Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: “Work, it’s getting harder to stay connected to the good things. Too often you take over my life. And when this happens, my priorities, happiness and even my confidence seem to hinge on you.”
Author and workplace expert Sara Ross opens her book, Dear Work: Something Has to Change, with this honest summation of how many of us feel about our work life.
In the past four years, we’ve become consumed by work. This can be particularly true for anyone working remotely. The workday can have no clear ending or beginning, and you might have a difficult time walking away from your computer or not responding to after-work emails. “When that’s all we can think about, when our identity is our work…, the challenges we feel at work… [feel] personal, and it takes up more brain space, it takes up more heart space, and we start getting into this place where it’s hard to disconnect,” says Ross, founder of BrainAMPED, a research and strategy firm dedicated to redefining how to succeed at work.
If you’re having these feelings, you’re not alone. Many employees are facing larger workloads coupled with an inability to disconnect from work because technology allows work to reach us wherever we are. “Even if we’re in the middle of doing something with our family, we confuse the fact that somebody can reach us with the idea that we should be available for work,” Ross says. This creates what Ross calls “work-life blur,” which makes people feel like they don’t have control over their work life.
When we feel like we don’t have control over our work life, we feel anxious and stressed, says Stella Grizont, author of The Work Happiness Method: Master the 8 Skills to Career Fulfillment. Being chronically stressed can impact your well-being, your performance and how you relate to your colleagues and family members.
However, Grizont and Ross say it’s possible to change your relationship with work.
Here are five tips for gaining more control over your work life:
1. Focus on work that provides the most value
Many of us go from meeting to meeting and answering emails, creating a dizzying feeling of busyness. When 5 p.m. comes around, we realize we haven’t even started the one task we really needed to accomplish that day, so we frantically start working on it and often find ourselves working late into the evening.
When people feel pressured and stressed, their vision narrows, and they tend to only do the work that is right in front of them. So, they decide to plow through their email instead of focusing on work that matters, says Brigid Schulte, author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life. Clearing out your email might make you feel super productive, but you’ve only done low-value work, she says.
If you find yourself falling into this trap, Schulte recommends taking three intentional breaths and then asking yourself if you really need to answer every email by the end of the day. Ask yourself where you can focus your time and attention to do the most high-value work, such as writing a report or preparing a client presentation, says Schulte, a director of the Better Life Lab, the work-family justice program at nonpartisan think tank New America.
Another tactic for prioritizing work is to list every task on a piece of paper—but don’t call it a to-do list; call it a brain dump—and then pick one or two tasks that are the most important to do that day, Schulte says.
2. Make daily choices that align with your values
We tend to feel a greater sense of control over our work when it aligns with our personal values, says Grizont, an executive coach and founder of The Work Happiness Method. “The way to feel in control of your week is to actively demonstrate to yourself how every day you are actually making choices that align with your values,” she says.
Let’s say you value creativity, but you feel like you’re not getting projects that allow you to be creative. There are ways to be creative without asking for permission, changing your title or getting a raise, Grizont says. You can decide to design your PowerPoint differently to incorporate creativity, or you can find creative ways to collaborate with colleagues. At the end of each workday ask yourself, “How creative was I today?” You will start to notice that, if you make a choice to be creative, you will feel good about the work you are doing, Grizont says.
3. Audit your energy
Take stock of your daily work tasks and how they impact your energy level. List your daily tasks in a spreadsheet and determine whether each task is energizing or depleting, Grizont says. Then, ask yourself if those depleting tasks are your responsibility.
“Sometimes, the things that are draining for you aren’t even your responsibility,” she says. Consider delegating those tasks or weaning yourself off those tasks. Conversely, if you notice a task is energizing, figure out how to increase the frequency of that task.
4. Don’t get stuck in survival mode
Most of us cycle in and out of busy times at work. But, sometimes, even when work slows down, we continue to push just as hard and get stuck in survival mode, Ross says. “Survival mode can start to feel like normal mode,” she says. Our brain is designed to be very adaptable, so when we do something consistently, our brain learns to do it more efficiently, whether that is helpful for us or not.
Looking for red flags in your emotional, mental and behavioral perspective can help determine if you’re stuck in survival mode, Ross says. Pay attention to how you’re showing up to colleagues and family. Are you being abrupt? Are you feeling hurried and distracted? Those are signs you are stuck in survival mode, Ross says.
5. Develop a rest ethic
Most of us strive to have a strong work ethic but few of us think about creating a strong rest ethic. Sometimes, our fatigue is caused by underliving, rather than overworking, Ross says. “We get to the weekend, and we’ve crushed it at work all week, and then we crash all weekend to try to build the energy for the week in front of us,” she says.
We often think about meaningful work but not meaningful rest. We need to give ourselves permission to not be productive every moment of the day, Ross says. We also need to recognize that being exhausted doesn’t prove how committed we are to work. “Exhaustion and excellence are actually not mutually exclusive,” she says.
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
Photo by PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock
