Opinion: How spending less time on the job can make you a better worker

In our book, Learned Excellence, we divide life into six different pillars.  Besides work and relationships (which includes family and friends), we count health (exercise, nutrition), spirituality (purpose, religion), hobbies (the things we do for fun and community), and legacy (how this all adds up).  When everything is going well in these pillars, life is good.  The house is stable, able to withstand numerous crashing waves.  But when we allow the pillars to rot, life becomes more precarious.  One big wave — a bad review at work, a romantic break-up — can mean trouble.  

Many people invest all their time and energy into just one or two pillars of life, usually work and relationships. They are inherently out of balance, so failure has greater consequences and stress increases. If all you have is your job or career, you better knock it out of the park because you have nothing else going on.  When you are balanced, however, when adversity happens you have other things to fall back on.   

Learning excellence, learning balance

In our profession, we get to work with many of the world’s best performers from the realms of military, sports, first responders and business. We have discovered that across all these disciplines, there are a few things these stars have in common. What differentiates them from everyone else isn’t their physical or intellectual characteristics, it is their mental approach. These mental disciplines are entirely learned. In other words, everyone can learn excellence, just as the world’s best performers have.  

That includes learning how to stay balanced. The best, healthiest performers feed and water their six pillars constantly. This serves them well when adversity hits or transformation is at hand (marriage, retirement).  It also helps them perform better. 

This may seem counterintuitive — how can taking energy and time away from my job help me perform better?  But it is empirically true. Balance helps relieve a bit of that performance pressure, and gives the body and soul a means to recovery and replenishment. It’s just a fact: the best performers maintain balance across all their pillars.  

There is no optimal, one-size-fits-all formula for this, it will differ for each person. The focus should be more on the process of balance (periodically considering how you are tending to each pillar) than the outcome (X hours on this pillar, Y hours on that one). 

Here are a few practices the best performers follow:

Set goals and make the time

You are probably familiar with the power of goal setting.  In fact, you probably employ goal setting as a standard practice at work.  How about your other pillars?  One way to ensure you invest some time and energy in each of them is to set goals, so that you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish across all of your pillars.

Make sure that your goals are SMART: specific, measurable (you will know when you have achieved it), achievable (it’s feasible for you to get there), relevant (it matters), and timebound.  To improve accountability, write them down and share them with someone.   

Next, have a process to manage your time so you invest at least some of it across all your pillars.  Once a week, review your calendar for the upcoming 10 days.  Ensure you are using your time well by eliminating white spaces; an empty calendar slot means you are letting events control you. Color code your time slots according to pillar. Maybe red is work time, blue is relationship, green is health, purple is spirituality and so on.  Some events can be win-win: going for a hike with your family counts as both health and relationship time.  Now, you can look at your calendar and quickly take stock. Nothing purple is coming up for the next month?  Do something about that.

Let the balls drop (but make sure to pick them up)

You can do all these things with the best of intentions, but then life happens — an important project or deadline, a new baby — and before you know it you are investing all of your time working and on your family, with hardly any time for relationships, much less any other pillar. This is fine; it has to be. Sometimes balls have to drop.  

Just don’t let yourself off the hook too easily.  When balls drop and life gets out of balance due to short-term circumstances, be aware of it.  Then formulate a plan to address it.  Work may be overwhelming right now and the kids can’t get to practices and games by themselves. But there’s likely an open day or two on the calendar sometime in the next month where you can invest in your other pillars. Block it off, color it for that pillar, and make it happen. Too often, people may be aware of the imbalance but maintain a helpless mindset: there’s nothing I can do about it.  The best performers have a plan.  

The good news is that once you set up these practices and achieve greater balance, it starts to take care of itself.  Balance becomes a habit.  The busiest, most successful people we know invest time and energy in all their pillars. We regularly hear stories about how much joy and relief they find in things where they aren’t the best and don’t have to be: new hobbies; new friends, new purpose.  Then they tell us how much better they perform as a result.  Balance pays off. 

Eric Potterat  is a clinical and performance psychologist. Alan Eagle is an executive communications consultant. They are the authors of Learned Excellence: Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World’s Top Performers  (Harper Business, 2024).

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