How hard should you be working?

I did have a few sections planned out to give a bit of an analysis of the different variables involved in checking your workload. On reflection, this knowledge is meaningless. What it comes down to is; what are you happy to do?

I’ve made a point of saying “happy to do”, instead of “prepared to do” or “able to do”. Our happiness is an incredibly intuitive metric. It’s something most of us have a pretty firm grasp on already, yet we continually de-prioritise and disregard it.

You’ll know you’re working too hard because when you reflect, in those sparse moments of silence, you’ll realise that you’re simply not okay with the current situation. There’s your alarm bell.

What you do in response to that is the real question. Working too hard is innately a bad thing, but try to think of it like getting into debt. When starting their corporate journeys, plenty of incredibly wealthy and successful entrepreneurs have accrued huge financial debts before their “big break”. Likewise, most all of them have admitted to working ridiculous hours and feeling incredibly stressed out, to get their work off the ground. 

I think the comparison fits quite well. You can go through short periods of stress without incurring too much damage to your health but, if you allow the stress to accumulate, all of a sudden, it cripples you. 

It’s not tech debt, or knowledge debt. It’s stress debt. And like every other kind of debt, you’ve got to pay it back eventually. The trick is, managing how you pay back. Like financial debt, make sure you pay it back on your own terms and not on someone else's. Make sure it remains at a level you can control, and don't forget that it is always accruing interest.