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Key points
- Set boundaries between work and home in order to prevent burnout, even if you love what you do.
- Break the career curse by realizing that work could monopolize your family and relationship time.
- Break the career curse by checking in with yourself to evaluate your sense of work-life management.
- Break the career curse by being present in your personal life, rather than hiding behind work
Everyone seems to worry that you work too much. You have hard time unplugging and know that you desperately need to hobby. However, you are absolutely passionate about your work, so doesn't that make it okay?
The overall job satisfaction rate at 57% has increased steadily for ten years and almost as high as 1995. Reaching for the stars translates to fulfilling a calling and being passionate about career choices.
Loving your professional life makes it easy to get sucked in by taking on more projects, joining more committees, and becoming involved with more, more, and more of this, that, and everything else. Look at the towering sandwich, can you see past it? Even though you love the taste of every bite, you will eventually have to finish it. Once you finish the sandwich, can you eat anything else? We all have a maximum capacity!
The curse of career happiness is the struggle to stop working when it might not be appropriate to work, such as during family time, social gatherings, as well as time devoted to hobbies and personal well-being only because you simply love what you do. You are an absent presence because you are physically present, but your mind is elsewhere or you are on your device handling business. It is a natural instinct to acquire more work and feels extremely painful to say “no” to an opportunity when the plate is piled too high.
For instance, when planning a dissertation study it is easy to get overly ambitious when you are passionate about the topic so the purpose of the study could be lofty and unmeasurable. The intrinsic motivation might drive the candidate to create a large, long, and complex study, also known as Save the World Dissertation Studies; while forgetting that the purpose of the study is to graduate and realize those Save the World Studies can be done later when not paying for university credits as a student.
The key to not letting your work plate get piled so high is to set and maintain concrete boundaries between your professional and personal worlds.
It’s hard to stop “working” because you love what you do without letting work spill into your personal life. However, here is why you need to set those boundaries to stop working and take time for the people, topics, and activities you cherish, as well as for yourself:
Break the career curse by taking mental and physical break by doing something else, like a hobby, will only improve your work performance.
Sometimes, we have to stand still or slow down in order to speed up and improve. Our devices need to be recharged in order to continue working. Sound familiar?
Break the career curse by realizing that work could monopolize your family and relationship time.
Sometimes our biggest mistakes are the ones we do blindly and innocently. You will never get that time back.
Break the career curse by checking in with yourself to evaluate your sense of work-life management.
How are you doing with managing the needs of both? If feeling burnt out, more personal time might be needed.
Break the career curse by being present in your personal life, rather than hiding behind work.
Only you can answer that truly and honestly. It's a tough one, but it might help you evaluate the quality of your personal life to see if you need to make any adjustments.
If you are within that 57% group, I hope you become a pro at creating and maintaining boundaries between your professional and personal worlds, since it will help your career in the long run. You need to nurture your soul in other ways or you too will crash, like if you added more to that sandwich. Do not crash and burn yourself out. You are too good for that ☺. How can you create thicker boundaries between your work and personal lives?
To learn more about how to prevent creating those Save the World Dissertation Studies, check out my book Finish Your Dissertation, Don’t Let it Finish You!
