Disengagement Stress

One of the subjects of today’s daily rundown on LinkedIn was #DisengagementStress.

Not a bad idea to disengage, but life goes on 24/7. Which means work, play and sleep goes on 24/7. The idea those items should be scheduled in blocks of 8 hrs each were once true. Nowadays, mainly due to technology and different kind of labour, they are all mixed up. Which is not bad at all, although I like my sleep to consist of one continuous block of at least 6 hours :-).

What’s important to avoid stress is Balance and Expectations.

Work-Life balance. Working and living should be in balance. Which means you should not be working all the time and on the other hand you should not be slacking all the time. I think one of the common mistakes and cause for stress is to continuously have your mind at work. Bring loads of work home, because that’s the place where you can get a lot done and the office is more for socializing. If this is the case you should work from home a couple of days instead of always go to the office.

The second one concerns expectations. Expectations on the homefront for instance. The family should understand answering an e-mail or making a phone call during your ‘free time’ is sometimes very effective when done right away. It may set your mind at ease and improve your sleep.

Anther one is expectations of your employer. Those expectations should be reasonable. ‘Reasonable’ is of course a grey area, but it should be clear an employer can never demand you should be available 24/7. It should be ok to not pick up the phone, but instead listen to the voicemail and then to decide if the occasion is urgent enough for immediate action (or is so much fun to do you cannot let it wait until tomorrow). An employer should also expect you to make private calls during office hours or bring the kids to school and arrive a bit later at work.

My experience with expectations were phenomenal during my last job. My mind is busy with IT all the time. Some of it is work related like working on proposals, preparing for a meeting or finishing up some task, but it also includes a lot of self-education, reading articles, developing an app just for the fun of it, etc. My employer has never made any remarks when I arrive at the office later than normal or when I leave early because of a meeting at my kids’ school. And they also never demand extra hours. After office hours contact is always initiated by mail or text and exchanges could go on all night, but they understand perfectly well when the scale is pointing toward Life instead of Work and no reaction is given.

We have a mutual understanding of what performance is expected. During which hours of the day or week the results are accomplished don’t really matter as long as deadlines are met. I like it a lot to manage my own schedule. Therefore I have a perfect Work-Life balance and #DisengagementStress is no issue for me.

Let me know what you think and how you deal with #DisengagementStress.