A detour, this time, to share six books that you may not know about and that could make a big difference to your tough working life. Some just published, some older. No sponsorship/affiliate links here.

Simone Stolzoff, How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers

This one’s published this week! But I got a review copy and read it for you. If you sometimes struggle with uncertainty or indecision, I’d really recommend it.

Work-related indecision is so familiar. What kind of work do I want to do? Is this job right for me? Do I want to make this career move? Should I retrain? Why do I have these doubts about my work? What actually makes me happy, and makes life meaningful? (And that’s not to mention the bigger dilemmas: do I want to have children? Is my partner the right person for me? Where should we live?)

tackles uncertainty through stories about grappling with doubts like these. His subjects aren’t celebrities, thank goodness: they’re real people with all the peculiarity of real people, whose stories he’s woven into a thoughtful, wise book. And then at the end he draws out several lessons. I won’t steal his thunder except to quote a sentence that stopped me in my tracks (and which is, in turn, a quote I didn’t know from the psychologist Rollo May): “Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.”

If this sounds up your street and you want to buy it, this link should take you to a bookseller in your country. Or there’s Amazon (including USA, UK, Canada, India).

Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It

Have you heard of mindset psychology? This is the fascinating idea that, for example, kids who are shown that they have the capacity to learn (growth mindset) do better academically than those who are left believing that they’re stuck as they are, or that people who have a positive view of aging age better and live years longer than those who dread getting old.

This book is about stress mindset, the counterintuitive idea that stress is often something good, something we should welcome, because it helps us perform better and learn more—and that a life with a certain amount of stress is a better, more meaningful life than a stress-free one. Is stress bad for you? The answer to that question may be: it depends on your attitude toward stress. If you see stress as a negative then yes, it’ll be bad for you. If you recognize its benefits, it’s often good.

Don’t believe me? Read this book: it’s perspective-shifting.

Amazon USA, UK, Canada, India.

Selina Barker, Burnt Out: The Exhausted Person’s Six-Step Guide to Thriving in a Fast-Paced World

During the pandemic there was a little glut of books on burnout. And for this Great Work project I read most things that are published on burnout. I apply a fierce practicality test: could this actually help real people? Really?

This one stood out. ’s a British coach (the burnt spelling), and her book’s about as practical as a book can be. It’s full of color, boxes, and exercises. I opened it with my bullshit sensors on full power. But the book is, in fact, full of intelligent, easily-applicable advice that harmonises with the research, and therefore with the advice I collect here and in the forthcoming Great Work book.

If you’re dealing with burnout right now, or know someone who is, and you’re looking for an intelligent way through it that you could start applying tonight, I don’t think there’s a better guidebook out there.

Amazon USA, UK, Canada, India.

Bree Groff, Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously)

This quirky book is, as it should be, a load of fun. ’s a consultant from the world of business, but there’s plenty here for Great Work readers who work in public and non-profit settings. Today Was Fun is an irreverent manifesto for work being joyful, and a guide to how to get there. I loved the section on really getting to know and enjoy your colleagues, and a passage on what Groff calls emotional reliability.

It’ll be most useful if you have some leadership responsibilities. If you do, it’s a delightful book.

Amazon USA, UK, Canada, India.

Kathryn Page, Good Work: Transform Your Work from the Inside Out

This book’s just published and achieves two unusual things. First, it successfully considers both us, people who work, and those who are trying to improve working lives in their teams and organizations. And secondly, it refreshingly doesn’t assume that all work is done in commercial settings.

is an organisational psychologist. Her book’s grounded in solid research but it’s also practical, readable, and short. It gets an extra star for sneaking the word shite past academic publisher Wiley. If you have a bit of sway at work and want to think more about making work better for everyone, this might be the book to help you frame how to achieve that—and how to improve your own working life at the same time.

Amazon USA, UK, Canada, India.

Joseph Jebelli, The Brain At Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I can only write so many Great Work articles before being overtaken by the compulsion to recommend ’s book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, a book that radically changed my life for the better. Do we need another book on rest?

It turns out that we do! This gentle book, by neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli, skillfully weaves research and personal narrative into a new and persuasive paean to rest. It’s full of wise advice.

Amazon USA, UK (super-cheap paperback now available in the UK), Canada, India. Subtitle seems to vary with region/version.

P.S. It makes my day to hear from a Great Work reader. Just click ‘reply’: it’ll come straight to me.

PS Meet me at a conference

A couple of upcoming conferences at which I’ll be speaking …

BC Rural Health Conference

Such a lovely conference for people providing health care in rural settings in Western Canada and further afield. I’m giving the closing plenary: I’ll be talking about small changes you can make to have a better working life. Conference info here.

Workplace Mental Health Conference

The University of Michigan (Eisenberg Family Depression Center)’s virtual half-day conference on workplace mental health. A really interesting lineup of speakers. The focus is on how organizations can better support employee well-being and success: I’m talking about emotional regulation at work—what can employers actually do? Conference info here.

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Have a think about your last vacation. (I’ll use the North American term here. Fellow Brits, as well as Aussies and Kiwis: we’ll think about our last holiday.)

Was it primarily enjoyment? Or was it more recovery?

For most Great Work readers—we’re people who do tough, meaningful work, and tough work is tough—it may have been a bit of both. So put it on a scale: where on this scale did your last vacation sit?

This is vital information. Where your vacations fall on that recovery-enjoyment scale is a measure not of the vacation but of the state of your life. This is a great stepping-back-and-seeing-the-big-picture indicator of how your life is going.

If your vacation’s on the enjoyment side of the scale, that’s a sign that things are in balance.

If your vacation’s on the recovery side of the scale, it’s an important indicator that they aren’t.

If you’re needing vacations to recover, something’s wrong.

For a start, using vacations to recover may not work. Sure, you’ll feel better at the end of it. But the wellbeing bump is short-lived—one study of German teachers found it lasted less than a month ; in another small but more diverse study in Austria, less than a week.

That needn’t depress us: there’s evidence that, in the longer run, vacations may make us happier, healthier, and better protected from burnout.1 There’s even (weak) evidence that more frequent vacations may help you live longer. (This weighs heavily in the US, with some of the shortest vacation allowances in the world and culture of not using all of it.)

Vacations are great.

But, if you’re relying on vacations for recovery, you probably aren’t leading the life you want to lead. And you’re missing out on one of the great pleasures of life—vacation for enjoyment.

The problem and the solution

So you can use your vacation to recognize when things aren’t as they should be. Is it mainly enjoyment, or mainly recovery?

And if you can’t take a vacation, this works just as well in hypothetical form: if I did, would it be enjoyment or recovery?

That vacation test will tell you that something’s wrong, but it doesn’t tell you what to do about it. But one of the defining characteristics of a great vacation is that it offers time and space for mulling things over: it gives you perspective. The vacation itself (if you can get one), even a recovery vacation, is the ideal time to think about what’s wrong, and what you want to do about it—with a clarity about what really matters and how good and bad things are that’s elusive when you’re cognitively overloaded and exhausted.

Is yours a bad job? Should you leave?

Or are you giving too much of yourself to your work?

Do you need to get better at managing your time?

Is this something to do with how you’re reacting to things?

Do you need to prioritize rest better during your working life, not just on vacation? (I wrote more about this here.)

Do you need to make a big career decision?

Do you need to get some advice? (Email me! I’ll gladly mull it over and give you my thoughts.)

And if any of the ideas above ring true, click on the links: you might find an answer there.

P.S. It makes my day to hear from a Great Work reader. Just click ‘reply’: it’ll come straight to me.

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The majority of teachers and doctors and nurses and social workers and others doing tough, meaningful work will spend years doing so alongside parenting children or caring for their own parents or others. We can’t think about how people do Great Work without considering the extraordinary challenge of caring at work while also caring at home. That goes for those of us who aren’t looking after someone ourselves but who have colleagues who are parents and carers, too.

And, when women still shoulder a disproportionate share of home and caring responsibilities, let’s remember that the majority of people in professions such as teaching, medicine, nursing, and social work are women. No surprise that recent US research shows that women face a markedly higher risk of poor work-life integration and of burnout than do men, nor that the work-life integration thing’s especially bad for women in my line of work, medicine. This should matter to all of us. Not to mention the many good dad colleagues I’ve had who’ve struggled to balance work with family responsibilities.

And many Great Work readers do work that involves caring for and about people: this adds a tension one mother described to me as “How do I do right by both?”

This is an unusual topic for me. Overwhelm and exhaustion from tough work, the loneliness of imposter syndrome, worrying you’ve screwed something serious up—all these I know well. And I have a couple of wonderful nieces, and there’s a boy I’ve known since he was a baby who has become an important part of my life.

But I have to rely on others to learn about how it’s possible to stay afloat, and even thrive, while parenting or caring for others outside of work.

So I’ve spent time the last few months trying to learn more about how parents and carers do it: reading about it, studying the research, and asking generous parents and others doing tough jobs while caring for a parent to talk to me about what’s worked for them.

And I’m hoping that, if this is a topic you know more about than I do, you’ll consider replying, or commenting below, with your own thoughts about this, with your suggestions and ideas. I’m probably not going to tell any parents anything new here. But you might.

So here are some of the ideas that have kept coming up in conversations with parents and other carers.

If you have a partner, you have to share responsibilities fairly.

Especially the mental responsibilities, the cognitive burden. Pretty much every partnered parent who’s discussed this with me has said that the support of their co-parent is critical. If you make a list of everything that needs doing, are both of you shouldering your share—not just the caring responsibilities but all the other stuff that has to be done to keep the home in good shape, healthy food on the table, the clothes clean, and the bills paid? Are you modeling, to your children, truly shared parenting and household management?

This is a topic about which a fair bit has been written. There’s a wonderful book by called Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) that turns this into a thoughtful game, identifying, agreeing on the importance of, and sharing out equitably all the things we have to do, in a non-threatening way that’s designed to improve relationships.

Do you have a support network?

Sharing responsibilities isn’t an option if you’re a single parent or carer. One single mother with a tough job talked to me about how important a support network—friends, neighbors, colleagues—has been for her, and the importance of being brazen about asking for help. And going out of your way to do favors for others, because what goes around comes around. The message: cultivate your support network. It’s vital.

Boundaries.

This matters to those of us without caring responsibilities too, but it was a message I got most clearly from middle school teacher , about whom I wrote in a previous article. Boundaries about how much you give, and what you reveal of yourself at work—and boundaries and routines that allow you to switch off at work. Sarah has an unwinding routine after she leaves school before picking up the kids and becoming a mother again. And she has rules about leaving her computer at work and not checking work email in the evening—so she’s able to be undistracted with her family.

How do you organize your time?

Vanderkam’s a prolific writer and mother of five children who examined, in meticulous, half-hour-by-half-hour detail, how 143 high-earning women with at least one child living at home organized their time—and wrote about it in her book I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time. Their earnings are well above the income of many who do the most meaningful work. But much of what she found may be helpful to anyone with caring responsibilities.

One of the themes was a lot of intentional time management (with plenty of flexibility), thinking not just about how days fit together but also weeks: if there are going to be a few days in the week when mothers weren’t going to see so much of their children, they compensated for that elsewhere in the week. And many worked what Vanderkam calls split shifts, working during the day, then a chunk of time with the children, and then a bit more work late at night. Split shifts are familiar to many Great Work-reading parents.

Another great point from I Know How She Does It was that having too many routines can be counterproductive: for example, those who kept on top of the housework every day ended up doing more of it. And, as several parents with tough jobs have emphasized to me, you have to lower your standards for things that don’t, at the end of the day, matter all that much.

Having breaks.

One strategy critical to several who have shared their wisdom with me has been planning time off every so often, with the children, going away somewhere, even just for a few days, so you can spend time together away from responsibilities, work, and organized kid activities. I heard this a number of times: easier to organize than a big vacation, and maybe just as important.

Part-time work.

For many people with caring responsibilities this is unavoidable, and often welcome.

But can you afford it? Vanderkam makes the point that part-time work typically involves a pay cut—yet people who work part-time often end up working the same hours (taking into account evenings and weekends) as someone without caring responsibilities who’s working more traditional hours.

Do you work somewhere where, instead of—or as well as—taking a pay cut to go part-time, you could have more flexibility with your working hours, or have your work measured not by your hours but by what you get done? One working mother who’d requested flexibility and initially been told “no” pointed out the importance of knowing your rights: where she was working this turned out to be something to which, as a parent, she was entitled.

