Let me start with a confession. I think I am a workaholic. That doesn't mean that I work all the time. In fact, I regularly take out time to go to the gym and meet friends. But even when I'm doing those things, I'm usually obsessively checking for emails and thinking about work. The next major meeting I have, or the documents I'm working on, or the feedback I've just received on my work. In fact, I meet most of the 7 signs and 3 character traits of workaholics that this Forbes article enlists.
Because I don't really work long hours, my physical health continues to be unaffected. I get time to eat healthy, work out and sleep well. So far, so good. But the mental stress and exhaustion from constantly thinking about work takes a toll. Every 4 months or so, I find myself completely disengaged from work and unable to carry on. Then I take a few weeks off for a vacation. But even when I'm on vacation, I refuse to stay away from work. I check emails and work on flights, during breaks, at nights and any other time. Research published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology found that workaholism is correlated with higher prevalence of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety and depression. Many of the findings are behaviour patterns that I observe in myself. Compulsively checking emails, sometimes every 2-3 minutes, is one. Trying to organise my workday and fretting over irrelevant deviations from schedule is another.
Vacations can be an excellent way to unwind and rein in your workaholic tendencies. Over the past two years, vacations have become an integral part of my life. But these vacations weren't always what they were meant to be. I still remember my first vacation after joining Omidyar Network. Nico and I went to Thailand and Cambodia, but I used a lot of that time catching up on work. The next trip to Japan was even worse. I signed myself up for an investment committee meeting, constantly read work-related documents, and stressed non-stop about an investment proposal that I had been championing internally. I came back from these 'vacations' slightly refreshed, but experienced burn out within a few months.
I then thought a lot about how I can make my vacations work for me. I took inspiration from the four rules of an effective vacation that writer Chidike Samuelson enlisted - pause everything that suggests work, treat your mind, treat your body, and catch up with your life. So, this time that I'm in Australia, I successfully kept myself completely cut-off from emails for a week. I tried to replace the phone with a physical book. I tried to spend my meals either having a conversation, or reading the book. I take the time to sit and ponder, without feeling the pressure to do anything. Not all of that has been successful, of course. I still go on twitter, which has become a major part of my workday. On Friday, a Government committee released a report on a topic that I had been following closely. That led to a few days of disequilibrium. But the general upward trajectory is encouraging and gives me hope that the next vacation would be even better.
But vacations will only come once every few months, if not years. It is important to keep the body and mind healthy in the meantime. That will help me avoid the kind of brain-splitting burnouts that I experience every few months. There is plenty of advice out there on how to deal with work. I found these seven tips especially useful - eat nutritiously, exercise, uni-task, breathe, schedule non-work stuff, take tech time-out, and know that balance is constantly evolving. The one that I find most challenging is uni-tasking. One of the most important differences between management consulting and my current job is the explosion in the number of things I need to work on. At any given point, there are 8-10 major streams of work that are screaming for attention. Some of my days are spent just jumping from one to the other, addressing the most urgent things in each. That leaves me very dissatisfied because my brain doesn't feel particularly challenged, and I start wondering if I'm even contributing anything. Uni-tasking could therefore be something I focus on when I go back to work.
Incase you're wondering if I'm all negative on workaholism, I'm not! Being in love with my work has helped me tremendously in life. I look back at the frenetic pace of things back at college and I wonder where I got that energy from! But now that I'm in a slightly comfortable position in life, and possibly at a mid-20s crossroads, I need to think about where to go from here. The sprint is over, and the marathon requires a different set of skills. Writer Jessica Stillman has talked about five differences between workaholics and high performers - having specific goals, setting targets, varying level of effort, being proactive, and not seeking external validation. As I head back to work from my two-week vacation, these could serve as useful goalposts to keep in mind.
