Last weekend I took my 10-year-old daughter to ‘Deep Dive Dubai’, the world’s deepest pool. It was her first experience of scuba diving and an opportunity for me to reconnect with the passion I miss so much. I started diving in 1995 and qualified as a PADI Instructor in 2000, diving regularly until I left Investment Banking in 2004.
As an entrepreneur it has been difficult to go on scuba vacations. The good diving locations are remote requiring that you disconnect for long periods of time which is not conducive with downloading large attachments, joining conference calls and running webinars.
However, unplugging from the connectivity grid is more important now than it’s ever been. One of the wonderful things about scuba diving is once you’re below the water, whatever is going on above it is the last thing on your mind. You are transported into a wonderful world of dazzling colours and sea life, or as is the case in Deep Dive Dubai, chess boards, pool tables and motor bikes!
Since the Covid pandemic, the topics of workplace wellness, resilience and stress management have become mainstream concerns. How a company manages these considerations has a direct impact on absenteeism, staff retention and team productivity. These are therefore core considerations for any operator, large or small.
Most large companies now have well established procedures for their employees to disconnect from the office and enjoy “me time”. Resilience trainings and mandatory two-week vacations during which their email addresses are forwarded to a cover are examples of such practise. At the SME level such initiatives are usually not as well-resourced and often left to the individual without ever giving the employee any guidance on (i) the importance of such practise, or (ii) how to do it. These two points are what I will focus on in the remainder of today’s blog.
Let’s first deal with the importance of disconnecting from work. The developers of productivity apps for smartphones laud the time savings their apps offer however, what they are missing is that people my age remember a world in which there were no mobile phones, we all completed our work on time, and enjoyed a much better work life balance. Smartphones and increased bandwidth have created the problem because we are now expected to be 24/7. However, there is no going back so we need to learn to deal with it.
Here’s a shock observation: If you take some time out to recharge your batteries, you are more productive when you return to the office and you do more, higher quality work. Research by Sonja Lyubormirsky, A Russian-American professor at the University of California, shows that we are 31% more productive when we are happy compared to when our brain is negative, neutral or stressed. This is just one citation, there are mountains of data that support the fact that disconnecting, destressing and recharging our batteries are hugely beneficial both in terms of improved performance and reducing the risk of burnout.
So how do we achieve this? I believe the key is to do something that truly takes us to a place where our mind is fully occupied – where there is no space for work/problem related thoughts to enter our conscious. This is not easy to do. The human brain has 60,000 thoughts per day and while the vast majority of these are unconscious and never presented to our conscious mind, we have no control over which thoughts are presented. There will inevitably be thoughts around current (work-related) tasks, problems and stressors sent to our conscious awareness which, if we focus on them, takes us back to square one.
It is incumbent on us individually to identify activities which fully occupy our minds so we can truly disconnect and hit the reset button. While scuba diving ticks this box it’s not very practical; I can’t do it every week and there is a need to reset, if only for a few hours, every week. More accessible options include a gym class where an instructor is pushing you so there is no time to think about anything else (very different to a personal session where I find I am still checking my phone), yoga, meditation, cooking, watching a movie, reading a good novel etc.
Whatever it is, find your disconnect and diarize it with equal priority given to any work meeting. You will find that a little less work often results in more quality output.
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