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I’ve been disarmed by how grateful the parents and carers whom I’ve asked about this have been by my wanting to understand it better. Clearly, we should all be talking about this more.

If you’re a parent, or have other caring responsibilities, I’m in awe of you, and I’d love to know what’s been most important to making it work. As would other Great Work readers.

You can comment on this article: there’s a comment button at the bottom.

There’s a chat function on Substack (which hosts Great Work) where you could comment and see what others have said: click here.

Or reply (if you’re reading this as an email), or email me at adam at adamsandell.com. Everything comes straight to me. I’d love to hear from you. And (of course) I wouldn’t use anything you tell me without your permission.

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I’ve been getting fantastic feedback about the Great Work book from early readers. But it won’t get published unless I can show that people are interested in this stuff. It makes more of a difference than you may realize if you’re willing to ❤️ this article below. And if you’ve found something useful here, it’s a huge help if you share it with others, or encourage people to sign up.

Thanks so much!

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Great Work’s been quiet the last few weeks: I’ve been editing a new draft of the book—which is now with my developmental editor. More on that soon, I hope …

Are You Fine? Is Your Job Fine? Or Are You Too Tired To Tell?

Overwork for a while, and your perspective becomes distorted. There are many causes: prolonged cognitive overload; accumulated exhaustion; a lack of the vital, restorative benefits of regular rest and leisure; often, impaired sleep; and more. And it’s a distorted perspective that’s no fun, and makes for bad decisions, too.

There are several common, overwork-distorted perceptions of work.

First, there’s This is hell and it’s someone else’s fault. This one has lots of variations. This organization is ridiculous. My boss is an idiot. None of my colleagues are as committed as me. My patients/students/students’ parents/clients/customers are so bloody entitled. And more.

Then there’s I’m not up to this. Again, there are a few versions. Everyone else is smarter than me. My colleagues all have skills that I don’t have. Someone made a mistake in giving me this job. I’m not going to be able to cope. I’m going to screw something up.

And there’s a particular version of this, when you actually are being shafted1 by the organization or team in which you work, where you tell yourself that it’s your fault. You may even have been encouraged to think that: “Well, everyone else is OK with how we’re working here.” This is, needless to say, a form of gaslighting that’s done especially to women.

All of these, whether you’re blaming yourself or others, feel horrible. Worse, they result in you making bad decisions:

1. If you’re telling yourself it’s all someone else’s fault, you’re denying yourself the opportunity to improve, and perhaps transform, how you handle tough situations. This is a key Great Work idea—that, when you focus first on how you’re dealing with something, what you’re dealing with usually turns out to be much less of a problem, and can even be reshaped into an exhilarating challenge. It’s often the reaction, not the stuff.

2. If you’re telling yourself you’re not up to it, you’re likely experiencing imposter symptoms, which are awful. But the beliefs driving them are usually wrong: you probably are up to it. And those beliefs can be fixed: imposter syndrome.

3. If you’ve allowed yourself to believe that you’re finding it hard because you’re inadequate, not because your work situation’s objectively absurd, you’re going to feel terrible—and you won’t challenge it or leave, when perhaps you should.

But how do you know when your perspective’s distorted and you’re making bad decisions? Read on!

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, having just given myself a short writing sabbatical after several years of working too hard (long, intense hours away from home, overnight shifts, and sprawling medical director responsibilities). I wasn’t burned out. And it was work I’d chosen, which was, in many ways, the high point of my career so far. But I was exhausted. And I didn’t appreciate how exhausted I was, or how much it had affected me, until some time after I gave up those responsibilities. Creativity I’d forgotten about slowly returned. I became more present with people I care about. I started thinking bigger thoughts. My sleep began to normalize. I read more books. I began appreciating the world around me more. I realized how much worse I’d been than I’d seen at the time. But it took time.

One of the problems here is that many of us have years of training in pushing through excessive workloads. My profession, medicine, doesn’t have a monopoly on this: it affects plenty of others, and parents of young children, too. We can do it indefinitely, superficially managing fine, because that’s what we learned to do for so long. Yet we still pay the price, losing perspective, and perhaps, along the way, years of our lives.

What’s the answer?

This begins with recognizing that you’re not at your best—which, if you know you’ve been overworking for a while, you can’t be.

And then it’s about doing what you need to do to regain perspective. You may not have the luxury of being able to take a sabbatical—but there’s always something you can do.

Take a long walk somewhere beautiful, without your phone.

Take a few days off and spend them doing things that allow your mind to wander, not catching up on all the chores that have accumulated because you’ve been overworking.

Take a relaxing vacation, if you can.

Do what you need to do to step back, breathe, and think.

Chew it over with someone wise and independent, someone you trust to discern whether you’re being screwed, and with the bravery to tell you if the priority is to address how you’re handling the job.

Often, just a little stepping back and head-clearing is enough to see that things aren’t right, that something needs fixing.

And, even when it is the stuff, not just how you’re handling it, it’s always worth thinking about how you are handling it. Crappy stuff warps your perspective and depletes your ability to fix it.

And then, when you’ve done all that, when you’ve reminded yourself of your priorities, you can make better decisions, big and small, with a clear view from the top of your mountain.

Book Review

’s Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes (One World, 2025) is a book that’ll have you thinking about those times when you go along with something that doesn’t harmonize with your values. It’s about why we do this, how we can stop doing so, and why our lives, and the world, improve when we do.

As you’d expect in a book about sticking up for yourself, the experiences of women and members of marginalized ethnic groups are where they should be, at its heart.

It’s got me thinking differently about those times when it’s easy to go along with someone, or not to speak out about something, or to compromise what you care about. And perhaps it’ll help me do better.

A paperback edition came out last week, which makes it cheaper. (It has a new subtitle: How To Speak Up When It Matters.) I’d recommend it.

Some Great Work Core Principles

In recent emails I’ve been reviewing seven core principles that underpin much of what I write about in Great Work. We’d covered four …

1. Work’s a huge part of life. It should be part of what makes life fulfilling and fun.

2. Things go dramatically better when you tend to them, or: The startling benefits of taking some #&@?*%! responsibility).

3. You’ll be happier, and you’ll achieve more, if you’re kinder to yourself.

4. The kind–businesslike matrix, or: Why so many teams of good people struggle.

Here are the remaining three:

(5) It’s often the reaction, not the stuff

There’s often a perspective that will serve us better. For example, some situations—not all, but many—that feel overwhelming, stressful, or out of control don’t have to feel that way. There’s a trick to reformulating them that can make them positively exhilarating.

I wrote more about this here:

(6) Almost nothing’s as important to your wellbeing or success as other people and your relationships with them

Yet it’s easy, especially when stressed, to forget that.

More here:

… and this piece on having difficult conversations is relevant, too.

(7) Habits make it easy, and everything improves when you use the best approach consistently.

Many of these pieces and, especially, the book on which they’re based, suggest changes that you can turn into habits. Habits are how we automate things in our lives, making them effortless—and the right habits make everything better. This may be why there’s been a recent(ish) wave of books on habits—’s thoughtful The Power of Habit (2012), James Clear’s wildly successful Atomic Habits (2018), and Wendy Wood’s more scientific Good Habits, Bad Habits (2019).2

Get in the habit of resting regularly through your day, for example, and you’re going to get more done, and do it better, than if you just plough through. This article suggests some rest habits that can transform your working days. Here’s how you can cultivate better internet habits. And here’s a little sequencing habit that’ll make you more efficient and more relaxed.

How could this be better?

Would you take a moment to complete this one-minute survey? There are only two important questions and it really does help me improve this. I’ll soon be writing about juggling caring responsibilities alongside tough, meaningful work—which reader feedback helped me realize I’d neglected.

Thanks, as ever, for reading. Do click the ‘Comment’ button below, and say what you think.

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The thing that often makes the biggest difference to how we feel about our work: the team within which we do it. And a lot of teams aren’t doing as well as they could.

Does your team, and the way it runs, make your work harder, or easier? Is everyone looking out for themselves, or is there a culture of support? Are things forever going wrong, or do they just work? And, maybe most importantly, if you’re asked what’s good about your job, would one of your answers be “My colleagues”?

The foundation for improving things is understanding the dual importance of teams being both kind and businesslike, what those terms actually mean, and why this is the starting point for making everything better.

I wrote about this in the very early days of Great Work. Then, I had fewer than two hundred readers. Now we’re in the thousands, and my understanding of this kind–businesslike thing has grown. So: it’s the right time to revisit it.

The Kind–Businesslike Matrix

Let’s start by defining two terms.

Kind is easy. Teams that are kind are made up of people who are there at least partly because they care. And these teams have a culture of treating everyone decently—colleagues, those they serve, their learners, their community, people in other organizations.

Teams that are businesslike make savvy decisions, and they’re good at implementing them. They communicate well, within and beyond the team. People’s responsibilities are clear. They’re well-managed, not just administered: they respond calmly to challenges, and plan for the future. They have good systems that make people’s work easier, safer, and better, and that don’t get in the way. And, when something goes wrong, these are the teams that enthusiastically learn from it.

What businesslike doesn’t imply is that your team is a business, any more than kind implies a charity. Nor, in this kind–businesslike matrix, do those terms imply anything about where you sit on the political spectrum. Whatever it is your team does, if it’s going to do it well, it needs to be both. If you’re not businesslike, your kindness will be less effective. And being kind is a prerequisite for being truly businesslike. Kind and businesslike together are necessities for team serenity and success—and for your serenity and success.

And they’re not alternatives. Being kind doesn’t mean being unbusinesslike, and being businesslike doesn’t mean being unkind. If they were axes on a graph, they’d be at right angles to each other, orthogonal. A team can sit anywhere on this graph (and can move).

Let’s consider four types of team—the four quadrants on that graph.

Teams that are neither kind nor businesslike (quadrant 1): there aren’t many of these around. That’s because they tend to fail—often quite quickly.

Teams that are businesslike but not kind (quadrant 2): if you’ve worked in enough organizations, you may well have experienced one of these. They can do well for a time. But they usually come off the rails after a while, because good people decide they don’t want to work there. They become unfulfilling places to work. Cohesion deteriorates. People who can leave do.

Teams that are kind but not businesslike (quadrant 3): these can be lovely places to work, and their members tend to be deeply loyal to them. In easy times these teams often do well. It’s when things become challenging that they struggle. The team doesn’t adapt well and becomes overwhelmed, blaming circumstances, and hoping for better times to come along. People become stressed; some burn out. These teams may see difficult situations as crises, and are prone to the “Once this difficult period is over” fallacy.

Teams that are kind and businesslike (quadrant 4): yeah, you see where I’m going with this … These are the teams that are a joy to be a part of, that support their members to do their work well and make a difference—the teams that thrive. This is how teams should be.

And among the many teams I’ve worked with in health care, law, academia, and public and non-profit organizations, by far the commonest of these four types is the third type: teams that are kind, but that would be happier and more productive places if only they were more businesslike.

You may have a pretty good idea of where your team sits on that graph. But, if you think you’re in quadrant 4, the kind, businesslike, thriving one, you should check. Businesslike but less-than-kind teams tend genuinely, and mistakenly, to believe they’re where they have to be. And fear of change or of losing their special ethos, or skepticism about taking management seriously, often convince kind but unbusinesslike teams that they’re as businesslike as they should be.

How can you be sure? Having experience of a variety of teams gives you perspective. But the people with the most insight are often those members of the team who have the least sway, and, especially, those who’ve joined recently. Ask.

Once you know, or discover, that you need to become more businesslike, or more kind, you’re already part-way there. This is something to think about, to feed into decision-making—especially the bigger-picture conversations for which you should be making time, every so often, as a team.

How do you get there?

Kindness deficits are hard to fix in a team that doesn’t recognize the need: if you’re stuck in a team like that, you may want to consider your options. But, if it’s the team that has identified the need, you can choose to make it more a part of the team’s culture. Ensure that each decision, the everyday stuff as well as the big ones, is influenced by that priority. One way of supporting this may (again) be to make a genuine effort to listen to those in the team who have the least voice, those who’ve joined recently, and those the team serves—and then to look for the truth in what they say, not for reasons why they’re wrong.

