A lot of working professionals have a tendency to skip breaks and even meals as they work. They don’t take pit stops, instead just pushing themselves to the point of burnout. There are a ton of reasons for this, but the overall gist is that they think of breaks as being counter to productive work, instead of an essential part of it.

It’s hard to change deeply-seated views like that. But it might be easier to just engineer around them.

My first thought: Don’t call them “breaks.” The type of hypervigilant, A-type workaholics that I’m talking about here don’t like taking “breaks” where they aren’t working. I genuinely think a lot of people would go for more 10-minute walks outside during their workday if you called them “Cognitive Realignment Meeting for Increased Productivity” or something. Packaging helps.

But another thought is this: breaks are unguided, and that same type of professional I’m talking about tends to not like unguided time. Heck, I see a lot of professionals use their breaks from their main work specifically to do secondary work! They’ll say, “Okay, 15 minutes where I don’t have scheduled meetings. I’ll use that to check emails!” Ugh. So instead – block that off too! Make a different 15-minute calendar entry that says “Check emails.” If you need to do it, schedule it.

But then make sure you have your Cognitive Realignment Meeting, too.

We often do a bad job of telling other people how to communicate with us.

In the modern era, there are so many ways to get in touch with someone, whether at work or in your personal life. And I see people frequently get frustrated by the way other people use those channels, never realizing that they’re the ones creating the situation.

Here’s a simple example: At work, people can email you or they can use some kind of chat function like Teams or Slack. Those two options exist in most companies – plus, of course, picking up the phone or coming to see you in person if that’s an option. And folks will constantly complain about “meetings that could have been emails” or email chains that should be chat messages or chat messages that would be better resolved as a call, etc.

But… have you told people how to do that stuff? Do they know what things you’d prefer to resolve in a chat versus an email versus a meeting?

I know one professional who started a group chat with his team called “Emergencies.” He leaves the notifications on for that one, and off for everything else. And it takes so much stress off his plate! Many professional managers I know obsessively check their chats and emails every five minutes because anything could be an emergency, but most of the hundreds of messages they get in a week aren’t. But not this guy! He’s able to do real deep work and only check his messages a few times a day, because he took the radical step of actually explaining the proper channel for urgent matters.

Take the time to explain to people how you’d like to be connected. You can even put automatic responses in various channels directing them to other ones. In your email, you could put an auto-response up that says something like “Hello, I check my email twice a day to avoid distractions. For matters more urgent than that, feel free to reach me on my cell phone.” That simple adjustment will give people peace of mind that a non-response from you isn’t a problem, and give you peace of mind that you aren’t missing anything urgent when you want to actually focus.

This is a small intervention, but it pays dividends. Try it out!

“I need to see consistent effort from you.”

Have you ever heard this? Have you ever said this? It’s a meaningless but persistent bit of “manager speak,” and it’s a poor substitute for actual leadership.

Because, first off: no you don’t. Even if there was some impartial definition for “consistent effort,” that’s not what you need at all. You need results. How much effort I personally put in to get them isn’t your concern.

And there is no such definition! Only a completely arbitrary accusation with equally nebulous defense. You can’t prove I’m not putting in “consistent effort” any more than I can prove I am.

Look for results, talk about results, and lead to results. When the car crosses the finish line, they care about its position in line, not how much fuel was left in the tank.

I heard this brilliant phrase from a colleague today, talking about advice she gives to her children. The gist is this: Life is hard. No matter what, life is going to be difficult a lot of the time. But you have some control over what kind of hard it is. Life can be hard because you’re overworked, or hard because you’re broke. Life can be hard because it takes a lot of effort to stay in shape, or it can be hard because you’re unhealthy. It can be hard because you study all the time, or it can be hard because you haven’t accomplished everything you’re capable of.

There are trade-offs to everything, and risk to everything. There are no free lunches. But you can make choices that give you the brand of hard that you’re most equipped to deal with, or that give you, personally, the most reward for the difficulty. Those choices will be different for everyone, but you do have choices.

And if you don’t make them, you tend to get the worst kinds of hard on offer.

Just as two people together are often more than twice as creative and effective as either working alone, solving two problems at once is generally more than twice as difficult as solving one. The network effects work in both directions. When you have two major issues, information about them both is fighting for your attention and brainpower, and the fight itself uses up extra energy that neither problem would on its own.

The first thing to do: isolate. As hard as it might seem, you have to pick one thing and tackle it. Call in backup if you need to – not to solve the other problem, but just to keep you on task. Write down the other thing and put it aside, telling your brain that it’s coming soon but not to otherwise worry about it.

Use whatever tricks you have to censor out incoming information about that problem. Disable updates, turn off your phone, or leave that room. Tackle the one thing first, get it stable if you can’t solve it completely. When you get to that point, you can switch to 100% focus on the other.

Part of your brain will scream that the other thing needs your attention, but that’s exactly the thing that’s making both problems harder. The total time to solve both issues will be lower if you do one thing at a time.

If someone admires you, compliments you, or brags about you – be worthy. Act in a way that makes it so they undersold you. Outpace even the greatest admiration. Let it propel you.

Things often outgrow the hate you have for them, so you have to be really careful which things you decide you’re never going to like.

If you go to a new restaurant and you have a bad experience, it’s okay to say “I didn’t like that place.” But if you make hating on that place a core feature of your worldview, you’re going to be increasingly silly as the new restaurant fixes its mistakes, grows into its own, and becomes a fantastic, five-star establishment. Everyone is talking about how great that place is, but you continue to cling to your “Joe’s is terrible” mentality, which increasingly has no basis in reality.

Especially since you haven’t eaten at Joe’s since that first time! You decided you didn’t like it, so you refused to engage with it. You never learned about the improvements.

Hate doesn’t leave room for growth. Keep it light, and revisit.

Don’t ever count on the security of Plan A. Part of thinking strategically is to give some thought, however little, to “but what if…?”

The best time to muse about a problem is before the stress of it presents itself.

Some fascinating research I just learned about: Turning something you want to accomplish into an identity instead of an action increases the likelihood that you’ll do it.

I’ve written about the opposite effect before, how people can let negative but temporary elements of their existence become core aspects of their identity and thus never overcome them. But it turns out this effect can be harnessed for good!

Instead of saying, “I’m going to get my to-do list done today,” trying framing it as “I’m the kind of person who finishes their to-do list.” Don’t just say “I won’t procrastinate,” say “I’m not a procrastinator,” and watch the change start to take hold.

I didn’t just write today. I’m a writer!