I’m sure that if we asked this question to a group of people, a very high percentage would answer yes, that switching off from work and from our tasks helps us come back to them with more energy afterwards. This is the position Carlos Bravo defends in this article on his quite recommendable blog, where he says that he goes running and that it helps him perform better afterwards. Víctor Martín, another great blogger, also meditates and does sport every day, as you can read in this other post. Along the same lines, you can read articles by psychologists like this one, where they explain the causes of work-related stress and how to fight it. And yet I still have some doubts.
All this comes up because, while finishing off a good holiday (including an incredible trip to Paris), I went back to the gym after 5 months away. The feelings I had were mixed. On the one hand, I love doing sport and it is true that when I spend some time without doing it I miss it, but even so, I spent the entire session (barely an hour; you have to start slowly ;P ) thinking about the list of things I had written down to do and had not been able to get done during those days. The result is a positive feeling – probably caused by the endorphins released by doing sport – mixed with a bit of frustration over all the things I meant to do during that time and could not.
And this is not a one-off, because except when I play team sports such as football, if I run, swim, cycle, do pilates or go to the gym, I often end up with this same mix of feelings. The same thing happens when I am doing other activities, such as watching a film or going for a walk. On top of that, to make matters worse, these are the moments when solutions come to me for problems from office work or personal projects, and when I also take the chance to organise my tasks. It is clear that this is not switching off, but in my case it turns out to be very productive. Should I give up this habit and avoid thinking about work when I am “switching off”? In an ideal world where you can have a good, well-paid job working “only” 40 hours a week, sleep your 8 hours a day and practise all your hobbies in your free time, then probably yes. But at least in my situation this is not feasible, neither in the short nor the medium term, unless days start getting longer and reach 27 or 28 hours.
Do not think I have not tried. Last year I went on holiday abroad, to a remote village with no Internet and without taking out roaming (Jazztel’s abusive rates had a lot to do with that). Of course I warned the office, but that did not prevent the accumulated work in my absence and the decisions that had to be made in a short space of time from far outweighing the benefit of the “battery recharge” that supposedly comes from disconnecting. You could say I was a typical case of post-holiday stress, and maybe that is true, but the fact is that I have not repeated it since, because in my case, checking email once a day and deciding whether or not to answer a message during the holidays makes going back to work much, much smoother.
Obviously I do not intend to generalise my position, only to put forward the idea that sometimes this disconnection so demanded by professionals and workers may not be as productive as people try to make us believe. Besides, it is worth bearing in mind that most of these “pro-disconnection” positions assume that our work causes us stress and tension. That is true to a greater or lesser extent, but in my view there are three very relevant questions that are not always taken into account:
- Not everyone tolerates the same levels of stress in the same way
- Not all jobs generate the same amount of tension that workers then have to “discharge”
- There are people who enjoy working and miss it when they spend some time, for whatever reason, not doing it. In that case, the disconnection itself would be what generates tension and discomfort in the person. Curious, right?
With all this, what I mean is that we are all different, and just as some people perform better working in an office during the day, others work better from home at night; some need total disconnection when their shift ends to start the next day with their batteries charged, and others prefer to keep thinking about and organising their next day when they get home. Let’s not feel bad about not switching off, if it does not interfere with the rest of the facets of our lives; there is nothing wrong with it.
PS: Reading a good novel really does give me that disconnection, and it is something I appreciate, even though I often consider it a “guilty pleasure” ; )
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