How to Unplug From Work

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I'm talking about unplugging from work. Incredibly necessary, but so many of us suck at it. After this episode, you will have a tool kit for stepping away from the computer and keyboard. Let's hop into it. 

Entrepreneurs and competitive careerists—I came up with that, it's not an actual term—they are notoriously bad at unplugging. I'm one of those people. And if you're listening to this podcast, I generally assume that you're one of those people, either an entrepreneur, an aspiring entrepreneur, a competitive careerist, and I assume that because this podcast is all about accelerating your business and your career. And so when I think about it, what makes us great at work is what makes us horrible at unplugging from work. We take our careers really seriously, we don't settle for good, we need perfect, and we want to move up the totem pole of our given companies as fast as humanly possible. And this ambition is great, and it leads to results in your company and over the long run of your career.

But this mindset is a double-edged sword. When you prioritize excellence in your job, it can have downstream negative effects in other aspects of life. You may work two hours past when you promised your partner you'd stopped working so that you could eat dinner with them. Your mind may ruminate before you go to sleep and when you wake up based on something you're working on in your job, and it causes you to be disengaged in conversation with your family or friends. So, at this point, I hope those of you who are bad at disconnecting, like myself, are cognizant of the fact that you're bad at disconnecting. Now, before I talk about tactics and strategies to unplug effectively, I want you to also just understand what the long-term impacts are of having attachment issues with your work.

Performance Burnout

So the first long-term impact created by being attached to your work is burnout. We've all heard of burnout, but I think until we actually experience it, we kind of call bullshit on it. I'm exhibit A. When I started working full-time on Morning Brew in 2016, I remember it like it was yesterday, we didn't have an office yet, we were working in an incubator on NYU's campus, and I thought burnout was a complete excuse. I assume that if you really love the work you're doing, which I did with Morning Brew, it was my baby, it would be impossible to do too much of it. Well, I just ended up learning the hard way that that was not the case at all. For several months, my co-founder Austin and I were working 15 hour days, and oftentimes we would finish up the newsletter, both writing it and coding it into an email template, at one or two in the morning, and then we'd start everything back up at 8:00 AM. So we were probably running on five to six hours of sleep. It took very little time for me to feel the impact on my way of working and my way of living by driving myself into the ground like this. After about two weeks, I felt fuzzy, my anxiety, my base level of anxiety, was probably 50% higher, and I was just overall less effective in my work because I didn't pace myself appropriately in prior weeks.I treated entrepreneurship like a sprint when it was really just a marathon for the next seven years. 

Passion Burnout

The other impact of burnout is not just burnout from doing well in your job, it's burnout from having passion for the work you're doing. Nothing kills your passion or your love for work quicker than doing too much of the work you're doing. The most powerful example of this is in sports. There are countless athletes that have either quit their careers in sport early or shared publicly how much do they actually hate the sports they're doing and it's become a job. There are hundreds of examples like this, but one great example is Andre Agassi. Andre Agassi was one of my favorite tennis players and tennis icons growing up.

He was one of the best test players of all the time, and he fell out of love with his sport. It was in his biography that he said he plays tennis for a living or even though he hates tennis, and he hates it with a dark and secret passion that he's always had. And so in the case of Andre Agassi, you know, he's the example that I use, but so many tennis players and so many athletes go through this. When you're at the top of your game, when you're on tour for tennis, you're dedicating 30 plus weeks of the year to tennis. But even outside of those 30 plus weeks, you're spending time thinking about it. What is your training regimen going to look like? What is your diet going to look like? What is your sleep schedule look like? And that is the main reason for burnout for athletes is literally their entire identity is tied up in a single activity that they spend decades doing. But it honestly isn't that different with work for people like you or I that take our jobs so incredibly seriously.So that's the first reason that failing to disconnect can be so detrimental to your happiness. Burnout is a very real thing in performance and having passion for the work you're doing. 

Neglecting Your Purpose Portfolio

The second big reason is something I call neglecting your purpose portfolio. When you spend so much time in your work, you neglect other things that fill your cup in life. Even if you're a workaholic, your job is not the only thing that defines you in life and something that has always stuck with me that a friend of mine, Kat Cole, she was the president of Focus Brands, which owns Jamba Juic, Auntie Anne's, Cinnabon, she talks a lot about this concept of your purpose portfolio and how you need to diversify your purpose portfolio and invest in all aspects of your purpose portfolio. And basically what that refers to is this basket of all of the things in your life that give you purpose and fill you with energy. And connecting this back to unplugging from work, not only can overworking make you lose passion for your job, but it can also make you feel unfulfilled because you're not nurturing the other things in life that really matter to you in addition to work.

