Dr. Dale Whelehan

Let's have a meeting about that.

You know, I'm not working hard enough, all these sort of things, which if we critically analyze them, are they actually

working for us or working for anyone.

Then how might we actually go about negotiating change to how we think about time in the workplace, whether for ourselves and our teams and our organisations, creating a more balanced way whereby we can put in effort but also recover from that effort, like how an elite athlete would do.

They peak performance and then they recover from that.

We're no different to the physiology and psychology of elite athletes.

And then ultimately, how do we create the system that allows greater level of slack within it?

So if we have a tendency to continue to add more and more and more, how do we actually pause ourselves from doing that and seeing actually where are we going?

It is about getting more out of people.

It's about getting people back to having a sense of livelihood, you know.

The workday, the third busiest time of the day for emails now is 10 p.m., you know.

Exactly.

You know, we are passively walking into this.

And, you know, there's many different things that have happened with our relationship to time over the last hundred years that have made us arrive here, you know, to an unconscious way.

It is not against business interests to be doing this.

It's actually safeguarding the future of humans and thus the workforce, because there's a reason why burnout rates and stress rates are rising exponentially now compared to 20, 30 years ago.

It's because the amount of work and the expectations of how much time to complete that work have just grown.

Well, it's a cultural norm now, you know, and it's influenced by people, as you say, you know, you go into your social media and there's certainly my social media pumps being like, you should be doing X, Y and Z, you know, otherwise you're not productive or worthwhile.

But then it's also team norms, organisational norms, cultural norms.

It's very hard to put up boundaries.