that job or maybe you just really like a lot of things about that job and you'd rather you know stick around and make it better so you know I can't stand up and say that there are no risks to rocking the boat there are but setting healthy boundaries is a really important step in fighting burnout if you're able to so one of the places I work everyone just worked through lunch and ate at their desks it was kind of the culture and then somebody stood up and said I'm gonna take a walk anybody else and then we became an office that took launch walks like I was it sometimes that's all it takes is one person to say you know I have an issue with this or I have needs that this is not addressing sometimes you have to fight a little harder but there's a lot of room between begrudgingly like accepting you know your work culture that's ruining your health and on the other side of the spectrum rolling and sing and take this job and shove it like there's degrees of rebellion and we want to hit somewhere in the middle of that so you might rebel in small ways like being a person who suggests a lunch walk and you know kind of normalizing that for other people it's really minor boat rocking you're probably not gonna get like called in the boss's office for insubordination for that you might set a precedent for not answering emails at all hours of the day or you know if you're working off site or freelancing even setting work hours at all is a boundary that a lot of us don't enforce and it's an implicit boundary that you set with your behavior you're conditioning people on what availability to expect from you so when you answer an email immediately it's 10 p.m. on Sunday you're saying I am fine with this please contact me at literally any time this is fine so you know it's a little hard to get mad at them for doing it when you keep basically conditioning them that's cool I was doing contract work for university and I've been working hours that I was not getting paid for and so was everyone else like the whole team was doing this and but you know it was this is a boundary that I really needed to set that they pay me when I work so I gave them warning because you know communication and managing expectations is really important when you're changing a policy like I'm saying I have a problem with this but I've been doing it for a few weeks so I only work like 20 hours a week for them so when I put in 15 I'd say you know hey I only have five hours left and then that's it and often they would need more work than they could afford and they would kind of ask if I couldn't just like do it anyway you know and the temptation is to explain yourself I have this other project or an appointment or whatever but the really good tip that I learned for saying no is to stop at no because if you don't you know if you say oh no I don't have a ride then they'll just offer you a ride and you have to come up with another reason you can't do the thing say no stop talking so you know so I tell them that you know sorry I only have 20 hours and and they're used up and my boss was not thrilled about this it wasn't the best news ever because they were losing out on free labor but you know she also understood that I didn't want to work and not get paid for it you don't always know how your company will react and so that can make you know pushing back against boundaries really tricky but sometimes they're very amenable to it my first internship that I ever worked like my bus schedule allowed me to either get there 30 minutes early or five minutes late and I'm not really morning person but I got there 30 minutes early and like months into it I mentioned this to someone and they're like just come out five minutes late who cares so you know you may be like killing yourself to get to live within parameters that other people don't value or even like care about so it's it's good to open up a conversation because you may find that they're really amenable to changes that you need setting boundaries due to illness can add a layer of difficulty you might need to consider you know do you need an outside agencies help to keep that job or what accommodations can they offer you and are they able to do that but you know you really want to consider if you're not speaking up about it how stressful is it going to be for you to hide that and you know living a double life not telling the people that you work with that you're struggling it's really stressful which is also bad for your health and if you can't push back or they they aren't able to help it is important to still find support through you know family or friends or support groups or something that they can kind of help you work within your boundaries of that job so when I relapsed the second time I got sick because I didn't learn anything I was definitely going to get fired if I didn't say anything at that job I did not have the kind of hours to cover you know missing for doctors appointments and procedures and whatever so the benefit for me was much greater than the risk I didn't have anything at all to lose so the hard part then was admitting that I needed the help and then I needed it in a pretty formal and official way so I filed for FMLA now like setting this up is outside of scope today there are a lot of free resources on the internet that can help you with it but I will say that as with any of their other boundaries there are two really important steps for it one is getting super clear and realistic about exactly what you need to keep doing this job and still be a healthy human outside of it the second is to ask for it and not feel guilty for needing it some of the problem with working ourselves ragged is external if you're working on someone else's you know for someone else you work on their hours but some of it's us you know that crushing Protestant work ethic and one of my worst habits was that I would feel constant crushing guilt anytime I wasn't working on a thing like until it got done I need to be working on it so my downtime didn't even really count for my mental health because the whole time I'm supposed to be relaxing I'm just drowning in anxiety over not getting this thing done so I'd work crazy hours I burn out and I feel guilty so I'd work more crazy hours and