The Boss of You

I hope it will come as no sur­prise when I say that we don’t always live up to the stan­dards we put forth in our book. We’re human, after all, and although we believe pas­sion­ately in cre­at­ing and cel­e­brat­ing new mod­els for suc­cess, not every day at Raised Eye­brow is a ban­ner Boss of You day. Some days get away from us; there are times when bal­ance escapes us; and of late there have been more than a few occa­sions when I’ve found myself feel­ing more than a lit­tle hyp­o­crit­i­cal that I wrote a whole chap­ter on how entre­pre­neurs need to treat them­selves like val­ued employ­ees, while I’ve been tir­ing myself out, pulling evening and week­end shifts in an attempt to keep from being swept under by my workload.

This isn’t a “poor me” post, though. Rather, it’s intended as a note to myself for future ref­er­ence, and I hope some of you may also find it useful.

Last week­end, dur­ing one of my afore­men­tioned extracur­ric­u­lar work sprints, I got a mes­sage from Emira sug­gest­ing that I take a day off this week to make up for some of the over­time I’ve put in recently. I might never have come up with that idea myself, so I’m grate­ful to her for putting it to me. My par­tic­u­lar brand of worka­holism leads me to lose all per­spec­tive about what’s really urgent and impor­tant — I find that at a cer­tain point, every­thing feels urgent and I have trou­ble see­ing an end to the to-do list.

But I knew when she called me that she could see I needed a break, and I took it. Bet­ter yet, Wednes­day was a hol­i­day, and I took today (Thurs­day) off as well, so I had two days off in a row, midweek.

It has been a revelation.

Not since my last vaca­tion have I felt so cen­tered and clear­headed. I spent most of yes­ter­day doz­ing away the sleep deficit I’ve been build­ing up (along with the nag­ging snif­fle & cough that have been lurk­ing around me), but this morn­ing I woke up with an energy and a sense of pur­pose I haven’t felt in sev­eral months.

Here’s why this is impor­tant: I know that tomor­row when I go to the office, I’ll make bet­ter deci­sions than I would have made two days ago. I’ll be more patient with clients, col­leagues and myself; I’ll have a clearer sense of pri­or­i­ties; and if all goes well, I won’t have any clients tell me I look like I just rolled out of bed. (This actu­ally hap­pened on Tues­day. Not my favourite thing to hear.)

Aside from that last, some­what face­tious com­ment, all of those things are very good things. They’re things I think every­one I work with would pre­fer to see from me on a reg­u­lar basis. So I need to remem­ber this feel­ing I have right now — and the next time I find myself drown­ing in work, I hope I can also remem­ber that tak­ing one day out of the office can have extra­or­di­nary results.

OK, future self? Hear that? When you’re work­ing too hard and you think you can’t pos­si­bly afford to take a day off: Take a day off.