When I would spend too much time working in the early days of The Brew, like I was just mentioning, I would always end up feeling disappointed with myself that I was either neglecting, seeing my family or neglecting seeing my friendsm or taking care of my body because I was forgetting to work out or eat well. Now, there will be a group of you listening to this that absolutely is saying to yourself, "Yeah, no, I'm young in my career though, and my job is my life right now and I know what I signed up for. So I'm okay having my job take up my entire purpose portfolio." Okay. I see where you're coming from, I went to business school with a lot of people who worked in banking, I worked in financial services.

The issue with that though is your purpose portfolio won't be filled by your job for your entire life, and you don't want to just start investing in other parts of your life when they're finally relevant. Things like relationships, friendships, your health, they take time to nurture and you want to care for them proactively, not reactively. So to take a pause here, I hope you understand why failure to unplug can be so detrimental to your love for your job, but also your overall satisfaction in life. So now I want to talk through six different things that I believe you can do to unplug in a realistic, but effective way. You don't have to do all of these things. I think even one or two of them can make a massive difference in the balance that you have in life. 

Strategy #1: Be Realistic About Your Goals 

Number one: be realistic about unplugging, given your constraints. Literally the worst way to build a habit is to require large behavioral change. For example, if you wanna build an exercise habit saying to yourself, "You're going to work out seven days a week" is the worst way to actually be able to work out in a habitual way. So, an example would be if you work in banking, don't set up an unplugging goal of not working any weekends, because you'll probably be disappointed and break that habit a few weeks in, since that is a part of the culture of banking.

If you work in sales or account management, any customer facing job, don't set an unplugging goal of turning your phone off for a majority of the work day if your job is quite literally to be on call for your clients at all times. That is what you signed up for. You need to understand your constraints and create plans for unplugging that respect those constraints. Maybe it's going for a walk in between meetings, maybe it's creating a buffer between meetings so they're not back to back, so you can get in a quick Headspace meditation. Maybe it's shutting down at 6:00 PM to spend time focused on yourself or hanging with your partner or your family. So that's number one, which is: be realistic about unplugging so you can actually create a long term habit.

Strategy #2: Separate Work and Non-Work

Number two: create a separation of work and non-work. This is probably the hardest thing to do right now. With the pandemic and with most of us working in a remote environment for an extended period of time, separation between work and play has been cut basically to zero. Commutes to work have been cut to zero, changing from your lounge outfit into a work outfit has been taken away, and that has led people to work more hours, even though they are in the comfort of their home. So the question is, when the separation has basically become a zero in the new normal we work in, how do you create it? So I think there's two types of separation.

There's physical separation, where you create physical distance between work and play. So, if you live in a home or an apartment that's conducive to literally separating rooms where your office is versus where you enjoy a play or life, I would heavily encourage that. Or even better, if you have the opportunity to work in your company's satellite office or in a coffee shop, if you like ambient noise, or step out of your home, force yourself to get dressed into a different outfit, and leave your home some days. Or leave your phone in your office when you shut off for the day and don't look at it until the next morning. Then there's creating digital distance, where say, you do live in a studio or a one bedroom, and you live in that one bedroom with your partner and you're going to have to work in the same room where you watch TV and you eat dinner, think about the digital things you can do to create separation.

That could be turning off notifications on your phone, whether its notification to Slack or to email or to text, or if you have an iPhone setting, timers, where after a certain number of hours of using an app, it reminds you that you told yourself if you didn't want to use it any more after that amount of time. Creating digital distance and physical distance can be huge in a new normal where the distance between work and non-work has been basically brought to zero. 

Strategy #3: Feel Good About Your Work 

Third way to unplug effectively: feel good about the work that you do. This is the one that's always impacted me most because I believe that you need to now take hard work to compensate for a lack of smart work. And so the best way to, in my mind, that you can unplug at the end of the day is when you set a list of the things that you want to do in the beginning of your day. If you actually get those things done, you don't feel like you're constantly checking social media or your texts while you're doing the work you said you would do. If you actually keep your word to yourself in doing the work, you promised yourself you would do during your day, I believe unplugging becomes so much easier. 

