2020 brought a lot of lessons, with one being the importance of maintaining a proper work-life balance. Those of us who were fortunate enough to keep our jobs during the pandemic also found that a merging of our work & personal lives started to occur, whether we liked it or not. As my living room also became my office, and my cat as my assistant (he’s pretty bad at it to be honest), there was now a computer screen that sat and called to me to do work all day, every day. This was a problem.

Those of you that know me on a personal basis know that I take my career very seriously, and I could argue that it’s been my #1 priority since entering adulthood. Combine this kind of mentality with a full-time work from home setup, and that led to a steady decline in my mental health that I didn’t even realize was occurring because I was too busy working all the time. Even scarier in looking back, is that the stress and anxiety I was dealing with definitely affected my interactions with others, yet I didn’t know why or recognized that this was happening. Basically… I found myself being very short with others. If someone didn’t do a task right, I would just do it myself because I felt like I didn’t have time to walk them through it or help them understand the root of the problem. We had a ton of projects to complete at Five Four Group last year, and given the uncertainty of how the pandemic would affect the fashion industry, everything was basically high priority and due ASAP. This created a lot of stress on top of a constant feeling of ‘get as much done as you can’. Looking back, here’s a few things that I’ve come to realize:

Recognize Your Limits

To give you some context, I project managed the launch of 2 brands and migrated an entire subscription business over to a new e-commerce platform within 5 months. These types of projects usually take 5 months EACH with a full team dedicated solely to the project. I ended up juggling these on top of managing my marketing team, executing multiple ad campaigns for 3 brands, and other misc. tasks/projects from departments that needed help. While I am proud of what I was able to accomplish as well as the experience that I gained from such endeavours, it was taking a huge toll on my mental health from the constant feeling of being overworked. I should have realized my limits and either pushed back and politely declined some of the tasks, or found other resources to help get the job done rather than take on the amount of work that I did. By the end of the year, I felt extremely burnt out and worse: had a fairly negative outlook on how I thought 2021 would go because of a daunting workload that never seemed to go away. Going into 2021, I’ve started to recognize the limits I have in both my time and output and plan to communicate these better.

It’s important to say no (politely) if you can’t take on anymore. It may seem like a good thing to always accept new work and be seen as the ‘overachiever’ in hopes of a raise or a promotion, but I can guarantee your output will not be 100% on any of the tasks you work on and this will not be viewed positively. A huge problem that occurs when taking on too much is a lack of focus, and that by nature means that you can’t give something your all because you will be too busy switching from one task to another in an effort to just get things done. If you have experienced anything similar in your own role, I encourage you to take a step back and breathe for a second. Think about your personal bandwidth, and what you can or want to take on. Also think about tasks that you may not like, but need to do them due to your job requirements. Anything that doesn’t fit into these two categories, you should start declining or at least asking for help so that the burden isn’t solely on you. You roughly know what you can accomplish between 9 and 6, so anything else will either have to wait or be handled by somebody else. Don’t get me wrong… you can and probably will have some late nights or weekends, but my point is that you should not be doing that consistently as you’ll never have the chance to actually recharge your batteries since you’re always on.

Breaking The “Hustler” Mentality

Something I’ve seen become popular in the last 5+ years is this “hustler” mentality that society has seemed to accept as the norm nowadays. What is a hustler mentality? Well thanks to people like Gary Vee, it’s this notion that young people need to work their asses off in their 20s and 30s to make something of themselves if they have any hopes of becoming successful or rich. Are you someone who spends hours a day gaming? You’re a bum. Do you like to go hit a few golf balls every Saturday morning but have no hopes of playing in the Masters anytime soon? You’re wasting your time. Do you spend your free time doing things that aren’t work-related? Good luck ever making over 6 figures. Basically, you need to always be working. Even when you finish your job for the day, you should be working on a side hustle until you go to sleep, and then rinse and repeat.

This attitude is a serious problem, and I’ve seen it lead to a ton of mental health issues with friends and even myself. It creates unrealistic expectations that to be successful, you have to sacrifice personal experiences to constantly spend your time working. It also creates a form of “punishment” in your head that if you do decide to go get drunk at a bar on Friday night, or spend the weekend binge watching Netflix, that you are in the wrong and even farther away from success because you chose those activities over work. This “punishment” leads to guilt about slacking off, which leads to anxiety about what you may not be accomplishing, which demotivates you from wanting to work, and repeat. Guess what – this is the furthest thing from the truth. Yes, if you spend EVERY single weekend on the couch or at the bar, you are probably a lot less likely to make a million dollars per year and become a CEO. What they don’t tell you though? This won’t necessarily make you happy… and it may not even be what you want for your life. Unfortunately, you bought into the dream that someone else sold you. What’s important is that you take note of what matters to you, especially things that make you happy, and start spending your time on those things. If those things don’t happen to lead to making money or founding a company, than so be it. You don’t need to define success by what someone like Gary Vee is saying or what you see on social media… I’d argue that the most successful people on this planet are probably those that love what they spend their time on which leads to their happiness. You’re probably going to get maximum 100 years on this planet, do you really want to spend the majority of it working and stressing yourself out on something you don’t love?

I also want to make it clear that I’m not trying to to tell you to not work either… if you are passionate about what you do and truly enjoy it, then by all means put the extra hours into it when needed as it should become one of your sources of happiness. Also, you probably have bills to pay and need to be able to afford next week’s meal, so some type of work is probably unavoidable.

I’m Busy Working… What Are You Trying To Tell Me?

Basically the TL;DR of this is simple: evaluate how much work you are capable of outputting, and either decline or re-prioritize anything else that you can’t manage. That way, you can put your best efforts into what you are able to handle (while looking good doing so), and reduce any potential anxiety or stress you would experience in the future from being overwhelmed with work and/or sub-par performance. Also, make sure you love what you do for work, and if you don’t, then make sure that you love what you do outside of work and don’t sacrifice that personal time for anything.

All of that to say this: Go binge that netflix show. Rack up those W’s on COD. Finish the latest 50 shades of grey book. Unless you’re a doctor saving lives, the work can be done tomorrow.