Working with your tendencies

[00:00:00] Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:16] Unlike physical work, which you can literally step away from, knowledge work can stay with you. If you're interested in your work, it can stay with you even more. I definitely suffer from this, and in the past, there have definitely been seasons where other parts of my life have suffered because of this too.

[00:00:38] There's also the added issue that knowledge work doesn't always happen within a specific schedule. I've written about this on my blog before, so I'm going to go ahead and quote myself and then link to the post in the show notes.

[00:00:53] "Some of the best solutions I've come up with for problems I've solved in my projects have often come when I'm not at my computer. That's a common fact every knowledge worker can relate to. Our brain doesn't operate on a timer, and it often keeps working the problem even when we're not officially at work or at our desk.

[00:01:13] In fact, when I'm working a difficult problem, I know the best way to surface a valuable insight is to deeply understand the problem and then walk away and then do something else, or sleep on it.

[00:01:27] And at some point, while doing the dishes, taking a shower, or admiring the sunset, an idea will come to mind and lead to a breakthrough. It happens time and time and again."

[00:01:40] However, since November of last year, I've been working hard to maintain better work boundaries. And part of that has been figuring out how to mostly leave work at work when I'm done. Yes, your mind will still come up with ideas outside of that time, the subconscious is a weird thing. But maybe even to give your subconscious some breathing room, you need to figure out a way to get your conscious mind to stop thinking about work, you know?

[00:02:10] So let's talk about what hasn't worked.

[00:02:15] Adding an event to my calendar to block off the last half hour of my day to wrap up my day has not worked. It gives me a bit of warning that my day is supposed to be ending soon, keyword being supposed to be, or phrase. But it doesn't actually make me wrap up. My brain just doesn't believe it's a real meeting, And it carries on at full speed anyway.

[00:02:40] Closing all the apps on my computer partially works. I have to save everything, review all the tabs in my work browser profile, push any code I wrote to github, etc. It doesn't stop my mind from being in work mode entirely, but it does slow it down.

[00:03:00] Literally walking out of my home office and doing another activity partially works. If it's an all consuming one like a weightlifting workout, then sometimes it works and knocks me out of work mode quickly. But if it's cooking, well, I'm an excellent cook and it doesn't take all my mental attention, so it only partially knocks me out of work mode.

[00:03:23] These are solid strategies, they just don't work for me. Because my work is interesting enough that it's easy to keep going. Or sometimes it's stressful enough that I want to persist and keep chewing on the problem I might be working through.

[00:03:36] But here's what has been working, and it's gonna, it's gonna sound weird, I know. My mind knows that my workday should end at a certain time, so up until that time, it wants to go full speed ahead.

[00:03:52] So, instead of baking the wrap up time into my actual work schedule, back in December, I started giving myself a 30 minute grace period that was technically off the clock. As in, it's not scheduled anywhere, and my brain knows that it's past the time when I'm supposed to stop working. That part is important.

[00:04:12] I had to make myself offline on Slack, right? That's part of my rules. I can't carry on a conversation with anyone because I'm supposed to be off the clock. I could write an email, but it had to be scheduled for the next day. I could craft a 30 minute long message, if I wanted even, but it had to be scheduled for the next day.

[00:04:32] And during that extra 30 minutes, I could plan and do all the real wrap up things that my brain won't allow me to do while I'm still technically at work. I call this working with my brain. instead of against it. Because sometimes you just have to find a way to work with your tendencies rather than trying to change them.

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening! Same time tomorrow?