It’s amazing to complete all your tasks on time, especially when you have a busy job and demanding family life. However, in our digital age, many are falling prey to the siren call of relentless productivity. A survey conducted by Airtasker found that 29% of remote workers struggle with work-life balance, and 22% report not being able to unplug from their work.
This growing obsession with constantly getting things done can culminate in toxic productivity, a phenomenon where the pursuit of work leads to burnout, reduced mental well-being, and strained personal relationships.
Remote work, popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic, is celebrated for offering efficiency, flexibility, and a better work-life balance. However, it’s evident that maintaining a healthy balance is more vital than ever, especially when the line between your job and personal life is so easily blurred. Here are a few tips to help you strike the right balance when working remotely.
What Is Toxic Productivity?
Toxic productivity is the uncontrollable urge for continuous productivity at the expense of other important areas in your life. It manifests when you push your productivity to the extreme, trying to get things done. Mostly, toxic productivity leads to turbulent relationships and health issues. While healthy productivity is essential for career and business success, it becomes problematic when you push yourself too far.
What Causes Toxic Productivity?
Modern society values high productivity, but there’s a faint line between healthy and harmful output levels.
- Corporate culture: While some organizations have robust measures to mitigate toxic productivity, others focus on profitability. Typically, when a company prioritizes work output at the expense of life-work balance, employees are compelled to overwork.
- Unrealistic expectations and competition: Most people have unrealistic goals and expectations about what they must accomplish. However, chasing unrealistic goals can push you into a vicious cycle of frustration and burnout. Similarly, competition among peers often leads to overworking, especially when striving towards work promotion.
How Do You Identify Toxic Productivity?
Healthy productivity is non-toxic and necessary for optimum efficiency in different areas of your life. It can help you accomplish boring tasks at work or home. However, productivity becomes toxic when work replaces vital personal needs, making you feel a constant urge to overwork.
Toxic productivity and overworking can look different for different people, depending on your career and personality. While some people tend to neglect their personal chores like laundry, others experience relationship hardships because they are always working.
7 Signs of Toxic Productivity
- Never-ending To-do Lists: Continuously adding tasks and rarely feeling a sense of accomplishment, no matter how much is completed.
- Guilt During Downtime: Feeling guilty or anxious when taking breaks, resting, or engaging in leisure activities, believing every moment should be productive.
- Declining Health: Ignoring health concerns, skipping meals, or sacrificing sleep to get more done. Chronic fatigue or stress may become common.
- Neglecting Personal Relationships: Prioritizing work or tasks over spending time with loved ones or fulfilling personal commitments.
- Lack of Satisfaction: Despite achieving goals or completing tasks, there’s a lack of fulfillment or joy. There’s always a feeling that one should be doing “more” or, in other words, a need for overachievement.
- Decreased Work Quality: Pushing oneself to constantly produce can lead to a decline in the quality of work, as the focus shifts from doing things well to just getting them done.
- Avoiding Self-Care: Viewing self-care activities like relaxation, meditation, or hobbies as “wasteful” or “unproductive.”
5 Essential Tips for Avoiding Toxic Productivity
It’s easy to get trapped in toxic productivity, especially when facing uncertainties or trying to get a promotion. However, the cycle leads to exhaustion and burnout.
Everyone needs time to relax, manage emotions, and enjoy personal time with friends and family. Since productivity requires balance, the following can help you achieve the right remote work productivity.
1. Set Healthy Boundaries
Remote work offers outstanding flexibility, but it’s essential to establish healthy work habits and clear boundaries to avoid burnout and ensure your well-being. Ideally, you should establish specific working hours and communicate the same to colleagues and supervisors to prevent conflict of interest.
Remote workers need strict boundaries to ensure a perfect work-life balance. You can start by setting specific times for your daily work session to create a routine. Dressing in professional clothing can help remote workers feel like they’re in the office. Similarly, set a specific time to stop working regardless of your workload.
Your family is essential, but they must understand there are times when you need space and privacy to work uninterrupted. Most importantly, your coworkers should understand your availability schedule so you can focus on your family when not working. While resisting the urge to respond to work emails is difficult, responding to every communication outside normal working hours can compromise your work-life boundaries.
2. Prioritize Your Health
Neglecting self-care is easy when your job takes up much of your attention throughout the day. However, it’s almost impossible to maintain a work-life balance if you don’t take care of your health. Remote workers should prioritize exercise, healthy meals, and sleep for rejuvenation. Typically, people with a strict commitment to a healthy remote work lifestyle are less stressed and more energized.
Regardless of the nature of your work, focusing on your health and well-being is vital to achieving optimum balance. Always get enough sleep at night and start the day with a healthy breakfast to maintain your energy levels. You can also schedule workout sessions with your spouse to enhance your life-work balance without getting overwhelmed.
3. Focus on Networking and Professional Development
Remote work offers invaluable opportunities to focus on your professional and personal growth. You can invest in skill development through webinars, online courses, and industry certifications relevant to your career specialization. For instance, finance professionals can consider a graduate diploma in financial planning to ensure steady career growth.
Also, you can participate in industry forums, virtual networking, and online communities to enhance your professional network. While the efforts may seem subtle, they can open lucrative opportunities in your career.
4. Maintain a Manageable Workload
Unrealistic workloads can be overwhelming and often compromise healthy productivity. Ideally, you should refrain from working and sending office-related emails or calls. However, off-work tasks and communication stem from unmanageable workloads.
When overtime work is available, grab a few tasks, but don’t let overtime wages entice you to take on stressful extra work. On the contrary, avoid additional workload if it interferes with your family life. Some remote workers worry about being left out if they take a family vacation. This shouldn’t be the case, especially when your work is demanding. Regardless of your contract terms, negotiate a fair workload and practical timelines.
5. Set Clear Expectations and Avoid Perfection
Working from home doesn’t mean you have unlimited time and energy to work around the clock. Sit down with your employer and agree on specific expectations. If your supervisor expects you to work 30 hours per week, split the time into several chunks so your employer knows how much work you can handle on a specific day.
If you have other commitments, move the work hours to your favorite workday to cover your weekly allocation. In addition, let your supervisor know you can switch off your phone when not working.
While pursuing perfectionism in your work is easy, it may lead to toxic productivity. Instead, strive for excellence to ensure a healthy balance when working remotely. You may not have all the resources or perfect solutions to designated tasks, but a slight mind shift can help you avoid perfectionism.
What Tools Can Help to Avoid Toxic Productivity?
If you’re aiming for healthy productivity that allows you to boost your career and responsibilities, these tools and resources can help you:Category Tool/Resource Brief Description Time Management Tools Toggl Time-tracking tool for understanding where your time goes. RescueTime Monitors computer activity to give productivity insights. Pomodoro Technique Work for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break. Task Management Trello Visual task management with cards and boards. Asana Helps teams coordinate and manage work. Mindfulness & Mental Health Headspace Guided meditation and mindfulness practices. Calm Meditation, sleep aids, and relaxation practices. Break & Reminder Tools Stretchly Reminder to take breaks and stretch at intervals. Stand Up! Reminds users to take regular standing breaks. Workspace Optimization f.lux Adjusts screen color to reduce eye strain.
Final Thoughts
Toxic productivity is detrimental to workers and often culminates in business inefficiencies. Mostly, toxic productivity leads to burnout, stress, emotional instability, and depression. Typically, no one can maintain long-term productivity under unhealthy work schedules.
As personal and professional commitments evolve, it’s harder to maintain optimum work-life balance. However, achieving a balanced life is a choice, and you can embrace a healthier remote work routine.
