Naiman Labs Newsletter #32. Take a break

Hi Friends!

Welcome to another issue of Naiman Labs newsletter.

The first weekend of August is a perfect time to talk about rest. Burnout has become one of the most common words in the business world when it comes to employees and employers. According to the Microsoft work trend index, 48% of respondents admitted experiencing various stages of burnout.

Not surprisingly, employee well-being has also become a higher priority for both companies and employees. There are more and more well-being-related benefits in the corporate world, such as insurance, nutritionists, financial consultants, life coaches, and other examples.

I personally believe that benefits will never be enough for employees to feel that their well-being is improved. The important thing here is that burnout is a strong thing, and it is mostly "internal." The biggest problem with burnout is that we tend to notice it at very late stages, when we feel absolutely down and completely burnt out. At this point, it is usually quite late to deal with it without the help of professionals. But we can always help ourselves.

My personal simple recommendation for all of us working professionals is that we should never de-prioritize our rest.

🏄‍♂️ Develop your recharging habits

That's why it is extremely important for us to take rest. I know it might sound obvious and at the same time confusing, but I am surprised that even though we all dream about weekends and vacations, we often deprioritize them and don't take the necessary rest.

What I find important when it comes to time off is that we need to treat it quite seriously to make it efficient and to help us recharge and boost our productivity. First of all, I believe that one long time-off during 6 or 12 months is never enough. It is equally important to have some recharging habits, rituals, or short time-offs.

🥐 My wife and I have a weekly tradition of having a Saturday breakfast out. We call it the "self-improvement" breakfast. We find a nice place, plan what we want to discuss, and decide what we want to do during this time. And this time is sacred. This weekly ritual creates a very nice feeling during the week, and we both look forward to Saturday to come and enjoy our breakfast time. You can also try thinking of some rituals like this.

⌚ Many years ago, my friend told me about his "blocked evening" tradition. He has been working in a consulting firm, and his work time has always been super intense. However, his approach to have a "blocked evening" during a week was an extremely good practice. He agreed with his manager to have one evening a week completely blocked for himself. No message, call, or meeting could appear after hours, no matter how intense the project was.

✍️ It is always helpful for recharging to plan your rest time. It is essential. When you don't have proper plans and your time-off comes, you would feel lost and disappointed at the end of this time-off. We need to plan our rest. Planning itself will create some excitement. When we plan our weekends and vacations, we make sure that we spend them efficiently and switch to other activities not related to our work. This switch is very helpful for our brain.

🔰 Guard your rest

I understand that it might be daunting when you take some time off. I used to check Slack messages or emails from time to time while being off. I had this feeling of incompleteness, losing control, and being scared of problems piling up. I realized that this empty feeling is because when something unexpected showed up during my workday, I could often solve it immediately, but when I am not there, it is hard to solve immediately. To help ourselves deal with this, we can do the following:

• Prepare a high-quality handover: Document, describe, and explain your work projects to your teammates. Make sure that they will be able to cover 80% of challenges.

• Inform your main stakeholders that you're going to be off: Be open about this, manage expectations, and you'll see that even the most urgent questions can wait until you're back.

• Set your Slack status and out-of-office message in the email: It is about managing expectations again. Inform your contacts that you're off.

• Use "Do not disturb mode": Create a habit of using this mode during your work time as well; this is very helpful. But use this especially when you're off. The most urgent challenges will find their way to reach you if it is absolutely essential, but help yourself and protect yourself from "work" noise.

I hope that most of you are very familiar with almost everything I mentioned above. However, I believe it is essential to remind ourselves of these basics from time to time.

Your time matters. Your rest matters. When you are off, you are not missing or skipping your work; you are recharging and empowering yourself to become more productive, generate new ideas, and treat and reward yourself for the work done.

More reading:

Microsoft Work Trend Index

Have a great week ahead and don’t forget to plan your rest!

Vlad from Naiman Labs