Are You a Workaholic?

Is there an epidemic in nature conservation?

An epidemic where everybody works all of the time?

An epidemic where you must reply to emails at weekends, evenings, while on holidays, or while at an important conference?

An epidemic that is eating away at our personal lives, at our sense of perspective, at our core values?

How can we expect others to value nature when we can’t even value ourselves?

Cal Newport writes in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World that when we work too much we lose the ability to filter out the irrelevant. So it becomes a vicious cycle of working too hard and being caught up in the irrelevant! Not the best path to addressing one of the biggest global crises.

Instead, we need to recognise our addiction and its damaging effects on ourselves, our families, and our work. And then do something about it.

Some of our key tips to curing this epidemic include:

• Establish a work culture of only being available during working hours
• When you take annual leave set an out-of-office message to say that you are unavailable but will reply to their message as soon as you are back in the office
• Establish a daily habit of planning your day in the morning and incorporate a wind-down time of at least 30 minutes in the evening to reflect on any successes and lessons
• Say ‘no’ to any urgent, but not important, tasks. This includes prioritising when you need to check and reply to emails. Usually, if it is urgent and important, they will find another means to contact you other than email!
• Remove yourself from as many mailing lists as possible, or set up automatic forwarding from certain email addresses into a dedicated file in your inbox.
• Prioritise your time and efforts - what are the most important things that we need to do to make an impact in nature conservation? What are the bright spots that we can focus on that will result in the most impact for our efforts? And, by being ‘mean’ with your time - you will find that you are much more focused on the most important tasks.
• Find the joy in your life and enjoy your free time. Your free time is as important as your work time.

If you’re worried that you might be over-working, check out Julia Cameron’s book The Artist's Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self It includes a fantastic quiz to help you identify if you are a workaholic or not. If you find yourself in the workaholic category, try a few of the suggestions above.

Managing your work/life balance better means you are free to be the Wonder Woman you were made to be!