Unconscious work style is major factor in overload, work guilt and a missing life. When you react to incoming demands and don’t manage them, you wind up in mechanical overperformance mode, not knowing when to say when. A study at Harvard found that the main component for successful businesspeople who have true satisfaction in their lives is the “deliberate imposition of limits.” Boundaries are what control overload and stress, and they are critical for a successful balance of work and life in a 24/7 world. The key to the process in the Harvard study is knowing when you’ve done “just enough” in a given day or on a given project.
“Even if you love your work, do too much of it, and you’ll hate it,” Stanford Medical School’s Mark Cullen told me.
Developing guidelines that tell you when you’ve done just enough will allow you to sidestep the reflex to just keep going till the paramedics arrive. Does your productivity dive after eight hours? That could be “just enough.” Is your brain spinning around in a loop getting nowhere? You’re in “just enough” territory. Knowing you don’t have to finish everything on the to-do list today is another way of getting to the “just enough” point.
Researchers say that if you work excessively one day, the fatigue comes out of your hide the next day and the next. You can’t throw your body at a 24/7 world. It’s not physiologically possible. You have structural limits, as the engineers could tell you. Find those limits before they find you.
