Working Less, but Thinking Similarly
What I saw when I went from a 60+ to 20 hour work week.
I wanted to share a story that I sometimes share with clients that are navigating working in a stressful or demanding environment. Perhaps it’s one with unpredictable schedules, long hours or tight deadlines. This is my experience going from a high pressure leadership role, to working as a part-time consultant, and the surprising thing I noticed when I started working less.
In 2020 I decided to take a step back from my career in film advertising, to take some time off and consider new paths. I had been in a leadership position with clients, internal staff and creative projects, all needing frequent attention. My work was very relational, very stimulating, and consistently busy. It was a shock to my system to suddenly have open days and a lot of time to myself. I had been so attuned to what was happening or needed outside of me, it took some practice to start to listening in the other direction - inwards.
After six months, I accepted an offer to consult for another company part time. I still didn’t know what direction I wanted my professional life to take, but as my teacher had directed me, I was following little ‘yes’s’ and ‘no’s’, without needing to know where it was headed.
As the consulting work started, I had an initial euphoria at being back at work with so much more flexibility and autonomy. It was a thrill to head home at 3pm and have dinner before 6pm.
Then, after a month or so, I started to notice an interesting shift. Something about my internal world started to feel familiarly drained and consumed. I was puzzled, ‘how is this possible? I’m working significantly less and my responsibilities aren’t as far-reaching?’
I was on a hike one evening, having some worried thoughts about a challenging issue we were navigating at the company. And then it occurred to me…. ‘Oh, I’m thinking about them all of the time.’ My official work hours had some limits, but my thinking didn’t. It could span evenings, weekends, come with me on nice walks in nature.
There was my answer, I wasn’t feeling my 20 hour work week, I was feeling my thinking. So if I was turning over issues and questions in my mind, having anxious thoughts, or insecure thoughts - that would create the same anxious or insecure feeling I felt in my previous job. The circumstances may have changed, my internal habits of thinking, were the same.
This isn’t to say the quantity of hours we work are irrelevant to our wellbeing, they are. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. What is invisible to most of us, is how much the thinking we are running, costs us energy. It can be thinking we have about ourself, analyzing our performance. It could be thinking about someone else, thinking about a client or a co-worker. Or thinking about a project or task, anticipating what will happen, will it be succesfull, will we figure it out. All of that thinking, comes with a feeling.
One of the things I noticed first, when taking a step back from work, was how busy my mind was day to day. Once I no longer had a lot of people and tasks taking up my attention - I was able to see that.
The next insight I had, was that I felt like I needed to be thinking about them, in order to figure out, some of issues we were navigating. I remember the exact moment I had this