I put in a fraction of my effort at work and the outcome was the same as when I was burning myself out at work
Lessons I learned in achieving more work-life balance
I wanted to reflect on what I’ve learned in the past year in terms of the time and effort I put into work and how it’s impacted my perceived performance (by others) and work-life balance. It’s performance review season at work for many people (either mid-year or annual), a time that could be filled with lots of stress and anxiety about where you stand. I thought the school days were over, but it seriously reminds me of receiving my grades after a quarter or semester of work.
Below, I share a recap and evolution of my journey with work-life balance and performance over the last year. I’ve experimented quite a bit with the process in the last year, and I’m honestly surprised to say that I was able to find a way to work and worry less, while maintaining the same decently favorable performance outcomes.
Before you continue, I want to acknowledge that people’s motivations and needs to work can be so specific to each person. In my situation, I’ve consciously decided to stop climbing the corporate ladder in favor of more work-life balance. I’ve been trying to advance in the corporate world for the past 15 years, and I’ve reached a point where I just want a job that helps me provide for my family, leverages skills that I’m decently good at (and don’t mind doing), and provides good work-life balance so that I have plenty of time to enjoy life outside of work.
A flashback to last year and my all-consuming anxiety to perform and keep up
When I was burning out last year, I remember thinking there was little to no room for error at work. Everyone around me was working late into the night, and when I wasn’t, thoughts constantly raced in my head that I was falling behind and that I wouldn’t be able to recover. That I wasn’t capable of doing the job.
I felt like I was in a lose-lose situation. When I wasn’t checking my email at night, I had never-ending limiting thoughts of not being good enough swirling in my head. It felt like anyone else that was working into the night was better than me, getting ahead of me. These thoughts would consume me and make it so hard to focus and enjoy my “free time”. When I did check my email and do work at night, I’d feel so burned out and depressed that work was disrespecting my personal boundaries. No matter if I was working or not working, everyday, I was grinding. Physically and mentally. To get to my next vacation. Or my next break (e.g. a weekend, a holiday). But when that break came and went, I went back into that spiral. Until my breaking point (February 2022) where I took mental health leave for a few months and started therapy.
When I started therapy, my therapist and I simultaneously worked on analyzing my negative behaviors/anxieties and identifying/evaluating my values and priorities in life.
From a behavioral standpoint (read more about confronting my anxiety in this post), we discovered that I constantly felt like I was behind at work. I had so many mental distortions telling me that I was on the verge of losing my job at any moment. And I believed that if I lost my job, I wouldn’t be able to support my family. These negativity biases were disguising themselves as facts in my head so that I always felt stuck, like there was no other option but to grind at work. But in reality, these things weren’t entirely true. Even if a worst case scenario happened (like losing my job), I have years of experience working at numerous places so it’s possible (though not necessarily easy) to find other jobs. And in the meantime, I have some savings to support my family, while I try to find another opportunity.
From a values-perspective (read more about values in this post ), I discovered that work was near the bottom of my list of values. But I was spending a large majority of my time and mental capacity on it. What I wanted out of work was to have a job that could comfortably provide for my family. I didn’t care to rise the corporate ladder anymore; marketing (my profession) was not my dream job/calling in life. All I wanted was to not lose my job. And ideally I’d want to do “good enough” to get a decent rating and not get flagged for poor performance, while doing a job that was helping others.
The wake-up call that changed my outlook on work
I still remember the day so vividly when my therapist and I made the realization that my main goal was essentially to not get fired. She said to me, “If your bar is to not get fired, that’s a pretty low bar, Jenn. And don’t you think you’d likely get some warning (and some time to react) if you were going to get fired or weren’t doing well?” (E.g. Like a performance check-in or getting feedback. Usually this should be the case if you have a half-decent manager.) “If your goal is really not to get fired, it sounds like you have some wiggle room to let loose and experiment a little with how much time/effort you put into work.”
I really took what she said to heart. My life was shit ever since returning to work postpartum; could there really be a better way to live?
Experimentation and the outcomes
When I went back to work after my mental health leave last May, I was motivated and ready to experiment. I was at such a low already; I figured I didn’t have much more to lose. My goal was to not get fired (ideally getting a decent rating while at it), so that meant that I still had to focus on the goals/impact I was delivering. The lever I wanted to experiment with was the amount of time I spent delivering on those goals. Also, I wanted to work on keeping my anxiety under control, minimizing the time I think about work (when I’m not working) and ideally channeling that time into more energizing activities (like spending time with my family, engaging in my hobbies, etc - see more about activities that fuel me here).
Since my lowest work point in January/February 2022, I’ve had 3 performance reviews and this is how they panned out:
March 2022: I received a performance rating last March, while I had just started my mental health leave from being so burnt out. The rating below is an indication of how I “performed” at one of the most anxiety-ridden, “hardworking” periods in my life.
Assessment period (the period for which the rating is applicable): Second half of 2021
How much I was working/thinking about work: I was probably averaging 40-50+ hours/week, but spending another 20+ hours/week agonizing and being overly anxious about work. So in total, I was spending nearly 65+ hours/week working or thinking about work; the anxiety on top of a fairly demanding job was crippling.
Rating: I got a Meets Expectations rating for that half, which is a decent, average rating that I basically wanted and was totally ok with. If you get one rating lower (Meets Most Expectations), you’d generally be ok in the short-term but you’d receive less bonus and would be expected to show improvement in the next cycle.