The more familiar situation, the kind team that would do better were it more businesslike? This is an easier fix. Again, this needs to become a part of the decision-making. You need to make sure you’re making time, regularly, when you all have the headspace, to think the big thoughts about how things can improve and to make plans to do so. You need to make sure decisions are made well and then implemented well (SMART plans!). All this is at the heart of being businesslike. You need to optimize your systems, and have a process for keeping on top of them. Tackle the important but non-urgent stuff, now: it’s always going to feel as though there’s something more pressing to be done. Have effective meetings. You may need to overcome reluctance to getting some outside expertise in to help you figure some of these things out. (Unbusinesslike teams tend to be skeptical about this, but the right person really can help.) You may also need to work on your team’s comfort with having healthy, productive discussions about things about which people disagree.

This idea, that good teams are kind and businesslike, is the foundation of healthy, effective, fulfilling teams and organizations. And the starting-point is to think about it: to consider where your team’s deficits are (most have them), and what you can do, together, to move into that kind-and-businesslike territory where things hum.

If your team were to make one change to anchor it firmly in the kind-and-businesslike quadrant, what would it be?

The core Great Work principles

This email’s one in a series outlining the seven principles upon which Great Work is based. If you missed any of those, here’s what we’ve covered so far:

… and this one, the kind–businesslike matrix.

Three more coming!

How could this be better?

I want to make these emails and podcasts more useful to you. Would you do me a one-minute favor? Click here and answer two questions—what you like about Great Work, and how it could be better. Thank you!

And, if you’ve already completed this survey, thank you too. One thing I’ve recently learned from feedback is that I need to say more about combining great work with caring responsibilities outside of work. Which I will do!

And now for something completely different

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I hope this time of year’s a good one for you. Happy anything you may celebrate. I have a few things for you this time.

Be kinder to yourself and achieve more

Done right, most of us, most of the time, can achieve more, and enjoy it more, by being kinder to ourselves.

I took too long, last week, to realize that I was pushing myself too hard and needed to be kinder to myself. And then one of ’s emails appeared in my inbox (he’s the Four Thousand Weeks guy and his emails are great—details here). This one said, among other things:

… So it’s worth at least seeing what happens when you ask yourself not what you ought to be doing with your time, but what you’d like to be doing. And allowing for the possibility that the results of that approach might include all the productivity and accomplishment you’d previously been trying to attain by yelling at yourself.

And that was just what I needed to hear. And well-timed: in this short series of emails I’m reviewing the seven core principles that underpin Great Work ideas, and here’s the third:

Done right, most of us, most of the time, can achieve more, and enjoy it more, by being kinder to ourselves.

This risks sounding trite—a nice idea that can’t realistically change your real working life. But it turns out that there are changes that almost all of us can make, now, that will immediately improve our lives and work.

(Nine percent of you may hear an echo here, as I wrote about this right when I began this Great Work newsletter. But that was before 91% of you had signed up, and this is one of the most life-changing Great Work ideas.)

Most of us are pushing ourselves too hard

Have a look at this beautifully- (or at least unintentionally festively-) drawn sketch:

This says: work harder, and you’ll achieve more—up to a point. Lots of research, from many perspectives, over decades, indicates that most of the time, most of us are on the right side of that curve. On the right side, the only way to do better is to be kinder to yourself—to move yourself to the left of where you are. On the right side, if you work even harder, you’ll do even worse.

Let’s be clear: this is not about being a lightweight. If you’re serious about achieving more it’s what you have to do. That it feels great is merely a bonus.

We know from multiple sources that most of us are on the right side of that curve. One source is four-day week studies, which have involved thousands of people in all sorts of organizations, commercial and non-profit, all around the world.1 The working week switches from five days to four, with no reduction in pay. Consistently, business revenues increase, recruitment improves, staff turnover reduces, and workers love it. This is a huge finding: people are paid the same for four days as they were for five, days off increase by 50%, teams achieve more, everyone’s happier, and the large majority of employers like it so much that, at the end of the trial, they continue it. (It’s also better for the climate.2)

Much evidence points the same way. Back in the 1950s, Raymond van Zelst and Willard Kerr, two academics at Illinois Tech, surveyed their colleagues and discovered that those who spent more hours in the office were less productive: fewer publications and inventions than those who worked less hard.3 The same went for those who put in time at home: their productivity increased up to a point, but more hours reduced their productivity. A much more recent experiment by Boston Consulting Group, one of the “big three” US management consulting firms (a notoriously “always on” industry), involved protecting people from intrusions, or even checking email, after 6 p.m. one night a week. They saw measurable improvements in the quality of people’s work, communication, and team efficiency and effectiveness.

If you’re interested, the mechanism for this, the reason why rest is so essential to our performance, is partly because it switches on a part of our brain called the default mode network, which plays an important role in our intelligence, the performance of complex tasks, memory, social and emotional functioning, mental health, and more. (More on that in the two books I recommend below.)

There’s now so much evidence from all sorts of industries that we mostly hang out on the right side of that effort/results curve, and the conclusion is inescapable: you are likely achieving less than you would if you went easier on yourself, and the only way to do better is to slow down.

So the question isn’t whether looking after ourselves better works: it’s why we don’t.

Some people aren’t aware of, or don’t buy, the effort/result curve. (And that sometimes looks a lot like an excuse for not tackling long-established patterns of behavior.)

But more often we know we’re on the right (i.e. wrong) side of the effort/results curve, but we tell ourselves—and I’ve heard this from people in all walks of work—that it’s all very well for other people, but in my job it just isn’t possible to slow down.

Let’s see if that’s true.

Can you slow down, in your real job? How?

As a GP who sometimes works in emergency rooms, I have some experience of work where it’s easy to think it just isn’t possible to slow down. (Google tells me my most searched-for article here ever was about how I used rest and other forms of kindness to myself to get through a really tough week at work.) The other job where I most commonly hear people say, “But in this job, there isn’t anything I can do to go easier on myself,” is teachers, with classes that need to be taught, lessons prepared, kids’ work marked, and kids and parents listened to.

Here are some things that we can all do, including me as a doctor with patients to see, to shift ourselves left on that effort/results curve:

1. Start by paying attention to where you are on your effort/results curve. If, like most of us, you naturally gravitate toward the right side of the curve, nothing’s going to change if you’re not aware of where you are. You can’t manage your time or your tasks unless you first manage your energy, and focusing on managing your energy may be all you need to do to get on top of everything else.

2. Give breaks the highest priority you can. Protect them at all costs: they are vital to maintain your function and performance. In jobs like mine, and maybe yours, this may call for occasional tolerance with keeping people waiting, and that has to be OK: no one wants to be looked after by a doctor who’s dopey from exhaustion, nor taught by a teacher whose heart isn’t in it.

3. Break first. If you know you need five minutes to yourself and you also have something pressing to get done, take that five-minute break first. After that, a little refreshed, you’ll do whatever needs doing with a clearer head, more efficiently, and better.

4. Break well. Scrolling Instagram isn’t a break—it’s a maladaptive waste of precious rest time. Going for a walk outdoors or closing your eyes for a few minutes are true rest. You’ll know what does it for you: as a rule of thumb, if it facilitates daydreaming or meandering thoughts, it’s rest. If it doesn’t, it probably isn’t.

5. Stop working when the day should end. If it’s late and you’re tired, stop. (The rule I used to follow, get today’s work done today, has some merit as an approach to keeping on top of things, but only if it gives way to the overriding need to take care of yourself.)

6. Build as much rest into your week as you can. If you know you’re going to have several heavy days, ensure there’s time for you at some point, even if only in the evenings, and time to unwind (rather than turn straight to your email inbox or the tax return) as soon as you can.

7. Plan leisure. Your time off can easily fill with chores and the administration of life. Each week should have time not just for rest but, within that, for leisure, whatever that means for you—reading, seeing people you care about, getting outdoors, watching a drama on the TV, or something else. (Again, it ain’t scrolling.)

8. Let nothing encroach on getting a good night’s sleep. Every night.

How does that sound?

And if this is a holiday season for you, a time when you reflect on how you’d like to shape your next year, how much of that could you start practicing, turning it into a habit?

Want to read more on this?

I regularly recommend ’s book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (Basic Books, 2016) because it’s been so influential on my thinking about this, my life, and, obviously, this piece. It’s a wonderful book.

A new book on rest was published this year, neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli’s The Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life (Random House, 2025). I wondered whether we needed another book on rest but it turns out we do: a fascinating, readable account of what rest does for us and how it can change your life.

How could this be better?

I want to make these emails and podcasts more useful to you. Would you do me a one-minute favor? Click here and answer two questions—what you like about Great Work, and how it could be better. Thank you!

Winter at Great Work Towers

I’m writing this on the shortest day of the northern hemisphere’s year. This winter I’ve been trying to follow the advice of in her book How to Winter. I normally dread the winter but, as she explains, that’s the problem. I reviewed her book here and, so far, my winter’s been transformed by the approach she suggests—none of the grumpiness that normally colors this time of year for me. But damn, I’m pleased that the days are starting to lengthen again.

After a year or two of overworking as a doctor, I’m having a writing sabbatical, mainly working on the Great Work book (and just a little teaching and coaching). I’m loving it. I’m currently about half-way through turning the second draft into a third, trying to turn it into something I’d be willing to show to editors and agents. It’s interesting, as I live this idea that you get more done and do it better by being kinder to yourself, to feel my creativity and enthusiasm return.

Perimenopausal Great Work

Next month I’m doing a webinar for PAMELA, a UK-based support network for female legal-aid lawyers, focused on menopause and perimenopause. We’ll be talking about sleep and managing exhaustion while doing tough work. It’s at 1 pm UK time on Friday 16 January—a short talk and then discussion. You don’t have to be a legal-aid lawyer (my old job) or in the UK to join: being a woman with an interest in the (peri)menopause is fine! If you’re interested, sign up here, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me know you’re coming!

At the moment my next Great Work speaking thing is at the BC Rural Health Conference in Prince George, BC, in May. Want me to speak at your thing?

The year ahead

For the last few years I’ve worked as a doctor at a clinic and hospital on a remote Indigenous reserve (reservation, in US English) on an island in the Canadian Pacific Ocean. I’ll be picking up my stethoscope again in February, also on a reserve on a beautiful Pacific island, but this time just a few miles from home. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do the work I do.

This time last year, this Great Work newsletter had about 500 readers. We now have about 1,800, plus listeners to a professionally edited podcast version (thanks, Bren!). That’s still a long way short of the “platform” I need for a heavyweight publisher to be interested in the book. And that makes it hard for introverted folk who don’t like social media to get published! If you find anything useful here and there’s anything you can do to spread the word, I’d be hugely grateful.

Thanks so much for being part of this, for taking the time to read the stuff I write. I don’t take it lightly that you allow me into your inbox. I wish you serenity and success in your meaningful work in 2026. Meanwhile,

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The ideas and suggestions in these emails (and in the book I’m writing about all this) stem from several core principles. In this short run of emails, I’m setting those principles out.

The last email was about a foundational one—that work’s a huge part of your life, and shouldn’t be a price you pay: it should be one of the things that makes your life fulfilling and fun.

Here’s the second principle.

The Startling Benefits of Taking Some #&@?*%! Responsibility

Or: Things Go Dramatically Better When You Tend to Them

A lot of people’s working lives are worse than they’d wish, and many don’t tackle that, whether by leaving a crappy job, fixing how they handle stress, or improving their working lives in some other way.

Why don’t we do things we could do to improve our working lives?

There are lots of reasons for inaction: because doing something about it feels daunting, or because of worries it could go wrong, or because of believing this is just how it has to be, or because of thinking the problem’s you, or because of thinking the problem isn’t you.

But you don’t get to relive these years if you haven’t lived them as you’d want. And:

• Feeling daunted: things that feel daunting typically turn out to be easier, and more rewarding, than you expect. I guarantee you’ve had that experience many times before.

• Worrying that it could go wrong: that’s a healthy worry, but it’s a reason for care and caution, not for avoidance.

• Believing this is just how it has to be: maybe. But often not. Are you committing the arrival fallacy—the false belief that something ahead is going to make everything ok, and you just have to hang in there for now? Some spend their whole lives in the arrival fallacy.

• Thinking the problem’s you: it may well not be, and you’re missing an opportunity to improve your working circumstances. And, if you’re right, great! It’s within your power to fix it! (If you doubt that, read about growth mindset.)

• Thinking the problem’s not you: could you be avoiding an opportunity for self-improvement? (My life was transformed by learning how to get better at handling work stress—but only after I recognized this was my problem to fix.) And, if you’re right, and it’s not you, that just shifts the focus to what you can do to improve your working circumstances.

