Future Work/Life is a weekly newsletter that casts a positive eye to the future. I bring you interesting stories and articles, analyse industry trends and offer tips on designing a better work/life. If you enjoy reading it, please share it and subscribe!
I’m looking forward to a full week off work next week, the first in what seems like a very long time. Since I’m attempting to clear my desk of all pressing tasks, I’m only sharing a light version of the newsletter with you this week, highlighting some of the more interesting stories and most insightful analysis I’ve read and listened to recently, as well as links to some highlights from Take My Advice (I’m Not Using It) from the past 9 months. I hope you enjoy!
We’re all aware the world of work is changing fast, but what skills will serve us best in the future? Here’s McKinsey’s view:
How has the pandemic changed workforce trends? In another article by McKinsey (which is, in fact, a transcript of a podcast discussion between three of their partners), Sean Brown, Susan Lund, and Sven Smit cover why the more advanced an economy, the greater its’ potential for remote work.
If you haven’t noticed yet, my work motto is: Work Less, Achieve More. If you’d like to understand the logic behind this and how to make it work for you and your team, then do get in touch, but for now, have a read of this HBR article by Sarah Green Carmichael. In short, she explains that based on extensive research, long hours backfire not just for the individuals involved but for their companies too. She quotes a study by Boston University’s Questrom School of Business in which:
”Managers could not tell the difference between employees who actually worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to. While managers did penalize employees who were transparent about working less, Reid was not able to find any evidence that those employees actually accomplished less or any sign that the overworking employees accomplished more.”
When doing more from less, one necessity is reducing the time you spend doing things you don’t like and that don’t create value. That’s not to say you should constantly be switched on without any downtime - quite the opposite, as I wrote last week. However, as many of the productivity books that I also referenced in FWL46 will tell you, it’s easy for hours to slip away with very little achieved, not even feeling more relaxed. To that end, I enjoyed this article by Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic.
It’s inevitable, though, that there are those times in which you just have to get your head down and hit deadlines or knock out that client pitch. So, what can you do to get through it without collapsing in a broken heap? Here’s some useful advice from Amy Jen Su in another useful HBR article. In case you’ve used up your free allocation of articles, here’s a summary:
Accept the situation, acknowledging the reality of the situation with awareness to take clear action.
Observe and label your underlying emotions - this reduces the arousal of the limbic brain’s fight-or-flight system and activates the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for our executive functioning skills.
Preserve your sense of choice and agency to help assess your priorities, making tough trade-offs, and incorporating self-care where you can.
Communicate with your colleagues and loved ones to renegotiate deadlines, set tighter boundaries, or ask for more support.
Practice self-compassion. After all, during a work crunch or setback, it is easy to beat yourself up, especially when you aren’t hitting your high standards for work or time at home.
Once you’ve got that deadline out of the way, though, it wouldn’t do any harm to get a little more sleep. I’d already planned to do a lot more of that next week, and this article on ‘The new science of sleep: Everything we know about how it affects your health and brain’ from Science Focus, has focused my mind even more.
And finally, I’ve talked about all these issues and more with some fantastic guests since I launched my podcast in October 2020. If you’ve only started listening recently, please check out some of the previous three series, and if you’re feeling particularly generous, rate the podcast on your player of choice. Here are some highlights that you might enjoy. See you in a couple of weeks…
Cath Bishop - The Long Win with 3x Olympian, Diplomat & Author
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: 4-Day Week & Doing More In Less Time
Shaun Tomson: Purpose and Flow in Surfing, Work and Life
Allison Baum Gates: Venture Capital & The Future of Work
Alex Hutchinson - Human Performance: The Role of Mind and Body