In my journey as an executive coach there are several themes that recur in every client’s growth journey – becoming more effective, improving communication, work/life integration and effectively navigating conflict.
The weird title today applies to work/life Integration. If you stay up instead of going to bed to sleep long enough to feel legitimately rested before you go through it all again, you are revenge bedtime procrastinating, and you’re not alone. This is a major self-inflicted injury that is so easy to do – play on the phone, binge on a mediocre TV show, read, surf the net, putz around the house or engage in something you really enjoy until the early hours of the morning, just to grab a little bit more me-time.
The concept was first named as a thing in China. Emma Roa worked the notorious 996 schedule in China (9AM – 9PM, 6 days a week) and felt robbed from her personal life. She had a very small window at the end of the day to eat, shower and get to bed for a good night’s sleep. She started choosing to eke out time at the end of the day to have some personal time, to read, surf the net, watch TV, check the news until well past midnight. She was doing what the Chinese call ‘bàofùxìng áoyè’, directly translated as retaliatory staying up late.
The question here is – why do so many people have to stay up late to regain some sense of freedom, or control? We all realize that the long-term effect of sleep deprivation is extremely detrimental to health, productivity and sanity.
Now that work is largely from home, and the line between work and not-working has become blurred, the concept of a healthy work-life integration pattern is even more challenging.
Budgeting time is more important than budgeting your money. We can always make more money – but once the time is spent we can never regain it.
How will you budget your time to spend it equitably on all priorities and sleep enough?