Then there’s the problem of having been implicitly trained to put up with grinding circumstances for the sake of the future. Uncomplaining perseverance even acquires a misplaced air of virtue. Some Great Work readers are (like me) doctors who have had years of this training early in their careers, but others will recognise this: it’s not just doctors. Once more: the arrival fallacy. You get to live these years only once.

So …

This second Great Work principle says: we often have more agency than we think. Things may be out of your control. But are you sure about that? Usually, there’s something you can do about a crappy situation—and often with life-changing results.

What it is you can do obviously varies. But here are a few ideas—the commonest things we avoid, with links to stuff I’ve written about them.

If it’s you

I spent a good part of my working life not handling stressful working situations well, and that’s fixable. This is a major Great Work theme: often, it’s the reaction, not the stuff. Sometimes, you just need to get better at saying no.

If it’s the job

Do you know what you want to do, and what you really don’t? Are you in an irredeemably bad job and you just need to get out? Or is there a conversation you’ve been avoiding, perhaps with a boss or a colleague, that’s the first and necessary step to fixing things?

If it’s the organization or team

There are all sorts of things that can go wrong in teams and small organizations. In teams of people who do vocational work they care about, by far the commonest problem I encounter is that they’re way better at being kind than at being businesslike. (Video version.) Yet being businesslike—which means having systems for identifying and foreseeing challenges and opportunities, making intelligent decisions about how to address them, and then actually implementing those decisions—is a prerequisite for being kind, to the people they serve, and to themselves. Teams can get way better at this.

One approach that helps is shifting from an “It’s a crisis” mindset to “It’s a challenge.”

If it’s your life

Are you actually doing, regularly, the system-critical things—looking after your sleep, getting regular exercise, enjoying regular leisure, and looking forward to replenishing vacations—that you know we all need, even in the toughest of weeks? If not, what can you do about that?

It’s your choice

If you’re not doing things you could do to improve your working life, you’re making a choice. Here’s , in his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (which I’ve just read for the first time and discovered to be wiser and more fun than I’d anticipated):1

Whether we like it or not, we are always taking an active role in what’s occurring to and within us. We are always interpreting the meaning of every moment and every occurrence. We are always choosing the values by which we live and the metrics by which we measure everything that happens to us. Often the same event can be good or bad, depending on the metric we choose to use.

The point is, we are always choosing, whether we recognize it or not. Always.

Is there something you could fix?

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As I began researching and writing about the ideas in this newsletter and the book behind it, I realized that they fit together coherently because they all stem from seven core, interconnected principles.

(Thank goodness it turned out to be seven! As everyone knows, it’s a rule of the universe that all frameworks need seven elements: the seven deadly sins, the seven colors of the rainbow, the seven wonders of the world …)

These seven core principles define what this Great Work project’s all about. And they’re helpful in themselves, for those of us looking for serenity and success in work that we care about.

Until now, I haven’t written much about them.

So, over coming newsletters, I’m going to write a bit about each of these core principles, and why they matter.

This first one is the foundation for all the others.

Principle 1: work’s a huge part of life. It should be part of what makes life fulfilling and fun.

You may spend around 100,000 hours working. That’s about a fifth of your waking life. To aim merely for a good work-life balance—as if work’s a necessary evil, a price that has to be paid for the good things in life—is a dismal approach. Your work should be more than an instrumental good (done to earn you money): it should be something that’s intrinsically good in your life.

Of course not every working moment will be one of exuberant joy. Sometimes it’s going to be a grind. There’ll be stressful moments, especially if you care about what you do. There’ll be days when you’d rather not work. But, overall, your work should be one of the things you’d want to talk about were someone to ask you what the good things are in your life right now.

So if that’s not how it is, think deeply. What needs to change? How could you make those changes? What’s the first step? The remaining six core principles are about answering those questions.

The mixed blessing of caring about your work

Those of us who do work we care about—work that may make a difference—have a mixed blessing.1 Our work may give meaning to our lives, and allow us, when we’re old, to look back upon a working life well-spent. Knowing you’re doing good gives you some protection against exhaustion. But research indicates that caring about your work makes you more vulnerable.2 We put more into our work, at greater personal cost. Many forego substantially higher earnings to do work that matters to them.3 You may put up with working conditions that, were you less invested, you wouldn’t tolerate. You’re more likely to show up for work when you’re sick.4 Work calling for compassion can be mentally taxing.5 It hurts when things go wrong. And as the artist puts it (and this is my all-time favorite work-related quote):

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation or any boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.

I’ve written before about what makes work good:

People tend to see their work as a job, a career, or a calling—and only one of those. If it’s a job, you’re doing it for the wages. If it’s a career, it’s for the income but also status and esteem—things most of us value, even if we’d like to believe otherwise. If it’s a calling, a vocation, you’re doing it for personal fulfillment, and it’s likely to be work that matters to the world.

The more you see your work as a calling, the more satisfied you probably are with your life and your job, and the more meaning you are likely to find in your work.

And work should also be fun, at least some of the time. This is the thesis of a wonderful new book that I’ll be writing more about in future emails, ’s, Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously) (Page Two, 2025). She’s right.

Do something about it

So this principle is a plea that, if work’s not one of the good things in our lives, we figure out why that is and then do something sensible about it.

Sometimes that’ll involve a deep inward gaze to figure out how you might approach your working life better. This is what an earlier article, Know Thy Working Self, was about. And then, of course, you’d need to figure out the new approach. Often, it’s the reaction, not the stuff. Maybe it’s just taking a break to allow yourself to step back and recognize all the good things about your working life.

And sometimes it’s about recognizing that something external needs to change. One of my most popular articles here (and there’s a message in that popularity) was about knowing what you want to do, and what you really don’t. Another was about saying no well. And my last newsletter was about when to leave a job because it’s wrong for you (and when not to).

Have high expectations. Your work should be one of the good things in your life. Especially if you’re someone who’s chosen work you care about. Our years are subject to a no-returns policy. And a fifth of your waking hours is a lot of hours. Figure out what you can do to cultivate a working life that’s good, and then get going. And core principles two to seven do exactly that.

New here? Or have you, through some terrible oversight, not joined this community of people who do tough work that matters? Sign up! It’s free, bullshit-free, and not selling anything.

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My last email was about how to get through the winter, for those who, like me, find it a struggle. With cold rain pouring down outside, I’ve just begun a writing sabbatical: my aim over these coming wintery months is to turn the first draft of the Great Work book into a second draft, something I wouldn’t be mortified to show to editors and agents. It’s begun well, with the mercy-killing of an introduction I loved, but that needed to be about 20% of its original length. And now it is. There’s blood and elegant verbiage all over the floor.

When to leave because a job’s bad, and when not to

There’s a comic by internet cartoonist Zach Weinersmith that says: one day you’ll be dead—but you don’t live only once. It takes about seven years to master something. So, says the comic, if you live to be 88 that gives you eleven opportunities from the age of eleven to become great at something. “Most people never let themselves die,” writes Weinersmith. You could do all sorts of things. “These are your lifetimes. USE THEM.”

I keep coming back to this comic. I spent the early part of my career secretly embarrassed about my apparent inability to stay in one job for more than a few years. There’s the romantic ideal of the GP who, upon completion of his training (it’s a male stereotype), finds a community to commit to, settles down, sees patients whom he immunized as babies through to their middle age, and works in one place for forty years before retiring to a lionizing article in the local newspaper and an abundance of ugly tea-cosies knitted by grateful patients.

Me, I seem to need new challenges once I’ve figured out how to do something and made a difference. I’ve been a GP more than anything else. But I’ve done that seriously in seven communities across two continents. And, at various times, I’ve also dabbled in being a barrister (a litigation lawyer—I did stick with that one for ten years), a local government politician, an international development worker, an academic, and a hospital medical director.

For a while, I had a sneaking suspicion that my habit of switching jobs every few years reflected a flaw in my personality. But the ‘eleven lives’ cartoon was part of my realization that, while the ugly tea-cosies model is right for some, it isn’t for everyone. It’s fine to craft your life from a series of adventures. For some, it’s right. Looking back, my eccentric work history makes some sense, one thing leading to another, growing my ability to help people experiencing the rough end of injustices.

But, looking back, I think there may have been, early on, a job switch that did reflect a flaw in my personality. And there’s a lesson in this.

Wrong reasons for moving job

There was another job I left, early in my career, blaming the job. I didn’t make that decision well. I wasn’t Great Work about it. It was a tough gig, and the large organization for which I was working wasn’t well run. I told myself that’s why it wasn’t the right job for me. But that wasn’t true. I was struggling because I was early in my career and hadn’t yet worked out how to look after myself while managing a high-risk, high-pressure workload, nor how to work in a dysfunctional organization (to some extent, all are), nor how to look after relationships with colleagues who were often battling the same challenges themselves. Those are things I could have started to learn then, and my life would have been better if I had.

So those struggles recurred until I figured out some of the Great Work principles. Had I then understood that often, it’s the reaction, not the stuff; or appreciated the importance of knowing thy working self, or recognized my Catcher in the Rye syndrome, or grasped quite how important are working relationships, or even just read about more sophisticated ways of getting through a tough week, I’d have been better at that job, happier too, and perhaps I’d have stayed there for longer. (I guess I have learned a lot since!) And, had I still decided to move on, I’d have made that decision more wisely. Either way, the next few years would have been better for me.

You can move to a new job because you’re excited about a new opportunity, or you can do it because there’s something wrong with your current work. Ask yourself, if you’re thinking of moving on: does the idea contain genuine sadness? If not, it’s a clue you may be leaving because you’re fed up with where you are.

A question to ask yourself

And if you’re leaving because there’s something wrong with the current job, there’s a vital but easily-avoided question to ask yourself. Is what’s wrong with this job really something about me?

This question is critical to happiness and success in your working life because when you move to another job you’re going to take yourself with you. And the risk is that you’ll continue to find fault with each job and never settle into something fulfilling.

There’s no shame if your struggle with a job is partly to do with you. It almost always is: we all have our strengths and weaknesses. And, if it is, it doesn’t always follow that you should stay in the job. I’ve just left a job I loved because it involved regularly working in the middle of the night. Now in my mid-fifties, that was starting to kill me, and I realized, belatedly, that I’d reached the point at which I had to, and I mean really had to, stop working nights. I can stop, just not in that job. But I went through that thought-process consciously, checking and double-checking that it wasn’t just that I was tired and needed a break (doable), or that something had pissed me off (surmountable).

There are, of course, other considerations. Do you realistically have the option of moving somewhere else? If you do, would somewhere else truly be better? What’s the current labor market like, doing what you do in places where you’d want to do it? Are you thinking about this because a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has arisen somewhere else? How would the move you’re contemplating affect any career goals you may have?

But the biggest mistake I’ve seen people make, and a mistake I made early in my career, is to jump before asking yourself, “What’s my part in what’s wrong with my current job, and what could I do about that?” Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Sometimes it’s better to learn how to have a good picnic on brown grass.

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Do use LinkedIn? I’d love to connect there.

Surviving Winter Working Life

In most of North America, the clocks go back in two weeks’ time. In most of Europe it’s in a week.1

This is the trigger, for me, for becoming a grumpy git. Leaving for work in the dark, leaving work in the dark, often seeing no daylight. Days are cold, dark, and rainy. My patients become morose, battling tonsillitis and family feuds. Deciduous trees are bare; there’s less birdsong; and everything’s muddy. More to do to keep the house warm, the vehicle running, feet dry. I sleep less well, eat too much, and become lethargic and crotchety. Until the first sounds and smells of spring, I’m no fun for my colleagues, patients, or partner.

What I Used To Do

A while back, at this time of year, I began reading and trying to follow a note to myself that I nerdily refined over several years. It reminded me how badly I deal with the winter, and encouraged me to take on fewer commitments, plan holidays, keep warm and dry, read more fiction, keep running regularly, ration my screen time, and make an effort to see (and probably depress) friends.

And, the last few years, I’ve tried using a bright light regularly each morning. There’s pretty good evidence this works for seasonal major depressive disorder (i.e. worse than me) and some evidence that it helps with milder symptoms (probably me at times). Impossible to be sure how much it helped me (I’m not a well-powered, randomized, placebo-controlled trial). But it was easy, safe, cheap, and only a little weird.

I think some of this did help, especially the stuff about spending my days well. But winters were still a struggle. I certainly hadn’t fixed the problem.

So this spring I was excited to come across a book, published last year by an academic psychologist, , called How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days.2 I read it. It’s great. And I’ve been saving it up for you ever since.

