Work Life Balance Sacred Hours

Hey, it’s Jackson back with more practical tools to help you be at your best in work and life. The topic of this video is work-life balance. I think this is particularly difficult because, knowing you as part of the audience, you probably feel like at times you have 10 pounds of, uh, excrement, we’ll say, in a 5B bag. It’s just like, how can I get all of it done? And when you layer in things, whether it’s family commitments, social things, you know, extracurricular stuff, trying to get enough sleep, and maybe get a little exercise, right? It’s like maybe it’s 20 lbs of stuff in that 5B bag. Now, I am not, um, foolish enough to think that I can just simply say, “Hey, if you do these two or three little things, you’ll have perfect work-life balance.” But I do want to share with you a single principle that you can begin to operationalize immediately that I think can have a fairly profound impact on your sense of work-life balance. I sometimes say it’s really about work-life happiness because, generally, I don’t think it’s always about the exact amount of hours you’re working as much as it is feeling like you’re not overwhelmed, feeling like you have some sense of control, and that even if you’re working hard and maybe working a little more than you want to, you’re still prioritizing the things that are most important to you in your life. And that’s what this principle helps with. So, this principle is called sacred hours, and the fundamental idea here is that not all hours are created equal.

Let’s talk in terms of two buckets for this: work and life. So, sort of productivity first and then recovery or rest on the other hand. When we think about work and productivity, and I say not all hours are created equal, what that means is that there are probably times of day where you’re at your best, and there’s also probably certain types of work that are much more of what we in psychology—Cal Newport has termed this Deep Work. Right? So, think about work that’s maybe like a bigger, complex project or planning something out, excuse me, or getting your head around a strategy or writing a big report. You really need like 2 to 3 hours of intense, maybe even only an hour and a half, right? You need a block of intense, focused work. You’re kind of being a thinker. On the other hand, what we call shallow work is not that it’s not hard work, but it’s like, “Oh, I’ve got to check my email inbox,” or “I’ve got to do a 30-minute check-in meeting.” Right? It’s sort of less of that structured need to get into the zone. So, when you’re talking about applying sacred hours to your productivity, it’s thinking about what are the one to two, maybe three if you’re lucky, but probably just one to two hours of your day where you are at your best and can be least responsive. There was one physician who wrote a series of books, right, very busy running a medical practice, and he said, “1 hour before 9 is worth 2 after 5.” So, he’d get up really early to write. For some people, it’s that first hour, hour and a half of the day. Get your morning coffee, and just block this off. This is my time. For other people, it’s the last hour of the day where they really get in their zone, catch up on a few big things, and plan their day for the next day. Whatever it is, right, I want you to try to carve out 90 minutes. That’s actually the optimal cycle for focus because our brains have these things called ultradian rhythms, which regulate wakefulness and focus that go in about 90-minute cycles. So, typically during a 90-minute bout of intense focus, performance kind of rises, peaks, and then comes down over the course of 90 minutes. So, think about that time. It could be a little less, could be a little more. Ideally, when you’re at your best and you can kind of block out the world for a little bit and really focus on your deep, highest-priority work. Okay, so maybe it’s an hour before work, you get up a little early. Maybe it’s when you first get to the office. And maybe you’re saying, “Jackson, that’s impossible. I can’t do it.” My challenge to you is that as a leader, particularly as you lead at higher levels, you will face a lot of these buckets that you can think about as urgent and unimportant, urgent and important, and then not urgent and important. What you’re going to find yourself falling into is a lot of the urgent side. Some of that’s important, right? Urgent and important. Some of it’s urgent and not actually that important. But often, what gets left behind are the most important things that aren’t really urgent—crafting the strategy of the organization, you know, thinking about how can I really develop the people that I’m responsible for leading, right? How can I create the ideal cultural climate for my team or my unit, right? So, that is your challenge for the professional or productivity side.

Now, let’s talk about the rest and recovery, life side. Again, same idea here that not all hours are created equal. You might think about it this way: if you could have four hours off, a half day off, I’m just going to give it to you as PTO, right? Would you rather take it on Tuesday from 8:00 in the morning to lunch and then come into work in the afternoon, or would you rather take it Friday afternoon into Friday evening? Right? The marginal value of the hours on Friday are way better. So, it’s saying that some hours are much more precious than others, right? If I had to say, “Well, hey, I’ve got this meeting Sunday afternoon. I need to log on for a couple hours,” not a big deal, right? Whereas maybe, “Hey, every night at 6 my family comes home, and we have a chance to eat dinner together for an hour,” right? Those one-hour slots Monday through Friday are so much more valuable than, “Oh, I have to get up and do an hour of work on the weekend.” Whatever, hypothetical example, but you get the idea here. So, I want you to think about in your personal life, right, with recovery, what are a few of those key hours that really kind of restore you and bring a lot of joy to you—kind of a disproportionate amount? So, it might be, like I said, holding a one-hour block for dinner with the family each night. It might be, “Hey, once a week I need to just really go on a nice long run or a nice hike in nature, and that sets me up for the next six days. I’m just good to go.” Whatever it is, right? Same idea. You’re taking a kind of a time block, and you’re holding it as sacred, shutting out everything else, prioritizing you and what’s most important to you.

So, you now understand this. Here’s your exercise to do in groups. I want you to get together in small groups or in pairs. First, I want you to pick out what would your kind of sacred hours be for work? What’s the type of work you’d want to do then, and when would this be? I want you to talk about your plan to set up those sacred hours and how you’ll do that. For the life side, recovery side, same thing. You know, what would those sacred hours be? What’s significant about them? And then I want you to schedule them out, set them up, and talk about how you’re going to hold yourself to those.

So, there you have it—sacred hours. And again, the idea here is that you can’t totally transform, go from working whatever, 55 hours a week to 30, just magically. But it’s helping you to prioritize what is most important to you, and by doing that, you’re going to have a bit more balance. So, thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time.