January 2023: My next review was in January (I skipped the July 2022 midcycle review as I had just come back from leave and didn’t have much contribution that half). Many things had changed during this period: I had 2 different managers, lots of therapy and self-reflection provided me many cognitive tools/improved perspective to help with my anxiety, and I consciously decided to experiment with putting in a fraction of the effort compared to the previous cycle.
Assessment period: January-December 2022 (I was on mental health leave from February - May, and I had a 1.5 month sabbatical October-November)
How much I was working/thinking about work: If I was working an average of 50 hours a week previously, I went down to maybe 30-35 hours/week between May - September. I went down further to 20 hours/week between November-January (this was super unique and rare; it was a weird time at my company with a lot of uncertainty due to layoffs and unclear team priorities/resources so oddly enough, there wasn’t a ton I could meaningfully do with certainty.). As a result of the work I put into therapy and learning how to reduce my anxiety / mental distortions, I reduced the time I spent thinking about work, from 15+ hours/week previously to nearly 0 (this was huge considering that old me would’ve been feeling so guilty and behind about the lack of impact I was making). So in total, the amount of time I spent working / worrying about work reduced by practically 50%.
Rating: Meets Expectations [As part of the experimentation process, I was expecting and prepared to receive a “Meets Most Expectations” rating. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I would’ve been ok with it considering that I achieved way more balance than I had before, I wouldn’t be immediately fired (though I still might’ve been eventually laid off, but I knew that came with a severance to give me time to figure things out), and the experiment would’ve taught me that I need to work harder the next cycle.]
August 2023: This week, I just received my mid-cycle rating for my work in 2023 thus far. I started a new job (pivoted to a different role/team, doing something that was a bit more fulfilling because it leveraged skills that I’m decently good at and don’t mind doing) within the same company in mid-March, so the performance rating was mostly capturing my work from mid-March through June.
Assessment period: January - June 2023
How much I was working/thinking about work: Most of my focus was on onboarding, getting up to speed with different work/a different team (I struggled throughout this process to find my routine again, more in this post, but overall the job itself has been much more satisfying). Currently, I probably average like 30 hours/week (Some weeks are more, some less. When I was ramping up, it was definitely closer to the 40 mark.). Despite learning a completely different job/role, I’m proud of myself for continuing to carve out time to do important-to-me things like spend time with Mara in the morning, having lunch with my parents, logging off early to make dinner for my family, and getting my hair done during some work days. I also have kept my anxiety about work generally at bay and rarely think about work after hours.
Rating: Meets Expectations (Once again, had I gotten a “Meets Most Expectations” Rating, I would’ve been a bit disappointed but taken it as a sign to work a bit harder/smarter for the rest of the year. Instead, I was overjoyed to learn that it was possible to maintain boundaries and good work-life balance to achieve this decent rating in a new job. My manager and I talked about a few things I need to work on for the remainder of the year, but it still seems feasible for me to achieve them and still have decent balance at this point.)
In summary, over the last year, I’ve reduced the amount of time I’ve spent working and nearly eliminated the amount of time I spent worrying about work, and my perceived performance has not changed.
My lessons learned in achieving more work-life balance
There are three main takeaways from the above section (and no, the main points are not to dwell on the exact numbers of how much or little I’m working)
By far, my biggest lesson is that there are many ways to achieve your work goals; I used to think that obtaining a decent rating required a certain level of intensity, but the bar for what’s an acceptable, desirable outcome can actually be very wide. Exploring alternative approaches just involves identifying what your goal is and doing some experimentation on what’s effective to attain your goal. Only you know what flexibility you have to test out in your situation. My goal was to not get fired, and ideally get a rating that would be decent enough for me to not get flagged. I experimented with reducing the time I spent working/worrying about work and the performance outcomes have validated that I have room to play with. I know for a fact that managers/work culture have a lot to do with it too. But in any situation, there are always levers in your control that you can experiment with.
It is very possible to work smarter, not harder. Less can be so much more. I likely can go into another full post about this, but it’s so important to focus your effort on the things that matter and reduce the amount of time on things that don’t. I’m clearly working less hours and drawing very clear boundaries. While I’m working, I try to be extremely effective and focus my time on the highest impact things that will help me achieve my decent rating at mid-cycle/year-end.
Lastly, my investment in therapy (specifically for me, cognitive behavioral therapy) equipped me with critical mental tools to keep my anxiety in check, thereby reducing the time I spend agonizing about work. I recap a lot of the fundamentals of cognitive behavioral therapy in this post. Even when I work 40 hours a week now, the fact that I’m not constantly thinking about work (due to the self-awareness and increased rational thinking I now have) has been a game changer in terms of my work-life balance and mental boundaries.
With all that said, if you’re experiencing burnout, try taking a step back. Think about what goal you are optimizing for, and ask yourself if everything you’re doing is needed to achieve that outcome. Question your assumptions, and start experimenting to gather data points on what’s effective. You might discover that you need the same level of work you’re putting in or more (at which point, you still have options… is the job worth the effort you’re putting in? Are there alternatives you can explore?). Or best-case scenario, you might find that there are easier, alternative ways to achieve your outcomes (just like I did) if you just continue experimenting.