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Work-Life Separation · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: All right, are you ready, Paul?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh welcome back.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: You might have seen the show Severance on Apple TV.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: And if you haven't, you probably should.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's pretty great.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry, we won't have any spoilers beyond the main construct, but uh it got us thinking about work-life separation and why it's difficult and what to do about that.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: So are you ready to handle that today, Paul?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the show itself is uh the concept, it's an unusual construct.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, there's a group of people that want so desperately to separate their work life from their non-work life, uh, really strike the work life balance, that they literally have a procedure done to their brain and they agree that they won't remember anything that happens at work and they won't remember anything about what happens outside of work uh when they when they go between the two.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: So uh they don't remember friends, they don't remember family.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it's a whole separate uh being outside of outside of work.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's weird, it's a crazy concept, but the show clearly is is resonating with people uh that that watch it.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: So why do you think that is, Paul?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I think generally it speaks to a larger level of anxiety about work and specifically how work is taking over our lives, and also kind of the sheer difficulty of keeping work and non-work separate in this new world of work.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so uh what do you think's changed in the last 20 years to maybe cause that problem?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, Matt, so much has changed about work.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it's amazing when you talk to most people about this, we've done a lot of research uh into this.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: And you ask, even for people that have been in the workplace, let's say, since the 1980s or or 90s, um they kind of acknowledge that work has changed, but they don't they haven't really taken the time to think about how.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: And in reality, every aspect of work has changed.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: The what, the when, the where, the why, even of work, all of that stuff has changed.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, when when we present to organizations, we often we show them a table and we show them, we show them all of those different things, we show them how those things have changed, and and they're kind of shocked when they when they really start to think about it.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: But with regard to this specifically, in regard to to work-life separation, work-life balance and so on, I think about 20 years ago, um, as you said, uh when you walked out of the door physically from work, in the vast majority of jobs, even you know, yes, factory jobs, but office jobs as well and so on, when you were walking out physically, you're closing the door physically on work, you were closing the door mentally on work at the same time.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, your boss probably didn't didn't even have a means of contacting you, or if they did, it was your home phone.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: If you were at the home, you might get it.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: If you weren't, you weren't gonna get it.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so with no means of contacting you and no means of you being able to do work when you're outside of work because your computer was at the office and so on, that meant you got 16 hours of break a day, pretty much every day.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: You got 60 hours, 64 hours or so of break every weekend.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: You got like a like a mini holiday every uh every day, every uh every weekend.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: That has totally gone.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: And the fact that that has totally gone appears to be having a major effect on our mental health.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: What can people do about that at this point?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, um I thought I love the way you express that.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: What can people do about that?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: Because that that is the point, right?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: You have to, it's something you have to do, you have to own, right?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: You've got to impose your own structure.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: You've got to find ways to disconnect, you've got to have the discipline to disconnect.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the only way in which you can truly disconnect is by disconnecting the vehicle of connection.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so think about the point I meant about made about the boss, you know, your boss might have had your home phone number, but that was it.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: You've got to disconnect the channel between you and uh and where your work is.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that typically is your phone.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: So let's get some more practical tips then.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: So what we've what we've experimented with and what we've seen work really well is really, I would say, almost like a set of routines.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: So the routines that um we build are very important because the routines drive the majority of our behavior when we're not thinking.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's what we do when if if a if a routine is embedded, it's what we do when we're not thinking about it.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Most of us brush our teeth in the morning, and we brush our teeth in the evening, and we know that that's what we do, and so we just do it, we're not thinking about it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: We're not thinking, should I brush my teeth today?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so you need to embed um a set of routines that are gonna guide the behavior that you uh that you do every day.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: So what I'm gonna describe here are best practices.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have to do them exactly, but the closer you get to them, the better off you're likely to be.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I mentioned that that tether between work and non-work for most people is their phones.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a critical part of this.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: So I would suggest that um during the day, you need to have some regular periods.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Five minutes is uh is all it all it needs to be, but some regular periods where your phone is physically not with you.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're if you've been working for an hour, get up, take a break, walk outside, five minutes outside, phone not with you.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: So leave your phone at your desk, go outside, unplug, etc.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um your friends and your family.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: If you've got friends and family, try to spend at least half an hour with them without your phones, right?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: Putting your phone in the other room, maybe that's talking about dinner, something where the phone is physically not in the room.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that physically not being in the room is really important because if it's not there, you can't go grab it.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that applies at night as well, right?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: So at night, get your phone out of the bedroom.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: The worst invention on the on our cell phones is the is the alarm clock on it, right?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Get that out of there, use an old school alarm clock if you're using an alarm clock.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we'll talk about in another episode why you shouldn't be using an alarm clock, but that's another matter.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but say goodnight to your phone, leave it in the other room, check in on it.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then weekly, if possible, try to do a day without any electronics.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be hard.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's gonna require some planning, but the book 24-6 has some really, really good advice on that.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: All right, how much time we got?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: We got uh nearly three minutes, actually.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, that's a good one.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, a couple of things struck me while you were talking.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: One about the office, which I think is is an interesting thing that I hadn't thought about until you said it, but uh almost like things that have gone away that we just didn't notice went away and aren't really missing.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm sure it's still around in some institutions, uh, but like the inner office mail envelope.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh completely upended, uh typewriters, non-existent.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you were if you were in an office, and and this is interesting intergenerationally, right?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: So uh we, you and I, are of a certain age that essentially we've seen the office before computers maybe early in our career, yep.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh saw the computer rise to being ubiquitous, uh to now being something that we have to figure out how to get away from.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's it's pretty crazy how it's like uh, you know, it reminds me of uh what's that that Marvel, the like Venom, right?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like it just it's around us now.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's fascinating.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And all of those things just evaporated.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: There were whole departments in charge of walking around with all of the inner office memos, yeah, right.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the concepts we use turned into those concepts.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the blind carbon copy came from literally carbon copies.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's fascinating, and and it just happened.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody planned it, nobody decided that's what it was gonna be.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: It just is that way.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's very interesting from a world of work to have seen it all.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: People coming into the workplace now uh just take it for granted that this is how things work.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's it's very interesting.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think about a bunch of that recently, like the icons on your phone for a phone.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Phones don't look like that phone anymore.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yeah, very true.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's very strange.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I think the point that I would make on it in the last couple of seconds we got here is just that if it's omni if it's invisible, which in many cases it is, right?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: So our computers are getting smaller and they're getting more portable, and sometimes we might leave work and they might even might not even be there, right?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: If it's invisible, that often means it's omnipresent and insidious.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, it's all around us.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so that takes extra work to disconnect ourselves from.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's the that's the point here, right?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: It is so embedded in our lives that it takes work to to extract ourselves from.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the work that people put it in.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's really gonna happen.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Crazy.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: All right, we did it.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Paul.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: See you next time.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: See ya.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us reach more people.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.