Avoid work

Actually productive work, with competent colleagues whom you respect, will be tremendously rewarding and a huge contributor to your overall wellness.

Just avoid those other kind of work places....

It´s not a rule, it basically is a principle in a form that´s easy to remember. It clearly needs adaptation to the personal way of life. I think you got the spirit of it very well.
I do not mind to finish a task when it takes staying after my usual office hours. However when I decide to call it a day, I do so. I do not keep chewing it over when I am out of office. The results benefit from it.
A coworker who used to allow work life to take over his personal life entered a vicious circle. His performance dropped rapidly causing him to have to sacrifice even more of his personal life. Eventually he ended up with almost a year of treatment for a burn out syndrome.

I am trying to figure out the shooting thing, too-do you think that air rifles, archery, or video game shooters might push the same marksman buttons?


Good luck with the residency-being a doc seemed to be a lot more fun years ago than it is now. Happiest doc I know retired from faculty radiology work and opened up a clinic on st. thomas-no labs, no radiology, limited pharma for folks with no money and no access to health care. he gets paid in fruit and chickens, everybody loves him, no lawyers, no quality improvement studies...he smiles a lot.

Speaking for myself, archery does nothing for me. Air rifles are a little bit of fun but I have never bothered to own one. A really good shooter on PC or a console gives me a little bit of the same fun I get from real shooting, but it isn't much of a substitute for me. YMMV.

Excellent discussion. In my case I have a lot of different hobbies and I switch back and forth depending on my mood. I hunt, fish, bicycle, metal detect, read, hike, etc.

I have an awful time leaving things at work. I'm an RN working on a critical care unit. I couldn't even begin to count the times that I have woke up in the wee hours of the morning worrying about a patient. I told a colleague once that my job would be a lot easier if I didn't care so much.

LW

Having a few close friends and relatives going through burn out syndrome really started some thought processes. Each and every person has to work out the balance between their own ambitions, their boss' ambitions and the need to dedicate part of your time to something completely unrelated to work. Nothing stimulates those thought processes as seeing people close to yourself being reduced from aspiring, ambitious and industrious hard working fellows into passive, doubt-I'm-up-to-anything-today kind of guys and girls. (Of course, watching their gradual recovery was highly fascinating...)

My shortlist to avoid that from ever happening to me:
1) Nothing work related is my personal problem. My spouse is at home, NOT at the office. I am married to her, not to my work.

2) Don't try to solve everything "urgent" at once. Nothing immediate is life threathening crucial to solve RIGHT NOW (and if it actually comes close, you WILL know it, and everything else will have to be put aside for a while!). Prioritize and realize that you only can do SOME of those urgent tasks today - the rest will have to wait.

3) I am not Superman, and won't pretend I am.

4) It is my duty to report any shortcomings in an honest manner up front, including the fact that me prioritizing X, Y and Z means that A and B won't get much attention. Or that area Q is outside my compentence, requiring reading, training and TIME if I am the person that should do it.

5) Work should be FUN, as much as possible.

6) It is my duty and responsibility to make sure I MAKE TIME for building my own competence in new and interesting areas. Otherwise, forget about item #5 ever happening...

7) Use electronic meetings to your advantage. In particular, any potential dull meeting that you can't avoid should be electronic. Checking email at the conference table is NOT ok, but you can do whatever you want in a dull electronic meeting. That strategy has the added benefit of reducing travels if you are located off-site from the main office.

8) Don't multitask, with the possible exception of #7 (which is only done to preserve your mental health and increasing the odds of #5). Multitasking doesn't work, will give you the attention span of a squirrel (you actually train yourself to not consentrating on anything for more than 3 minutes straight!) and will both degrade the quality of your work and increase your stress level. Some tips:
- NO bells and whistles for incoming emails and other means of electronic communications.
- Make yourself unavailable when you have to concentrate.
- Schedule yourself for "email processing" once, twice or a similar low number of times each day. You MIGHT allow yourself to scan through your inbox for anything particular interesting when you aren't explicit doing something else, but it is dangerous territory which quickly degrades into "have to respond NOW" syndrome.
- Switching tasks after a reasonable amount of hard work is OK, but that time intervall should not be too short. And know yourself well enough to distinguish between procrastination, "check email"-fewer and the healthy need to refocus after prolonged concentration.
- Use an electronic "to do" list (todoist.com is GREAT) and releave yourself of the burden of carrying "due dates" in your head. Not to mention the fear of ever forgetting something... Dumping all that into a reliable electronic system is a huge stress reliever and greatly increases creativity!
- Take electronic notes. Searchable and much more reliable than your head. Your head is not a memory storage facility, stop treating it like one and use it to THINK instead!

how do you guys respond to executives demands setting their personal electronic toys?

I work in IT and they treat me like some slaves. I have to set up their personal phones. It isn't even related to work.

I am afraid this is like preppers should not show the world what they have on store. If your boss knows everything you are capable of doing, and he is the right ( or wrong ) type of personality , he will enslave you by his endless demands.

Try using the phrase ( I don't know ) more often.

I let my supervisor deal with it. It´s his job to assign tasks to me and say no to customers if there is not enough capacity. The real problem with those tasks is that time needs to go there and the time is taken from the tasks I am supposed to accomplish with a deadline. If the supervisor is not involved he just sees that my tasks get delayed without proper cause.
We are required to write up our time, so even when I do it we charge for it (which means if push comes to shove, the executive has to respond for wasting resources on private issues). When my supervisor is comfy with me delaying work items for that setup, I am comfy too. Experience shows that he usually is not comfy with delay on his projects.