Strategy #4: Understand Impacts of Failure to Unplug

The fourth way to unplug effectively: understand the long term impact of unplugging versus not unplugging. And here's what I mean by that. The best analogy I think is when you're driving somewhere, let's say you're driving to a family dinner and you're running late, you're someone who's habitually late, you leave your house and Waze says that it's gonna take you 30 minutes to get there, and you're going to be 15 minutes late for dinner...the typical behavior would be feeling the need to drive really fast, to get to your destination.

You end up driving 20 miles an hour over the speed limit and you try to shave off some minutes so that you don't get to dinner nearly as late. In reality, the extra 20 miles an hour that you're driving is maybe making up a minute or two minutes to get to your destination, but the probability of you getting in a car crash goes up significantly when you are not driving within the speed limit. I think it is literally the same exact thing for overworking yourself and not unplugging. That extra hour or two or three hours at the end of the day, let's say between 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM, it makes negligible difference over years of working in your job, especially if its at the end of the day, where you're less likely to be effective in a new way since you've already worked for 10 hours, and all it's doing is just increasing the probability of burnout and losing excitement about the work you're doing. I think if you understand the long-term impact and how negligible the impact of you working a few extra hours is, you'll appreciate the value of rejuvenating and recharging. 

Strategy #5: Hold Yourself Accountable to Others

The fifth strategy for unplugging effectively is to create reasons to unplug by holding yourself accountable to others rather than yourself. I generally think we, as people, are really bad at holding ourselves accountable to ourselves when we promise things to ourselves, but we are really good when we hold ourselves accountable to others because we feel that much more disappointed when we let someone else down. And so for me in my life, I implement things, whether it's a catch up calls with friends that are in my calendar or intramural soccer on Mondays or Tuesdays from 7:00 to 8:00 PM or dinner with my girlfriend that we've planned a few days ahead of time or having a TV show like—this is embarrassing—but Bachelorette that we watch every single Monday. Actually, a new thing for me is in having a dog, having the obligation of walking my dog so he doesn't take a crap in my house. All of these things have created accountability to others. And when I create accountability to others, it is a forced function for me or unplugging, and I generally don't let others down on the promise that I've made to them. 

Strategy #6: Work at a Company That Cares

The sixth and final way to unplug effectively is to simply work at a place that both preaches self-care and practices what it preaches at the top of the company as well. At the end of the day, unplugging is so much easier when you work somewhere where unplugging is encouraged and you see your bosses and you see senior leadership, the people who evaluate your performance, you see them practicing what they preach.

When I think about it, does investment banking or consulting have so much more work than other jobs such that unplugging is impossible and working 15 hours a day is necessary? Absolutely not. I wholeheartedly believe that. But the issue is that a culture of work has been set for decades and being a young employee, trying to behave in a way that's counter to that culture, it's both very daunting and also possibly career trajectory-hurting for people that work in these jobs. As an employee, make it a non-negotiable when you are looking where to work for a place that preaches and practices self-care and the importance of unplugging.

And then as a manager or a founder of a company, set an example through your words, but as importantly, your actions, that demonstrates the way of working and unplugging that you would want for yourself if you were an employee of your own company. 

TL;DR

So where does that leave us? Well, first of all, I hope that many of you now have a self-awareness about being a workaholic and having trouble disconnecting at the end of the day. I also hope that you understand the long-term impact on your career and your life for not being able to disconnect, and you also have six new tools for realistically but effectively stepping away from your phone, computer and keyboard at the end of a long day.

I Want To Hear From You

With that, I would love to hear from you. Last month was the biggest month on Founder's Journal, we grew by 30%, which means we have tons of new listeners. Whether you're a new listener or an old listener that just hasn't yet written in, I would love to meet more members of the Founder's Journal community. Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com Or DM me on Twitter @BusinessBarista and tell me a little bit about yourself, where you live, where you work, why you decided to gift me with your time and listen to this show. And just to add a little cherry on top, I will send a funny selfie of myself when I respond to your message or email or Twitter DM.

As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder's Journal, and if you enjoyed, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show as well. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next episode.