How to Take Care of Yourself So You Can Thrive at Work

I had a conversation a few weeks back with a close childhood friend who shares my passion for relentless optimization in a way that few others in my circle tend to do. Over the years, we’ve compared notes on life hacks ranging from home lighting to car maintenance to travel tips for the busy professional. In our most recent conversation, we delved into self-care, including the niche genre of pandemic self-care and our lessons learned on what not to do.

I recognize that there are infinity articles on the Internet about self-care, and how to prioritize self-care in a pandemic, and how to structure your self-care habits to maximize productivity. But, I also get a lot of questions about how I manage to stay so on top of things, and I figured there’s nothing wrong with contributing my little footnote to the genre.

If you are #OverIt and prefer to care for yourself rather than reading about self-care, then I invite you to skip this post. If you are like me and you cannot resist reading about the minutiae of someone else’s routine in your quest for self-improvement, then please read on.

Taking Care of Your Health

Early in my career, I routinely stayed up until 2:00 in the morning poring over spreadsheets, barely making it to the office in time for my 10am client meeting. I typically picked up takeout on the way home from work. I went to happy hour almost daily. Not a coffee drinker, I loaded up on sugary drinks and calorie-laden lunches to push myself through my morning exhaustion and my afternoon low point. What was I doing wrong? A lot of obvious and not so obvious things. After years of painful root cause analysis, I realized that the main thing I was doing wrong was not working according to my chronotype—i.e., the internal clock that dictates the time of day when you are most productive.

Even though I was truly a morning person, I stayed up so late that I didn’t know it. Since I was forcing myself to work at off times, tasks took longer to accomplish. Once I started going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, I no longer needed the calories to get through the day. I started to feel better. I had energy to exercise. The work got done more quickly. 13 years hence, and I’m 65 pounds lighter. I make it sound easy. It was a lot of hard work—both physically and mentally. But, if I had to simplify it, it was about learning when I operated at my best and adjusting accordingly.

This is a professional blog, so what does weight loss have to do with work? Everything. When I started eating right and exercising and stopped working at the wrong time, I started doing my best work. It’s been a game changer.

Fostering Creativity

Being productive in a knowledge economy requires you to use your brain to develop creative solutions to tough problems. Continued creativity requires rest. And, that doesn’t mean catching up on sleep alone. This article from the Trello blog claims that there are seven different types of rest (!) and, in my experience, that rings true.

To function at my best, it’s not enough for me to eat right, exercise regularly, and sleep at least seven hours a night (and btw, seven hours is the bare minimum for me. To feel my best, I prefer nine…but I’m also really good at sleeping.) Maximizing my personal creativity involves several important practices.

Read and Reflect

Even though I’m highly extroverted, I require substantial time alone for reflection. I allocate time each week for a weekly review, where I catalog my accomplishments from the week before and set goals for the week ahead in the context of my monthly goals and quarterly OKRs.

I also read A LOT. I subscribe to 75+ blogs on topics ranging from project management to leadership to productivity to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I also try to read several books each month—some are management focused, while some are novels.

Write

I am still horribly inconsistent in my attempts to write for at least 10 minutes per day. But, when I am writing regularly, I feel so much better. I love this Flannery O’Connor quote that sums up my writing philosophy: “I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”

Writing is my hobby outside of work. I used to scoff at the idea of having a non-work related hobby, but I’ve observed that pursuing a creative extracurricular pursuit helps you bring more focused energy to professional tasks.

Limit TV and Movies

I’m not someone who can watch one episode of a TV show at a time. Since binging Netflix on the couch is simply not rejuvenating for me, I remove the temptation by foregoing subscription services entirely. If there is something specific I want to watch, I sign up for a month and then quit. That way, if I want to watch a TV show or a movie, I’m limited to something I already own. Not that I haven’t seen my fave Nicholas Sparks movies probably hundreds of times…but it tends to reduce the amount of content I watch. I use the extra time to read and write more.

Socializing for Self-Care

As I mentioned, I’m highly extroverted and gain energy from being around people. For me, self-care requires regular social activities with friends—the right friends—who empower me to be perfectly myself, who know me well, and who can challenge me in the ways I need while also serving as a supportive sounding board. Admittedly, getting the requisite amount of social time has been difficult during the pandemic. It’s been a tough year for all of us, and my personal energy levels have been low. I’ve had to dig into reserves I didn’t know I had.

Signs You Need to Recommit to Self-Care

Ideally, your personal self-care tactics should be baked into your daily routine, but none of us is perfect. Sometimes, our good intentions lapse during a busy season at work or because of something going on in our personal lives. Conducting a weekly review helps me identify where something might be amiss and enables me to course correct more quickly.

Barring that, I look out for my personal warning signs. Am I getting annoyed with people at work for no reason? Am I multi tasking instead of paying attention during calls? That signals to me that it might be time for a break. The morning I wake up from dreaming about work, if I don’t already have a vacation scheduled, I immediately put one on the books.

I hope these self-care hacks were useful and help you to recommit to your personal self-care routine! Please let me know in the comments of any additional suggestions you might have.