Winter Mindset

Leibowitz is part of a school of psychologists, many of them Stanford University-based, interested in the extraordinary extent to which what we expect to happen affects our experience of things. There’s a life-changing book about this by science writer called The Expectation Effect. (Highly-recommended.) Teachers and others are familiar with this from the ideas of growth mindset and its evil nemesis, fixed mindset. It’s near the heart of that most evidence-based of psychological therapies, cognitive-behavioral therapy. And it’s a major influence on some of the ideas underpinning this newsletter and the book I’m writing about all this.

The line Leibowitz takes, informed by her own research, is this: what separates those who thrive during the winter from grumpy winterers like me is our winter mindsets. Think of winter positively, as something to look forward to, and you’ll enjoy it. Think of it negatively and of course it’s going to make you grumpy.

In other words, my note to myself, reminding myself (as if an immutable fact) that I handle winter badly, got it all wrong. I should have been looking for things about the winter to relish.

And there are plenty of those. They depend on who, and where, you are. Some of mine: sunny winter walks. Winter food. Quiet evenings with candles and a fire and everything warm while a storm rages outside. Hygge. The peaceful sound of rain on the roof at night. The best sunrises. Freshly-fallen snow. Baking. Even some winter jobs, like clearing the roof gutters, or bringing in firewood, can be simple and satisfying. (Nature and the outdoors are vital to my wellbeing.) If you’re a city-dweller, your list may be different. But it can be just as long and just as good.

It’s a change of mindset, and I’m feeling energized and newly positive just by making that mental shift. Here comes winter: it’ll be fun; I’m going to make the most of it and focus on the good stuff; and it’ll be spring before I know it.

Leibowitz’s How to Winter has lots of practical advice. Here are just a few of her suggestions:

• Consider and focus on what you’re going to enjoy about winter.

• Plan a celebration for the night the clocks go back.

• Challenge your negative thoughts about winter. Remember: often it’s your reaction, not the situation. Might you be overreacting? Are you prone to dwell on the things you don’t like about winter, at the cost of the fun bits and your mood?

• Spend time outdoors, and pay attention to nature. It’s still there and it’s wonderful even in winter. Keep on getting exercise, outdoors, if that’s right for you.

• Explore ‘slow hobbies’—whether things you already enjoy or something new. Winter can be a season for slowing down, for doing less, and prioritizing restful things you enjoy.

• Smaller lamps, candles, a fire if you can, and overhead lights off.

  

• Speak up for winter with others. As Leibowitz writes, ‘Saying “It feels so good in here” upon entering somewhere warm has a completely different effect than “It’s so gross out.”3 By focusing on the positives of winter with others, you may improve not only their winters, but also your own winter mindset.

There are many more ideas in How to Winter but, more than that, the book captures the spirit of relishing the colder, darker months in the northern climes where it was researched. If you’re like me, if winter can grind you down, I’d really recommend you read it.

Multi-tasking, time-boxing, and gender

My last piece was about time-boxing. In a hilarious and wonderful comment, Great Work reader Katie Thrower speculated about whether women are, on average, better at juggling multiple things at once and whether time-boxing may be more useful to men.

There’s a serious point. And there is, I think, an answer.

First, what people are generally talking about when they say ‘multi-tasking’ is actually rapid task-switching. And there’s copious evidence that task-switching is terrible for everyone’s performance.4

Secondly, the gender difference thing is actually quite well-researched and the evidence is that that stereotype doesn’t reflect reality. The best study I’m aware of is Patricia Hirsch, Iring Koch, and Julia Karbach, “Putting a Stereotype to the Test: The Case of Gender Differences in Multitasking Costs in Task-Switching and Dual-Task Situations,” PLOS ONE 14, no. 8 (August 14, 2019): e0220150, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220150.

My guess is that what’s going on is that many women’s lives require an awful lot of task switching, to which women adapt, and by which women are disadvantaged.

Podcast

As well as the podcast version of this newsletter (above), I sometimes talk about Great Work ideas on other people’s podcasts. My Robot Boss is the brilliant Devon Forster McConnell’s podcast about how AI is affecting, and may affect, work and leadership. In her latest episode (below), we discuss being ground down by work you care about, AI in medicine, and more. Do consider signing up for My Robot Boss (Apple Podcasts, Spotify): it’s interesting stuff, whatever your perspective on AI.

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

An update …

It’s an exciting time at Great Work Towers! This weekend I head to the remote Indigenous reserve where, for the last few years, I’ve worked as a doctor for two weeks a month. This’ll be my last trip there for now—which is poignant, as it’s the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done, in a community that’s been extraordinarily welcoming to me and that has come to mean much to me. But I need a break (as I wrote about here) and the time has come to do some serious work on the book that’s behind this project.

So, from November, I’ll be taking a writing sabbatical, focusing on turning the first draft of the Great Work book into a second draft, and getting things ready to approach agents and publishers toward the beginning of next year. My own wintering project—and I’m really excited about it.

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Connect with me elsewhere (a nervous experiment)

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The podcast version is now being professionally edited. Have a listen above, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

This time: time-boxing, and a book review.

“Important-seeming things often sit on my ‘To Do Today’ list for weeks until I eventually abandon them.”

Daunted by your list of things to do? The most important change of perspective may be the realization that most of these things are never going to get done—and that’s fine. The definitive book about all this is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by . If you struggle with how much you have to do and you haven’t read Four Thousand Weeks, you really should.

But we still need to get some stuff done. And, if you want an approach to that, a structure for getting way more done while looking after yourself and being realistic about how much you truly can get done, the only techniques that truly work all seem to be based on some sort of time-boxing or time-blocking. I recently returned to time-boxing, after a lapse of a few years, and I’m wondering why I lost the faith. It’s not for everyone. But it makes me and many others way more productive—and more relaxed and rested. And you don’t have to go all-in: you’ll benefit from doing just a bit.

What is time-boxing?

The idea’s simple. Each day, when your head’s clear, perhaps first thing in the morning, you decide what your priorities are for that day: maybe a project (work or life), tasks, rest, time with people who matter to you, exercise, the administration of life, and the other important stuff.

This is, obviously, for those parts of the day, and those days, over which you have some flexibility. If you’re a teacher with seven scheduled hours or a nurse working a twelve-hour shift, you could time-box outside of those hours, and your unscheduled days.

Then you block out realistic amounts of time throughout the day for those priorities you identified. You feed things from your to-do list into a calendar in relatively small chunks of time. At 9 am, half an hour for this, followed by an hour and a half for that. Then an hour of this.

If your priority today is to spend the first six hours mooching around in your dressing-gown, time-box that, so it doesn’t get intruded upon by the bothersome work email you’re tempted to re-read, or (unless this is what you subsequently decide) by a spur-of-the-moment plan to tackle a DIY job.

And then you follow those blocks of time, focusing only on what you’d planned to do, modifying the plan as needed if something takes longer than expected or your schedule gets derailed.

And that’s more or less it.

Why?

Three huge benefits:

1. It forces you to be realistic about what you can get done in a day. My time-management Achilles’ heel is being wildly unrealistic about how much I can get done—and then feeling disappointed with myself at the end of the day when I haven’t achieved the impossible. With time-boxing you quickly learn that (for example) it’ll take about eight hours to write this article, record the podcast, and get it all ready to go out—not the two hours I began by allocating to it.

2. It allows you to prioritize the things that matter most, controlling those things that otherwise colonize a large chunk of your day (remember Parkinson’s law, that tasks expand to fill the time you make available to them). Time-boxing helps you ensure you actually get to the exercise you intended, or the rest that’s necessary to be more productive, or the time that you wanted to spend with your partner or kids.

3. It focuses you fully on one thing at a time, knowing you’ve made time elsewhere in the day for the other stuff on your mind.

In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes that “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”1 That’s the strength of time-boxing, leaving you more focused on what matters most.

If it’s not for your typical work days, because you’re the teacher with the full day of classes, the manager with a day of meetings, or me in a clinic or emergency room, it may be particularly valuable for days off that otherwise get consumed by chores at the expense of true leisure, for holidays where you find it hard to unwind because of the shapelessness of the day, and (I suspect), for retirement or sabbaticals, when those familiar with the structure of work often struggle.

It sounds horrible!

For some, including me, the thought of having things planned to this level is constraining, perhaps even stressful. I often want to be able to roll with how I’m feeling, be spontaneous, not micromanage myself or fit my days into tiny boxes on a calendar.

But we do have to do some thinking about how to balance what we want to get done today, and this week, if we want it remotely to reflect our wishes—including for rest and leisure, which tend to be marginalized. You can always alter your plan during the day. And the returns from time-boxing are immense. It’s not magic, but it may be the best way of ensuring that you do in fact have the day, and cumulatively live the life, that you want. To the extent that it’s a bit finicky, that may be a price worth paying.

And of course you can do it as much or as little as you want—just your mornings, your exercise, your social media use, or the spare-time writing of your novel.

It probably can add to your stress if you approach it as another thing you have to do, rather than as a helpful tool. The trick, I think, is to recognize that, if it starts going awry, you need to modify your approach. If, like me, you tend to wildly underestimate how long things will take, learn and recalibrate. (By making me more realistic, it’s reduced my stress about getting things done.) If it makes you feel you’re rushing from one thing to another, loosen it up, and build in more time to relax.

The effects

• It makes you reflect on, and then prioritize, whatever’s most important to you.

• It helps you ensure you build enough rest into each day. Remember the core Great Work idea that you’ll get more done, and do it better, if you take rest more seriously.

• It greatly reduces rapid switching between tasks, which is much more cognitively draining than we realize.2 It’s much easier to ignore notifications and interruptions if you know that you’re focusing on something for 45 minutes and can check after that.

• It makes it easy to schedule, and therefore contain, your internet time. If you’re someone who can’t resist checking your email inbox every ten minutes, or who inexplicably hasn’t disabled notifications for new email and looks at email the moment it arrives, you could probably schedule fifteen minutes every hour for email and still be more productive and less drained by the end of the day.

• It works nicely alongside the pomodoro technique. (This is a simple and startlingly effective strategy for work where you need to focus. At its simplest you use a timer to work in 25-minute blocks. After each 25 minutes of work, you have a five-minute break—or, every so often, longer. Each break clears your head and you work, and feel, way better.)

• It helps you use your leisure time the way you want to be using it—instead of filling it with chores or distractions and never doing the meaningful, nourishing things you really want to be doing with your time off.

I wonder whether, for those who, like me, are prone to grazing, it helps with healthier eating habits, too: you know what you’re doing next, so there’s less reason to distract yourself by looking to see if there’s anything appealing in the fridge.

It’s not perfect. It bothers me when the plan starts going awry—as of course plans do. (The book I’m about to recommend has good strategies for dealing with this.) And I sometimes feel a rebellious resistance to begin a time-boxed task that, in a less planned day, I might have turned to willingly. Perhaps I’m still not planning enough leisure.

But the measure isn’t does it solve all my problems perfectly? The measure (and here I depart a little from Oliver Burkeman) is does it significantly improve my life? And the answer to that, for me, is: Oh wow, yes!

The book

My return to time-boxing coincided conveniently with the recent publication of a book about it: Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time by .3

As regular readers know, Great Work has me reading a lot of prescriptive (‘how-to’) non-fiction on life and work. Getting to the point often involves hours wading through cherry-picked stories about successful US businesspeople and sportspeople, when the book’s point could sometimes be better expressed in twenty well-written pages. Timeboxing exemplifies how to write a useful book about a good idea. It’s intelligent, well-structured, concise, and elegantly written. Zao-Sanders has thought deeply about the whys and hows of time-boxing and about what derails real people from spending our time the way we want to. And it contains more wisdom than I was expecting.

It takes a day-by-day approach: there’s also a week-by-week time-boxing approach (familiar to many from Steven Covey’s enduring The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)—Covey advocated for a weekly focus, and I think it can achieve a better balance of priorities and tasks). And Zao-Sanders’ Timeboxing may be best served alongside Oliver Burkeman’s idea (in Four Thousand Weeks, and elsewhere) about the liberating necessity of accepting the impossibility of getting everything done.

But if you’re interested in how time-boxing could help you and would like a guide to implementing it, this is the book. It’s one I’m adding to the Great Work recommended reading list.

Videos!

