BE LESS PASSIONATE ABOUT YOUR JOB

I know your eyebrows have risen reading the headline. Relax!  You will read the explanation at the end, but before that, check if these statements apply to you!

1. You feel anxious if you haven't checked your work message group for 10 minutes.

2. When your friends ask you how you are chilling at Work From Home, you start detailing every minor work inconvenience.

3. At night, you dream about those inconveniences.

4. You obsess about your work during dinner, in the shower and when you're trying to fall sleep.

5. Your moods depends completely on how work is going.

Don't lie, I'm sure you've marked every point up there if you love your job.

And now it might be time to take Drake's Advice: "You need to get done, done, done, done at work"

Caring too much about your job is unhelpful and unhealthy. Yes, you read it right, it's unhealthy. It makes small problems seem exceptional and throwaway remarks feel awful. And it's not only the leaders, supervisors or executives and not even the Virgos or Libras who care too much: it is possible to be overly attached to any job at any level. That's why I said - Be less passionate about your job. To quote - Less is more.

Caring less actually offers a solution to a lot of your anguish. You don't hyperventilate before a big presentation. You're not frustrated to tears by incompetent teammates. You actually put your phone away on your anniversary night, and you're not haunted by FOMO (Fear of missing out) as you backpack to "Desher Baari" aka area of low network connectivity.

It would be tough to teach yourself to care less without getting to the root of the problem. Why have we become work martyrs? Because -

1. We think the only way to succeed is to never stop working. We fear even briefly disconnecting will derail our careers.

2. We believe happiness is the result of professional achievement - not the other way around.

3. "Life will be amazing once I get promoted" we say to ourselves.

4. "When I'm making lakhs of taka, this will all be worth it".

"Be less passionate about your job" doesn't mean "Don't care about your work". It means care more about yourself. It means carve out time for the people you love, the people you care or actually "earn for".

Many of you may be thinking, wait a second bhai, this is all super dark- isn't it okay to be passionate about your job? Yes! Odds are, at one point in your career, you should apologetically back out of anniversary plans because you need to prepare a "pitch ppt deck" for your boss.

But chronically overworking is bad for your health and counterintuitively for your success. In fact, productivity drops after working about 50 hours per week. Perhaps you've heard of Parkinson's law -- "WORK EXPANDS SO AS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE FOR ITS COMPLETION." In other words, giving less time at a job might make you more efficient. So, be less passionate about your job… I mean, yes seriously.

GIASH SHAHEEN is a Rebellious Advertising Professional, widely known as #copybro, and can be reached at: facebook.com/copybrobd