For a time, I was struggling with working too much and too often. Sometimes it was self-directed, I’d stay online later because I enjoyed the feeling of being fully immersed in an interesting investigation, or because I thought I’d be more satisfied if I didn’t carry a task over to the next day. Sometimes it was not, an unforeseen emergency popped up that would require me to stay online later than usual. Still, even when I was dealing with an emergency outside my control, my own tendencies to overwork would lead me to push myself farther than what is healthy. I enjoy the work I do and I like being good at it, so when left to my own devices, I am prone to doing too much.

I think many aspiring early to mid-career engineers find themselves stuck here. If you’re struggling with this, I hope this article can provide some guidance. What I needed at the time were tools, like habits, that would allow me to disconnect from work when 5pm rolled around. Similarly, I wanted to prevent work, and work thoughts, from bleeding into my personal time. This an ongoing journey for me, but I have since developed habits that have helped me make a serious dent here.

Before we start, an obligatory note on therapy: if you’re struggling with your work-life balance, a therapist can help you gain clarity on your situation - why are you feeling this way, and what behaviors, or externalities, contribute to your malaise. From a place of clarity, you can often derive your own solutions. If you can afford it, I seriously recommend it.

Obligatory disclaimer aside, this is what worked for me:

1. Get work out of your personal devices

When starting a new job, the idea of installing your work’s messaging app in your personal phone can feel like a great convenience. There’s some truth to that. As knowledge workers, a lot of our work involves communication, so with just your chat client in your phone you can have a pretty productive afternoon. Better yet, you can do this while being away from your desk, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, or lining up for the checkout at the store; always online, always reachable. For people in my age range, being constantly online for friends and peers is familiar and a little cool, so it takes some scar tissue to realize it’s a different beast when it comes to work.

When I first uninstalled my work messaging client off my personal phone, during Christmas no less, I immediately sensed a weight off of my shoulders. I took some time after uninstalling it for me to stop mindlessly unlocking my phone in search for the app, waiting for the dopamine hit of seeing a new message, a thread update. Since then, I have sworn off having work accessible from my personal devices. Ultimately, keeping work constrained to company hardware creates a handy physical boundary that you can fallback on to build better work-life habits.

2. Manage the intensity of your day

The final hour of the work day can be pretty productive: there are often fewer meetings then, so it can feel like a good time to start a demanding task, like an intense debugging session, or an incident investigation. However, finding yourself in the middle of intense focus when 5pm rolls around is hardly conducive to committing your work and logging off on time. If, like me, you enjoy obsessing over puzzles (read: bugs) and can’t stop mulling over them until you’ve made a breakthrough in your understanding (that you’ll immediately need to validate), you need to plan so you can be in the right mindset when it’s time to disconnect.

For that reason, I avoiding starting intense tasks near end of day and also try to start the last hour of my day by making a quick mental plan of how I can finish or checkpoint all the work I’m multitasking at that point in the day. That “final hour agenda” keeps me honest to how much I can really get done before 5pm and lets me bring things to a satisfying conclusion on time.1

Consider the intensity of work across your day as well. In the past, I’ve had days where I’m fully “plugged in” for hours, alt-tabbing left and right, multi-tasking on every screen and making progress on many projects at once. I still do this sometimes (it’s fun and it can feel great in the moment) but we’re not built for long stretches of multi-tasking; it’s also good to leave some energy in the tank for the unexpected. Plus, if you’re going at 100% for most of the day, the last hour of the day might not suffice to help you wind down.

3. Be disciplined in your note-taking

People who are really into note-taking software like Obsidian and Notion often refer to the process of curating a good personal wiki as “building a second brain”. The analogy resonates because taking good notes has allowed my brain to rest easy knowing that I can rebuild context on the things I was working on by looking back at my notes. For the longest time, I was inadvertently always musing about work because it helped me remember the little details. Taking notes has helped me stop relying on this habit.

My note-taking approach is simple, but it works for me:

  • I maintain a To-Do list that reflects the active work that I’m either driving, or simply participating in. I have a general rule of trying not to have more than 8 items in the list, which helps me gauge how much capacity I have for handling the unexpected. If the list ever exceeds more than 8 items, it’s a signal something needs to be deferred onto the backlog, and removed from the list.
  • For each project, either active in my To-Do list or “in the backlog”, I maintain a project-based set of notes. These are just for me, and include observations, findings, reminders, handy commands, etc. These notes get messy while capturing information throughout the day, but a quick periodic clean-up suffices to keep them trustworthy.

4. Have routines outside of work hours

It’s easy to continue working after hours when you have nothing else planned in the evening. It’s much harder if you’ve made competing plans, have an appointment, or paid for class that requires you to be elsewhere; those things put constraints on your time that force you to eventually disconnect. If you’re struggling with working too much, it helps to have these “competing plans” not as one-offs, but as routines to provide a constant reminder that it’s time to go.

For me, that’s been a combination of evening gym classes, routine events with friends like weekly meetups and games, and other things of the sort. The key is that these needs to be routine (reliable, expected, at the same time, same place) so that you can start to plan around it. Obviously, making plans like these are a healthy thing to do in general, it’s not just to help you manage your work-life balance; that’s the more reason to do it. Still, I think the default for most people is to schedule these things as one-offs, so I recommend instead turning these into routines.

Parting thoughts

Everyone who struggles with overwork struggles for different reasons, but for me the key is to manage my mindset - I need to be in the right mindset to allow me to disconnect come 5pm, satisfied with the work I did throughout the day, and with something different to look forward to after hours. Similarly, I benefit from experiencing friction in trying to work after hours, which sends me a signal to reconsider before engaging. My advice ultimately serves to nurture those goals. If these systems don’t work for you, I recommend working on gaining clarity on your situation, what leads to your overwork, and how do internal and external factors lead to it. Please take care of yourselves.

All the best.

  1. You can also try to manage your pace across the week. What are the days where you’re most receptive to intense work that you’ll want to obsess over? Personally, I tread carefully on Fridays. It’s different working late on a Thursday, than on a Friday. ↩