Put your phone into airplane mode and give it to your wife/girlfriend/buddy/kids.
Internet articles, modern products, and social media are all optimized to be as addictive as possible. So the first step is to forcibly cut the dopamine loop.
FYI, CTO of a startup here. In my experience, co-workers and investors will actually respect you more if you have clear personal boundaries and stick to them. And it's not like "don't call on family day" is such a harsh restriction. The others have family too, you know.
What you say is especially true of someone in your role (or any higher up role), which in a small startup extends far down I would suppose.
When I see the C-levels or even just a level up or sideways mention that they had to work late on this or that or had to have a meeting at 10pm or someone was pulled into a meeting with some C-level at 10pm I loose respect for those people really fast. Work regular hours. Get done what you can get done in those regular hours. Regular hours can mean 11 hours one day and then you take most of Friday off.
There's two ways these people loose respect with me:
If you have to work 12 hour days to get the same work done as other people, you are maybe not really good at your job or you do too much 'socializing' at work but it makes the actual hard working folks that just finish their work in a regular day look bad.
Or you're the workaholic type that just can't stop. At least you're good at your job, perfect. But don't make actual hard working folks look bad.
Yeah it's crazy.
My wife was in final round of interviews, about to get an offer, and all seemed to be well, suddenly the hiring manager drops a bomb.. "The team is working 15 hours/day right now, but it should go down as we onboard staff.. and the firm cares about work/life balance so we encourage everyone to take off 2 days per month out of their unlimited vacation".
I mean wtf, if they are doing 15hr/day what are you going down to once you staff up.. 12hr/day? If your hiring manager is willing to work his team 15hr/days for months on end then how is he going to look at you trying to work 10hr/days?
Note this is not a startup, but an organization with nearly 20k employees.
This is not a lottery ticket job that if a product launches successfully she's going to walk away with career/life changing money. It's maybe a 15-20% raise so that she can work 50-80% more hours.
Just so dysfunctional.
She was super disappointed until we talked about it being a blessing in disguise. If he had come in with a lower number like "12 hours/day but going down" or the compensation was crazy, you would maybe try to talk yourself into it.. or worse if he didn't disclose hours and you took the job..
I went on vacation recently to a town with spotty electricity, no cell service for my carrier and barely functioning Internet. I didn't realize there would be no cell service or Internet on my vacation. I brought only books, binoculars, clothes, paper/pen, food and myself. I stayed in a motel/cabin kind of lodging and did a lot of mindless driving.
It was somewhat accidental forced unplugging/disconnecting.
Between work stress, COVID, and my own slight Asperger's, I struggle to get myself out of mental loops.
During this time away, my first few days, my dreams and every moment I closed my eyes was a flush of memories or thoughts of work. It almost felt like my brain was trying to process a backlog of stress and that process was "flushing" those thoughts (or brain chemistry) out.
I went hiking, read some, and mostly took it easy, walked around, ate and rested.
It took at least 3-4 days of a 8 day trip for my brain to barely start calming down. I had to keep repeating the "simpler activities" and just put out of mind literally everything else. I literally had to "escape" from my normal life entirely.
I don't say this to be run of the mill, I literally had this anecdotal experience but a few weeks ago.
I felt a little more like I had a handle on myself after this break, but only in a "just almost barely" kind of way. In other words, I had just started to come out of my loops and my fog, when my trip ended.
Just like the work had a lingering effect, so did taking the time off. I am back at work and finding myself going back to some of my loops, but my trip gave me a little break and opportunity to take some perspective.
Therefore, my non-scientific anectodal recommendation is to study your own rhythm and see how it changes when you disconnect or take a break, especially if it includes an aspect of "slightly forced disconnecting". If you can learn to become more self aware of the rhythms you experience or fall susceptible to, it might give you a chance to subtley shift or do something actively to tweak them in a way that helps you.
Now that I think about it, I believe I also had this effect that when I disconnect after a longer work period, I'll have a sort of re-processing flashback when I finally have time to relax.
Also, it's quite visible with my son. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, he will usually recount his most interesting experience again. Yesterday it was "cows are loud".
I can imagine that it'll help the learning, just like how replaying history with updated state scoring is such an important part of AI reinforcement learning. So maybe the body is post-processing work stress akin to "we successfully escaped from the hungry lion, now let's review how to avoid that in the future".
I don’t respect people who can’t get their work done during regular hours. If you are not smart enough to focus on what is most important, and ignore the rest, then you are not as smart as you think.
Internet articles, modern products, and social media are all optimized to be as addictive as possible. So the first step is to forcibly cut the dopamine loop.
FYI, CTO of a startup here. In my experience, co-workers and investors will actually respect you more if you have clear personal boundaries and stick to them. And it's not like "don't call on family day" is such a harsh restriction. The others have family too, you know.