As regular readers know, to get my own Great Work book published, I need to grow this newsletter substantially. The message people keep on telling me is “put short videos on social media.” So, with the help of a talented Gen Z friend, I’m cautiously (because I don’t want to get sucked in and I don’t want anyone else to get sucked in) dipping my toe into that water, with clips about Great Work ideas. If you’re on any of these platforms, do consider following me:

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Working as a GP you soon learn that, if a teacher’s made an appointment with you, more often than not it’ll be for something stress-related.

This means that there’s a lot the rest of us can learn from teachers who’ve figured out how to navigate their working lives without giving it all up to become florists.

And in this email I’m going to share some of that learning from Sarah Wendel. Sarah’s a mid-career middle-school teacher in Colorado, a parent, and a Great Work reader.

Sarah’s the kind of teacher you’d want to have, the teacher you’d want your kids to have. She’s no braggart but, talking to her, I’m a little overwhelmed by how much she cares. She’s excited by ideas. And she gives herself to her students—yet has also learned how to take care of herself and ensure her family doesn’t pay too high a price, too.

So what can we learn from her? Here are four of Sarah’s strategies.

Lesson 1: Boundaries at work

“I’m a real empath, and that’s a blessing and a curse. I wear my heart on my sleeve. And that makes me a great teacher, because students see that, and it makes me a really great relationship-builder with them. But because I’ve been doing it for a while, I’ve learned that I have to really set boundaries with them, because they take advantage of it because they’re teenagers. I’ve made mistakes, of course, where they’ve taken advantage of me and my vulnerability.”

Great Work is for people who care about their work. It’d be so much easier not to give a shit—but how meaningless would your work then be?

Giving a shit, though, comes with a cost: vulnerability. And a second cost: we may find boundaries harder to set. We value those connections. We’re keen to help. We need to feel needed.

What boundaries you need depends on the work you do. For Sarah it might include censoring, with her teenage students, some of the emotions she’d reveal to others. For me, a doctor, it sometimes means prioritizing what I can do for patients medically, remembering my limits when things start straying into social work, mentoring, relationship therapy, non-medical advocacy, or other realms. In fact, if you work with marginalized communities (whatever your role) and you give a shit, you end up doing little bits of all of those things and more. And, in a rural setting, you can’t help having students or patients who are also friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The trick is to be aware of what’s going on, and of the power imbalance, and to set (and sometimes discuss) sensible boundaries.

You learn to set boundaries by doing the job, making mistakes, and figuring out where your boundaries need to be. Yours, Sarah’s, and mine will all be drawn a little differently, and that’s fine. Those who run into difficulties are those who don’t think “Where should my boundary be?” in this role, or with this person, or in this interaction.

Lesson 2: Boundaries around work

How easy do you find it to switch from work to non-work?

Some people can flip a switch as they finish work for the day or the week. Others—including me and, it turns out, Sarah—can ruminate on some work problem all evening, and through the night, when we should be relaxing, spending time with people we love, doing things we enjoy, or sleeping.

“And so usually after school I have some time before I pick my kids up where I will run errands or I’ll go to an appointment or do something that kind of gives me some cushion instead of just walk out my school door, drive down the street and go get my kids. But I need a little bit of cushion time to transition from my workday to turning on mom mode.”

I’ll sometimes meditate for a few minutes after a heavy day, to clear my mind and reset for the evening. Too tree-hugging for some, meditation works for me.

Then there’s work intruding outside of work. “I’ve always been pretty good about not bringing my work home with me,” Sarah says.

“Like physically, I will leave my computer at school, because most of my stuff’s digital. The tricky part is the mental stuff, like if I get an email. I really try not to check my work email once I get home. That’s when I get my chance to deal with my own children’s stuff is when I’m done with work. And so if that’s when I get an email, I just perseverate and I have a hard time putting an end to that unless I deal with it, or respond, or whatever, and then I can move on. I have to close the door on work, metaphorically and physically, and not look at my work email. If I don’t have my computer then I can’t do any of my computer stuff. And then I can just be fully present.”

Leave your work computer at work, if that’s how work works for you, and make it hard to check your work email. (Could Sarah take her work email off her phone, or get a separate work phone, or somehow make it harder to check her work email when away from work? It’s when you’re most stressed that you’re most likely to check, seeking—but perhaps not getting—reassurance that there’s nothing there.)

Lessons: think about how you switch over at the end of the day, shelving work and immersing yourself in whatever you want to be immersed in. And do what you can to prevent work from intruding: practical solutions like Sarah leaving her work laptop at school, or technological solutions like setting your phone to block work texts out-of-hours.

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Lesson 3: Humility’s helpful. Imposter symptoms aren’t.

When Sarah first began teaching, she was working with a predominantly Latino/Latina population. “I was a minority in my own classroom, and I had never had that experience before.” And this was on top of being new to teaching.

“For most, really all of my life I’ve been surrounded by people who look like me, and who were like me, and came from a world very much like me. I distinctly remember my first couple of years of teaching, there were moments that were very, very challenging.”

And so here she is, right at the beginning of her career, and she’s experiencing the imposter syndrome. But that wasn’t because of inexperience, she explained. It was because she was white.

And of course Sarah was right to recognize her limits: she was trying to help kids grow into wiser, more adult versions of themselves when she didn’t have the expertise to fully understand what that meant.

But if you do work that matters, you’re always going to be able to find reasons to believe that you’re not up to the job facing you. And that humility will make you better at whatever it is you do. You’ll reflect on what you can do. You won’t pronounce on or do things when you really shouldn’t. And you’ll speak to others as equals, not from on high.

“And I’m so thankful that I did have that because I really believe it made me a better teacher and educator because of that experience.”

As I’ve written about before, imposter symptoms commonly derive from three beliefs: that you’re not as good as everyone else, that you’re not up to the task facing you, and that something awful’s going to happen as a result. Those three beliefs are almost always objectively false. Sarah wasn’t a member of the marginalized ethnic groups she was teaching: true. But it sounds like she was up to the job nonetheless. And nothing awful happened. In fact, it ended up being a good experience: she learned from it.

Fix the false beliefs and you fix that horrible feeling of being dangerously out of your depth. Humility’s good. Imposter symptoms aren’t.

For more on the cognitive-behavioral therapy approach to imposter symptoms that actually fixes it:

• Remember, Everyone Else is an Imposter, Too

• The Imposter Phenomenon: Not Just In Your Head

Lesson 4: Repair conversations

Previous emails have been about the importance of good working relationships and why we should, and how we can, have difficult conversations.

How do you fix bad feeling? Sarah has a lovely term for this:

“And there might be some lingering stuff like if I had a bad interaction with a kid. Those are things that I might perseverate on and think about how I could have done something differently. I will often have a repair conversation with a kid the next day, once I’m in a better place, and they’re in a better place, if I didn’t do it that day at school. And so I think about that kind of stuff.”

Repair conversation. I love (and will be stealing!) that expression.

But there’s another point here: it’s the evening and you’re worrying about some difficult exchange you had with someone at work. Ok, you can tell yourself, tomorrow, when the moment’s right, I will have a repair conversation. Now shelve that, and enjoy the evening.

Talking to Sarah I had the sense that, from her perspective, she’s still grappling with how best to navigate her tough working life. I think that’s how this seems to most of us. It does to me. But, whether or not it feels to Sarah like she’s nailed it, she’s figured out a lot. And it makes me feel better about the future of the world to know that there are teachers out there like Sarah, navigating their working lives, preparing their students to navigate theirs.

PS Do you have a story you might be willing to share about navigating tough work that matters to you? Reply and it’ll come straight to me.

Have you, through some terrible oversight, not joined this community of people who do tough work that matters? Sign up! It’s free, bullshit-free, and not selling anything.

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Big thanks to Sarah Wendel for the great conversation and for being up for this, and to Bren Russell for editing the podcast version.

Tired, exhausted, or burned out?

I’m a little exhausted at the moment.

My current job’s the most fulfilling one I’ve ever had, but my medical team leadership role is a big one that, despite being shared, is beginning to wring me out. I had last week off and went to see the new Superman film (ridiculous but fun). Afterwards, I switched on my phone to texts about three different work things. Meanwhile, I seem to have hit that point in life where working during the night, as I do when covering our emergency room a couple of times a week, leaves me with a hangover that lasts days.

I need a break.

But I’m not burned out. This is a distinction that matters. Let’s define three concepts for ourselves.

(1) Tired

You, me, and everyone else. Sometimes there’s something serious wrong (depression, say, or some other undiagnosed medical condition) but usually it’s 21st-century life. We cram in too much, and don’t rest well. We don’t afford sleep the vast respect it deserves. We disappear into mind-mushing social media. We prioritize not what matters most, but that which leaves us feeling drained. You’re tired? Welcome to the club. But read on for some ideas that may help.

(2) Exhausted

‘Exhausted’ comes from Latin words meaning ‘drained out’. I want to define it as something more dysfunctional than 21st-century tiredness. Exhaustion from work accumulates over time, and there’s a risk that your perspective starts becoming impaired. You may still be enjoying your work, getting moments of meaning and a sense of achievement from it—but perhaps less. You begin anticipating breaks as recovery, rather than just a shift of gear. People or things could begin to irritate you more than they should. Hang out in exhaustion-land for too long and it may get a lot worse: unless you do something about it now, you’re in danger of straying into the land of …

(3) Burnout

There’s a lot out there about burnout.

In the work context, burnout has an authoritative (if imprecise) definition, published by the World Health Organization:

“Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.” (ICD-11, § QD85.)

Focus on those words negativism and cynicism, and the sense of lack of accomplishment: with burnout, your work’s now making your life significantly worse.

Of course, work that’s burned you out may well be a bad job by anyone’s standard. But once you’re here, you’re unlikely to be seeing it from a healthy perspective, accurately evaluating its pros and cons. You’re seeing it negatively (‘negativism’) or cynically. You’re fed up, pissed off, ground down. Burnout’s closely related to, perhaps even a form of, depression. This is serious.

And worse?

There’s a fourth concept, beyond tiredness, exhaustion, and burnout. The Japanese language has a word for this: karoshi (過労死). Karoshi means death from overwork. But there’s nothing uniquely Japanese about karoshi: one international study estimates that, globally, three-quarters of a million of us die early each year as a result of excessive work hours.

Let’s try and fix this before we get anywhere near karoshi.

The wrong answer: resilience

Focusing on burnout seems to me a little like, when improving your swimming technique, focusing on drowning. There’s got to be a better approach.

The buzzword that often follows burnout is resilience, which might mean the ability to cope well with stressful situations, and perhaps to learn from adversity and bounce back stronger. This is obviously a Good Thing, though I’m not wild about resilience as a concept. It’s unambitious: we should aspire to thrive in our work, not just to cope. And the implication’s that the problem is that we’re weak, and we just need to toughen up. That’s both unhelpful and wrong. The solution is to improve work itself, and make next week, and next month, and next year, better. But that’s a tough project when we’re exhausted and beginning to lose perspective.

The right answers: several

As the writer H.L. Mencken noted, there’s a solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.1 Were there one simple answer to our feeling wrung out by work that we started off caring about, you’d know it already. But there are some good, effective, answers (plural).

The starting point is recognizing where you are on this spectrum that runs from 21st-century tiredness to karoshi, death from overwork. Know thyself. Pay regular attention to how you are, and ask yourself honestly: is this just the tiredness of everyday life, or are you—even if you’ve grown used to this—now exhausted or, worse, burning out?

The critical thing here is to spot that you’re becoming exhausted before you start burning out.

And then you need to figure out what to do about it.

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Tired?

Think about how you can build in more true rest and leisure, every day, and every week. You’ll get more done and do it better if you do.

We’re living in a pandemic of inadequate slumber. Sleep is phenomenally good for us: we should be protecting and prioritizing it at all costs.2 Aim for seven or eight hours, regularly, at the same time, undrugged.

And put your phone somewhere else for large chunks of every day and find things to enjoy that don’t involve the Internet.

Exhausted? Burning out?

The prerequisites are the same: prioritizing rest, true leisure, and sleep, and getting off those bloody devices.

But this is now more serious. Those basics are vital, but may not be enough.

Drop all responsibilities and commitments that aren’t either nourishing you or truly essential. You might be able to start doing this as soon as you’ve finished reading this.

Chew things over with someone who knows you and has good judgment.

Go on vacation somewhere where you can rest, regain perspective, and think about your next move.

Consider how you want to be spending your working life, and what you really don’t want to be doing: I’ve written more about that here.