just repeat that cycle so how do you combat that the first step is in figuring out what work is even worth doing I'm a big list person so I have to do list for my business for a household or kids talk that I'm giving right now I love lists and there are things that find their way though onto my to-do list that do not belong there so it's in this chart a few times and I use it in my book which you can pre-order now and it's out in September who put that there so the chart it's called an Eisenhower box and it's a way to prioritize your do list to do list you separate things into urgent or not and important or not so this bottom right is gone you'd be amazed how much stuff ends up here but just delete it never think about it again this is where busy lives because you're doing stuff you know working hard but like it's not important stuff so that's gone top left is your fires that you have to put out this instant and then you know the other ones are planning or either delegating or you're finding space on your to-do list to do them because if you don't find the space you know make the time they don't happen self-care goes in one of these top boxes depending on how badly you've been putting it off but even with you know after you've whittled it down to just the things that really honestly matter sometimes it still feels never-ending and so finding ways to knock out tasks efficiently can free up hours for you that you can use for important things like self-care so whether you're using like a Pomodoro method or systems to speed up recurring processes or your mono tasking which I recommend like we're used to doing a million things at once it's really multitasking isn't a real thing you're just switching from task to task multitasking is an El Camino all right it's supposed to be a car and a truck but instead it's just bad at being a car and a truck that's multitasking mono tasking friends so you know however you do it the point is to maximize the time that you spend working so that you can spend less time working and that's the tricky part it's a sprinters tactic you can't keep this up long term and not get burned out so the hard part is not filling this free time with more work and you can always find more work to do spend another two hours at the office on something they could wait until tomorrow but you start to hit diminishing returns and you can't run anymore so you need to give yourself permission to be done told you this is serious business you guys my work hours are limited now I'm doing a part-time schedule because I'm taking care of a kid at home so I figured out how many hours a week I can devote to work and my to-do list has time estimates because you know I track my time I have a pretty good understanding of how long things take and so this this is how I do I schedule tasks in one hour blocks on my calendar this is my actual real calendar I hope there's nothing terribly embarrassing on it and when my time is up I'm done I did the hour I'm done and knowing that I'm on pace to complete a project as long as I do that helps me from getting that anxiety that would drive me to just plow through everything until it was finished so I limit how much work I commit to realistic about how much I can do in a day and I'm not perfect at it I got a little bit burned out writing this talk about not getting burned out so you know it's a goal that we work toward but it's weird to think that being super scheduled and organized would make me less stress but it's what works for me and before my schedule was dictated by my kids naps I would give myself permission be done you know with tasks that you pick three things that need to be done that day and once you check them off then you're done you did it good job like you get to declare yourself victorious I had a friend that did film Friday so every Friday he'd work on personal projects and films it you know so whatever it is that that works for you find something that allows you to feel like you've done enough for the day so that you can relax without guilt about clocking out and I had to continually reevaluate this you know it changed when I got sick it changed again when I relapsed change again when I had a son it'll change again a dozen more times before the robot overlords take us you always have to be reevaluating this I spent my whole career working two or three jobs but that meant when I wasn't working I was crashing to recover from it and all my energy meant to to work there was nothing else left there was no space for me to do the things that I needed to keep myself healthy so I stopped being an ideal worker when your work is important to you and I've always thought of my work as part of my identity like it's it's a part of who I am you want to do the best job you can but to do that you have to realistically assess what you need to do that identify the things that you need to thrive in all areas of your life because your life is about more than just work and so I'm not just defining success in terms of how you know my business is running but how all the other areas my life are thriving as well it's about balancing for everyone and you have to decide you know what you need to give up to get the things that you need so since I've been in remission this time I learned how important it is to take care of myself how taking on more work and running myself into the ground to get it done set me up for years of IV poles and taking so many pills I had to organize them in a tackle box the second time I got sick the time that I should have known better and I should have probably done better to help to prevent that that time I was sick for five years I spent five years doing anti IV antibiotics and being in constant pain and you know hitting up the ER a couple times a month and sure you know I'm not saying that I caused any of that that's a whole other talk for chronic illness people but I certainly did exacerbate it because I wouldn't slow down I learned that all of these pieces these small concessions to self-care had huge ramifications if I ignored those needs so the next time that you power through a 60-hour work week or brag about how little you sleep or how hard you're grinding away really consider what you might be giving up thanks guys