Separation of Communication

Hey - It’s Michael.

Great opportunities arise & things change - I’m quite excited about it. Enjoy the newsletter!

Late night, you unlock your phone and reply to a few private messages. Suddenly a message from your colleague pops up. You answer and your head is back at work. Racing, spanning, whirling.

A relaxing saturday afternoon, you book your holiday with your spouse. You check the booking confirmation. Just a short check of other emails - 2 work emails come in and your mind starts to loop around unfinished ideas for this project and that conversation.

Every time you are in recovery mode and you read a work message, your brain ramps up for work again.

So essentially you can never really recover from the daily stresses of work.

Understand that stress is not inherently bad or good. It’s just a certain level of activation in your nervous system to have energy to get things done.

However, in order to function well & healthy long-term, you need to make sure to protect recovery phases for your body with low levels of stress.

This is impossible if you are constantly connected to your work.

One of the simplest tools is to introduce a strict separation of private & work communication.

Principle:

Separate all work & private communication channels to be able to mute them at will

In the end it’s nothing but control of attention. You want to be able to fully shut off communication in work matters in order to avoid accidentally ramping up your nervous system.

There are several logistical possibilities. Find one that works for you.

The key is always to be able to avoid seeing any message related to work, if you don’t want to.

The possibilities are either:

Hybrid separation:

You keep work related social media apps, access to your work mail and work chat clients on your phone.

This is dangerous territory - activating your nervous system is always just a touch away. At least, turn down all your notifactions, put all these apps in one folder and seek to keep it closed during down time.

Full separation:

Use a work laptop & work phone and do not log into any mail/messenger accounts on your private phone.

This is of course the most effective because you can physically control who reaches you by simply turning off the devices at night & on weekends.

I believe the worst setup is having no dedicated work communication channels at all. A simple example is using your Whatsapp for both work related and private communication. You’ll always be on and it’ll be hard to impossible to mentally recover from your work - ever.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” - Anne Lamott

If I had a second chance, what would I change? How can I implement this change from now on?

See you next week - Michael