Think about how you’re reacting to your current situation and how much of that’s the situation and how much is you. Could that change for the better?

And then, if things aren’t right, figure out what you can, and what you should, do about it. (And do follow the links if they look like they might be relevant.)

Do you need to say no to things to which you’ve been saying (or perhaps even already have said) yes? (How to say no well. And here’s something on pulling out of something to which you’ve previously signed up.)

Can your job be changed?

Can you reduce your hours? There’s good evidence that, paradoxically, most of us would get more done and do it better if we worked less hard. Teams and organizations that experiment with a four-day working week usually stick with it: people paid the same to work four days instead of five achieve more.

Would a sabbatical help?

Should you be looking for a new job?

Sometimes the answer will be to consider a new job or role. Remember that, if the problem’s partly how you’re handling things, as it almost always is, you’ll take your personality and all its idiosyncrasies and foibles with you to a new job. Would it be better to stick, for a while, in your current role, and work on better ways of handling its challenges? But perhaps the right thing for you, right now, is a change of job. If it clearly is, don’t be afraid to make a radical change just because it’s radical. Sometimes that’s just what’s needed.

My exhaustion, right now? I’ve reached the point where I need to give up the medical director job. And it took longer than it should have to realize that I have to stop working nights. But now I have realized. I’m sad to be saying goodbye to the remote Indigenous community that has so generously welcomed me for these last four years or so. But I’ll now be working here for only a few more months. And there are new and exciting challenges after that.

Thanks for the feedback

My last email was a snack-sized (really short) one. Thank you to those of you who clicked on the survey about whether you wanted more of those or whether you prefer these longer ones. Most of you prefer the deeper dives. Message received!

Where’s the book got to?

I’m writing a book about this stuff—and, honestly, these ideas fit together best in a coherent, practical manual that sets out the whole Great Work approach.

I now have a first draft of that book. And I know what I need to do to turn that into a better, second draft.

But to get this sort of non-fiction published successfully, you need what people in publishing call a platform: the influence, as an author, to ensure a good volume of early sales. I’m not there yet. I’m not a social media kind of guy. And you’ll have noticed I’m no Taylor Swift.

This Substack newsletter is my main platform. There are more than 1,700 of you reading or listening to it, which I can’t quite believe. But I need to add at least a zero to that number.

So I’m working on spreading the word. More on that soon. And doing some other platform-building things: I’m increasingly asked to speak at conferences, and on podcasts and in webinars, and that’s something I love doing. (Interested?)

I’ll be taking a writing sabbatical over the winter to finish that second draft. I’m excited about that: the writing’s something else I really enjoy.

My goal’s that, in six months’ time, I’ll be ready to start pitching the book to agents and publishers.

There: I said it!

And meanwhile, if you’re able to spread the word about this newsletter and help with that much-needed zero, I’d be hugely grateful. Use the button, or this link: www.adamsandell.com/newsletter.

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Comments? Ideas? Reactions? Do click on the ‘Comment’ button near the bottom—or just reply. All replies come directly to me—and I reply.

Next time: lessons from a middle-school teacher.

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Taking Work Relationships Seriously

Good relationships with everyone you deal with at work are central to your well-being and ability to get things done. There may come times when you have to sacrifice colleagues’ trust or warmth for some higher cause. But those times are rare.

Yet many of us, when something’s pressing our buttons, become spiky.

Breathe, check yourself, chew it over with someone wise. There’s almost always an approach that addresses whatever’s troubling you and strengthens relationships.

Of course, it helps if everyone else takes the same approach.

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Webinars

Thanks so much to those who responded to a survey a few weeks ago asking whether you’d be interested in free webinars on Great Work topics. Some of you are keen! The most popular topic was coping with mistakes, complaints, and litigation—but with several runner-up topics, including making difficult conversations easy. I may test out a webinar or two later in the year.

In case you missed it …

How often do you agree to something when you already have too much on your plate or your heart’s not fully in it—and then regret it?

A few people are a little too good at saying no, and their lives may be poorer as a result. But for most of us, including me, our sense of duty and good manners makes a diplomatic “no” so guilt-ridden that we say yes to things around which we should be navigating a country mile in a hazmat suit. (And let’s acknowledge that we make this harder for women.)

This poses a risk to those of us who do our work because we care about it—and to our work. We can end up distracted from what matters, overworked, and burnt out. Saying no is often the more responsible thing to do: worse than a “no” for everyone involved is a “yes” that’s followed by letting someone down, doing it resentfully, or the wheels coming off your wagon from overcommitment.

It doesn’t have to be like this. But that takes more than saying no well.

Know Your Priorities

Being good at saying “no” starts before anything’s asked of you. It takes clarity about your priorities. People who do this well, when asked if they can take something on, measure the request against things on which they’re already focused—cutting down on commitments, say, or spending more time with their kids, or advancing their career in some particular way.

And that shows them the right answer.

As I’ve written about before, you need clarity about what you want to do—and what you really don’t. (New here? That link’s to a story about a time I didn’t do this as well as I should have.)

Priorities help especially with those seductive things you’re asked to do that feel important or appealing, and that would perhaps flatter your ego or pad your wallet—but that you’d do at the expense of things that are even more important or appealing to your work or your life.

Set Personal Rules

Those who are good at this may safeguard their priorities with personal rules. A rule could be no weekend work, or that they aren’t going to take on management responsibilities, or no evening emails or meetings. (These rules shouldn’t be inflexible. Few rules can anticipate every eventuality. But flex one of your rules only after careful consideration, and on your own terms.)

Words that Work

How to say “no” becomes easier if you’re clear about your priorities. Be honest with yourself that it’s fine to decline—and why. If saying “yes” would be irresponsible, your “no” can be confident.

And when we say “no,” people are much less likely than we think they are1 to judge us negatively, to be offended, or to withhold future opportunities.

Vanessa Patrick, who’s written a whole book on saying “no,”2 suggests in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled3) that, instead of saying “I can’t,” you say “I don’t”: communicate that your refusal comes from rules you’ve set for yourself, rules you intend to respect. “I don’t” may sound a little pompous in some circumstances, but there are situations it suits.

Don’t hedge. If you say “I don’t think I can manage that at the moment—maybe next time,” you’re offering at least three separate vulnerabilities to someone who doesn’t respect your position. Try, instead, “I’m sorry: I can’t” (or “I don’t”). Keep it simple.

If you want it to be non-negotiable, make that clear. There’s no conflict between confidence and courtesy: use both. And this is a context where all reasonable people understand that saying you’re sorry when you’re not is just common courtesy, that you’re letting them down gently when you say you can’t do something that, if you had no other priorities, you could do.

“I’m flattered you ask but I just can’t.” “I’m having to prioritize other things.” “Afraid I have too much on already.” “I’m trying to break my habit of overcommitting, and this would be an overcommitment.” “What a lovely idea: I’m sorry I can’t.” Some of these formulations contain explanations, so be cautious with them if your “no” isn’t open to discussion. Often, what’s best is a friendly but assured “No thanks” or “Sorry—I can’t.”

And then remind yourself that you’ve chosen respect for your work, your colleagues, and your life. And now focus on what matters most.

P.S. In case you missed it, here’s a short talk on three core Great Work ideas.

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Thank you!

Here’s a short talk on three core Great Work ideas: how to get more done by working less hard, mastering stress, and why some teams thrive when the going’s tough. My audience this time was rural doctors in Canada—but this is for anyone doing tough work that matters.

Big thanks for video help to Rob Shaer, Heiko Decosas, Tanya Glafenhein, Emily Boardman, Monica Harvey, Rebecca Lindley, and talented video editor Joe Greenough.

Normal service resumes with my next email.

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Before we get to the feature presentation … interested in a Great Work webinar? I’m thinking about offering some on core Great Work topics. Like everything here, they’d be completely free. If you’re interested, would you take a minute (literally) to let me know what topics you’d like me to cover (impossible workloads? imposter symptoms? difficult conversations? team-related things? something else?) and what times/days work best for you? Click here. I’ll do this only if there’s some interest. Thank you!

What makes work good?

It’s a simple question without a simple answer. But high pay and low pressure probably aren’t what matter most.

Why do you do your work?

People tend to see their work as a job, a career, or a calling—and only one of those. If it’s a job, you’re doing it for the wages. If it’s a career, it’s for the income but also status and esteem—things most of us value, even if we’d like to believe otherwise. If it’s a calling, a vocation, you’re doing it for personal fulfillment, and it’s likely to be work that matters to the world.

The more you see your work as a calling, the more satisfied you probably are with your life and your job, and the more meaning you are likely to find in your work. (See here, and also Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Collins, 2018).)

Could this be because those with more resources can choose more interesting jobs and enjoy better lives? Probably not (or not only that): even within one occupation, such as administrative assistants, roughly equal numbers describe themselves as ‘job’, ‘career’, or ‘calling’ people. And having a calling to be an admin assistant brings the same benefits of satisfaction and meaning.

The authors of a related study describe hospital cleaners “actively caring for patients and families, integrating themselves into the workflow of their floor units.” These hospital cleaners “change the meaning of their jobs to be helpers of the sick; see the work of the floor unit as an integrated whole of which they are a vital part.” They’re right to do so: it’s better for their patients, for their colleagues, and for their own satisfaction and fulfillment.

What about the money?

The research on this seems to become more complicated with every year that passes. Money does buy happiness, at least up to a point (some studies suggest a good middle-class income level), but beyond that point, the benefits of earning more are less clear. (One appealing research finding is that, among the rich, those who earned their wealth are happier than those who inherited it.) The bottom line may be that, if you’re managing financially, the most life-improving feature of a new job probably isn’t the pay-bump. And remember the hedonic treadmill, the idea that the pleasure of an increase in income (or even of winning the lottery) wears off and, before long, we find ourselves back at our happiness baseline.

The pressure of the job

Much of Great Work is about coping with the pressures of tough work. But the most fulfilling job isn’t the one with no pressure. The best jobs may be those that involve a lot of what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi first described as the state of flow—‘being in the zone’. It’s when you’re fully absorbed in something in which you have some skill and over which you have some control, where you can see how you’re doing and, for a while, you’re removed from your everyday worries. This, thinks Csíkszentmihályi, is the definition of enjoyment.

You’ll know what flow feels like. Maybe teaching a class that’s going well, or in a conversation with a client, patient, or student where you know you’re helping and can feel it’s being appreciated. I’m in the zone as I write this email. I hope it’s something you sometimes experience at work.

Flow at work explains a paradox. Many of us look forward to the workday or the work week ending—but research by Csíkszentmihályi and others has found that we’re often in a better mood and more satisfied when we’re at work. This seems to be because, at work, we’re more likely to be stretching ourselves with flow experiences than we are during our time off, when we may spend less time in flow.1

You want a job that stretches you. Not too much. But nor too little.

So what does make good work?

There’s a nonprofit called 80,000 Hours that encourages people to find fulfilling work that makes a big difference to the world. The 80,000 Hours folk have studied the psychology that also underpins much of Great Work, and have identified six factors that contribute to a great job.2

1. The work’s engaging. This is the Csíkszentmihályi/flow point. Specifically, you need freedom to decide how to get the job done, clear tasks, variety, and feedback on how you’re doing.

2. Your work helps others. And remember (above) the benefits of doing work that feels like a calling to you—work that matters to you and to the world.

3. You’re good at it (or have the potential to become good at it). Nothing quite matches the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing a good job. (This is one reason why imposter symptoms, about which I wrote recently here, are so horrible.)

4. You have supportive colleagues.

5. The job doesn’t have major downsides. Impossible hours, perhaps, an unpleasant work environment, or a horrible commute.

6. The work fits with the rest of your life.

What do you do with this?

The main focus of the 80,000 Hours organization is helping people at the beginning of their working lives figure out a career that’s both fulfilling and impactful. If that’s you, they have all sorts of resources (all free) here. There’s lots of wisdom there, much I wish I’d considered while a student. Be aware, though, that their approach to evaluating impact leads to some surprising conclusions. They currently seem to be down a rabbit-hole about preventing an artificial intelligence catastrophe—a legitimate, if zeitgeisty, concern, but the world’s facing other pressing threats, too.

If you’re more established in your career, or trying to figure out how much longer to remain in your current job, or considering a move or a career change, then these six factors are really useful for auditing both your current role and your options. How does your current job, and any alternative you may be considering, score? All six matter:

1. Engaging?

2. Helps others?

3. You’re good at it?

4. Supportive colleagues?

5. Downsides manageable?

6. Fits with the rest of your life?

And that provides a great framework for your decision. Take a moment to do this for your current job. Your answers might surprise you.

Still here? A reminder—if you might be interested in a free webinar on a Great Work topic, and haven’t already completed the one-minute survey to let me know what topics you’d be most interested in and what times/days work best for you, would you click here and do so? Thanks so much!

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This one may resonate if you’re in a middle or later chapters of your working life. Earlier in your career? My next email may be more for you: hang in there!

Anthony, a colleague from years ago, wrote recently on LinkedIn about some professional exams he was about to do, later in life than most. Now in his forties, he was worried about changes he’d noticed in the sharpness of his memory. Could anyone offer reassurance or advice?

Why yes, Anthony, I can!

First, the Bad News

The decline’s real. It begins before you notice it, perhaps even in our twenties—in memory, reasoning, speed, and more, though it varies.

Anthony’s worry is common. It can even be a little scary. You make it to your forties or fifties and a few things slip your memory when once they wouldn’t have done: could this be how early-onset dementia starts?! Or, tired, you’re silently horrified to notice yourself jumbling, for a moment, two concepts you know to be unrelated—something unthinkable a decade ago. When this happens, I’ve seen people who work with their brains start to doubt that they’re going to be able to keep up, to stay safe, to be as good as they want to be.

Smart, reflective, observant types often notice these changes early. They value their intellect, so they worry.

And Now the Good News

You really don’t have to worry about this.

Psychologists’ tests, calibrated to detect small differences, can pick up declines over the decades. But the changes of normal age-related cognitive decline are small, and the mistakes trivial. Observant types notice changes that are real but just aren’t relevant to life or work. This normal decline is vastly outweighed by the benefits you’re reaping from your growing knowledge, good judgment, and skill at managing yourself.

You can see this in the research: like wine, cognitive abilities based on accumulated knowledge improve with age.

You’ve never been as old as you are today. Nor have you ever been as wise as you are today.

Toni Morrison, Diana Athill, and Isabelle Allende were (still are, in the case of Allende) writing brilliantly in their 80s or beyond (including memoir—memories). Benjamin Franklin was 81 when he helped draft the US Constitution. All gifted people, and none immune from age-related cognitive decline.

Don’t worry about it.

So …

Henry Ford is supposed to have said that, “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.” This idea is grounded in the well-studied psychology of mindset. Believe you can do well, and you’re more likely to do the work and succeed; think you’re stuck, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy too. This isn’t new-age platitude or toxic positivity: it’s grounded in much solid research. The leading name in this corner of psychology is Stanford professor Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.1 But perhaps the most thought-provoking book I’ve read on this topic (and I’ve read a lot) is ’s The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World,2 a fascinating and readable account of how what you expect to happen has big effects on everything from your mental abilities to how you handle stress (on which I’ve written here) to your exercise performance to physiological changes in how your body responds to food.

These are self-fulfilling beliefs about your abilities. And research shows they can be changed, pretty easily.3

So … let go of those worries. Remind yourself that any trivial decline your observant mind may have noticed can be disregarded. It’s more than compensated for by the skills, wisdom, and self-knowledge you’ve acquired over the years. Your detecting these trivial changes (many don’t) is a sign of your sharpness. You have an advantage. Let that be your focus: you’ll be fine.

Oh, and, however young or old you are, prioritize sleep, every day, all the time. For cognitive function, everything else pales in comparison to the importance of a good seven or eight hours of undrugged sleep, every night.

P.S. Want to connect with me on LinkedIn? I’m not a social media person. But LinkedIn is so dull that I reckon I’m safer experimenting with it, including posting some of these articles there, too. Find me here.

P.P.S. This isn’t an easy time to be looking for work. But many who do work that makes a difference are now finding themselves in that situation. If that’s you, I’d recommend the intelligent approach set out in this talk by Spencer Campbell and Dan Freehling, both experts in finding good jobs that make the world a better place.

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Of all the challenges that come up when I’m supporting people who do work they care about, imposter symptoms—feeling like you’re a fraud and out of your depth—may be the most common. Even if that’s not you, it almost certainly blights the working lives of people you know—and you can help.

I’ve written about the imposter phenomenon before. It’s horrible. People with imposter symptoms can’t enjoy their work, and live in fear of being found out or, worse, of screwing up something important. Women are affected more than men, though it can burden anyone. I’ve experienced it myself—as a litigation lawyer and, later, as a doctor, returning to work in an emergency room after many years of clinic-based medicine, despite a lot of retraining and updating. It’s been defined as the subjective experience of perceived self-doubt in one’s abilities and accomplishments compared with others, despite evidence to suggest the contrary.

At least, that’s how psychologists understand the imposter phenomenon—or imposter syndrome, as it’s often called. But a Great Work reader recently shared with me this thoughtful article (now behind a paywall) by feminist writer . Her perspective is that we shouldn’t think of this as a syndrome because that implies that the problem’s with the person experiencing it. Imposter feelings, she writes, are a rational reaction1 to a culture that treats women, especially women in positions of authority, as imposters. If society murmurs, “This isn’t a job for people like you (women, members of ethnic minorities, people from lower classes or castes)” then of course you’re going to start doubting yourself.

This is feeling an imposter because of the role, your identity, and the culture in which you’re working. Those may all be facts, not misconceptions.

As the definition I quoted above shows (“perceived self-doubt in one’s abilities and accomplishments compared with others, despite evidence to suggest the contrary”), psychologists have approached the imposter phenomenon differently. By that definition, you feel like an imposter not because of your role and what society says about who should occupy it, but because of misconceptions about your abilities. And those misconceptions aren’t facts: they’re false beliefs that can and should be changed.

I’ve written previously about how, if you feel like an imposter and that’s making work hard for you, the solution lies in that most evidence-based of psychological therapies, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Identify the underlying beliefs (usually, that you’re not up to the task, and that something awful’s likely to happen as a result) and then review, as objectively as you can, the evidence for and against those beliefs. Consider whether there are more accurate beliefs to which, if you care about the truth, you should commit. From my earlier article:

… seen clearheadedly, you almost certainly are up to it. You’re probably doing whatever you do because you’ve been trained to do it, because you have experience, because you’re smart enough to work out what to do, because someone’s measured you up and concluded you’re up to it. You’ve likely faced situations like this one before, more stretching ones, even, and things have worked out fine. Your selectively-remembered screw-ups are probably no worse than your colleagues’ own quietly filed-away mistakes. Whatever the challenge is, it probably isn’t as hard or as serious as it first seems. And if you’re not up to it? Blessedly, things usually work out ok anyway. Our anxious minds mushroom imagined bad outcomes, sometimes as trivial as someone briefly thinking badly of us, into calamities.

CBT’s effectiveness is driven by a wonderful feature of the human mind: fixing wonky beliefs fixes the unhelpful feelings that come with them.

But Caroline Criado Perez has convinced me that there’s something missing from psychology’s account of the imposter phenomenon. Underlying many people’s beliefs that they’re not up to the job is a sense that the role they’re in isn’t a role for people like them—because of personal characteristics such as being a woman that, in our unequal societies, are probably exactly why their voice is so important in their role. That’s one reason why the imposter phenomenon affects women more than it affects men.

I write about solutions. Caroline Criado Perez is surely right that the solution to women feeling fraudulent in positions of authority is to change the culture. And if you’re not doing your bit for that, you may be part of the problem. (It’s ironic that, as I write this, the Wikipedia article on imposter ‘syndrome’—not the term preferred by academic psychology, Caroline Criado Perez, or me—claims that it affects men and women equally. That’s demonstrably false. Women have it worse.)

But what can you do, right now, if you’re struggling in your job because you don’t think you’re good enough and, underlying that, is a sense that jobs like yours aren’t really for people like you?

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose 314th birthday I’m sure we’ll all be celebrating on Wednesday, can help us out here. Hume spotted that it’s logical nonsense to say anything about how things ought to be based solely on how they are.2 You can’t get an ought from an is.

In other words, the fact that (say) there aren’t many doctors in North America who are Indigenous women doesn’t, on its own, say anything about whether Indigenous women should be doctors. You’d need an ‘ought’ to prime any conclusions about how things ought to be.

Here’s a good one: professions and people in positions of authority ought to reflect the societies they serve.

And that opens up role-based imposter symptoms to fixing through CBT. This isn’t a job for people like you? Bullshit. If there aren’t many people like you doing this job it’s all the more valuable that it’s you doing it. Think of someone else from an underrepresented group doing work that matters: you’d not just say but truly believe that about them, wouldn’t you? So commit to it for yourself, too. Fix the wonky belief and you fix the unhelpful feeling.

It’s never simple. You have to correct false beliefs over and over until they, and the feelings that go with them, go away. And it’s everyone’s job to help—supporting colleagues from underrepresented groups, signaling our respect for them at every opportunity, showing that this is a job for people like them, and doing our bit to change the culture. And that’s how the world gets better.

Two final points. First, big thanks to Great Work reader Mark Strathdene for sharing Caroline Criado Perez’s article with me. And: Great Work is necessarily about equality. This is an important part of the book, but I haven’t said enough about it in this newsletter yet. There’ll be more.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

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A warm welcome to the hundreds who’ve signed up recently.

One Little Thing to Make Your Next Week Better

Perhaps the most important approach of those who thrive despite having too much to do and too little time is to appreciate that it’s not about time management. Time’s going to do its own thing, as it has been doing for 14 billion years, and there’s nothing you can do about that. In the best book there is on time management, Four Thousand Weeks, writes that time “is like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.”

What you can manage is yourself—and, in particular, your energy. (And your expectations of yourself, as Oliver Burkeman considers in his wonderful, newest book Meditations for Mortals.)

As you’ll know if you’ve been reading since the early days, a key Great Work strategy is to recognize that most of us are working hard enough that we will—wonderfully—achieve more, better, by working a little less hard. In other words, go a little easier on yourself, give yourself a break, and you’ll get more done, and enjoy it more, too.

I’ve written more about this, and the evidence to support it, here …

Great Work

Get more done, and do better work, by working less hard

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2 years ago · 11 likes · 4 comments

… but, this time, I want to offer you a challenge. In the seven days ahead of you, can you build in some substantial rest that you wouldn’t otherwise have had—and then pay attention to how you feel at the end, and to how effective you’ve been at whatever your priorities are right now?

Here are three versions:

• The bronze challenge: schedule just two hours of true rest when you wouldn’t otherwise have had it.

• The silver challenge: two three-hour rest sessions.

• The gold challenge: a whole day of rest (a sabbath), with only enjoyable things planned—and two or three hours somewhere else in the week, too.

Plan when you’re going to do it—and what you’ll do. Rest means rest: not scrolling on your phone, not doing a chore that’s been hanging over you, but doing something purely for the pleasure of doing it: reading fiction, going for a walk, listening to music, meeting up with an old friend, or whatever you find most restful.1

Appealing? Could you do it? Even just the bronze challenge?

I’d be willing to bet that, if you do this, you’ll be surprised by how much better the week feels, and how much more you get done. I’m pretty sure it’ll be so positive that you’ll want to think about how you can make planned rest a regular thing. Report back!

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Substack Chat

Interested in discussing this? Substack, the platform that hosts Great Work, has a chat feature for readers and writers to discuss things. I haven’t yet used it—and many Great Work readers are email-only, which is fine. But, if you’re interested in a conversation about fitting more rest into your week, or anything else Great Work, head over to the chat I’ve just created: I’d love to chew this over with you. Website or Substack app.

Great Work chat

Further Reading

On this topic of getting more done by working less hard, I’m not going to stop recommending ’s book Rest (Penguin Life, 2017)—a book that truly changed my life.

TV Show Recommendation

A variation of my occasional fiction recommendations: a four-episode British drama called Adolescence. A thirteen-year-old boy is arrested for murdering a girl in his school. Each episode approaches the story from a different angle and point in time and, astonishingly, is filmed in a single, hour-long take. It’s thoughtful, gritty, troubling, and superbly acted. Whether you’re a teacher or a parent, are involved in criminal justice or just care about the world, it’s hard to watch without mulling it over for a long time after you’ve watched it. Netflix only, alas. As my Canadian partner discovered, if your ear’s not attuned to Liverpudlian accents, you may want to switch on subtitles.

Next email (perhaps): a new approach to imposter feelings; winter; career choice.

PS Remember, you can reply to any of these emails. I love hearing from other Great Workers, and I always respond.

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