This video is a small sample of Balanced Being: How to Find Purpose & Meaning in a Digital Career.

This 7-module workshop helps infuse your life with new energy and purpose by teaching you how to be more intentional about your personal and professional choices.

The course usually sells for $297, but you can get Balanced Being free when you buy a copy of Molly’s book, Click Happy.

How do you become successful at your career while still living a life that feels good?

It may feel like your professional life and your personal life are at odds — that you can only improve one by sacrificing the other — but they’re not.

The key is work-life balance.

That’s the focus of Balanced Being (the workshop that this clip comes from) and in this post, Ezra and I break down a concept from this course that can help you:

• Increase productivity
• Reduce burnout
• And establish healthy routines.

By being more intentional about how you spend your time, you can learn to be your best self so you can produce your best work.

Let’s dive in!

There’s Such a Thing as Working Too Much

Listen, it’s great to be motivated to reach your goals. That being said, there really is a thing as working too much.

As Ezra says, “Working 10, 12, 14 hours a day consistently will burn you out and will reduce the value of the work you’re doing.”

You might be thinking, “But wait, Ezra runs multiple brands and leads over a hundred employees — surely he works a lot.”

Yes, everyone in a leadership position has the occasional long work day, but we’re talking about your typical routines. Ezra says he forgoes long work days in favor of showing up consistently every week and putting in the work.

“I’ve basically never worked more than 8 hours a day, ever. And I’ve never worked more than 5 days — mostly 4 days — a week, ever.”

If you want to be intentional about how much you work, a great way to do that is to think about setting a “container”.

Set a Container Around Your Work Schedule

By “container”, we basically mean setting boundaries.

Imagine your day is a blank sheet of paper. Now we’re going to take a pencil and draw a circle around how much time we’re going to spend working.

Why not just do the work we need to do without worrying about how long it takes? Not only because we don’t want to work too much, but also because of Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

If you let it, your business will bleed into other parts of your life and distract you from what’s truly important. That’s why it’s important to set boundaries between your work life and your personal life and stick to them.

“I need to have space in my world for the things that truly matter to me beyond work, Ezra says, “like my physical body, my relationships, my social life.”

So in addition to keeping you fresh and avoiding burnout, limiting your work hours actually ends up making you more productive.

Setting a container also has another benefit:

“It forces you to get good at delegation, and it forces you to get the important stuff done in the time you have, because you know you only have a limited amount of time.”

Work-life Balance Takes Practice

Like anything else, getting good at this takes practice.

Most people reading this blog are super motivated (which is awesome!), and they’ll probably find it difficult to put a container around their work day.

Just keep at it — it’s worth it. Here’s Ezra again:

“The thing that happens is that people fall out of it and then they feel bad. It’s okay. You’re going to fall off the horse. Reset the container, keep going.

Routine is meant to be broken. Routine is like a tube that carries water. When you have the tube, water can go where you want it go. But sometimes it’s nice to let it all flow, then bring it back.

You’re going to fall out of it. Don’t beat yourself up. The most important thing for a balanced being as it relates to digital work is that strong container…”

I hope this concept helps you increase productivity, avoid burnout and establish healthy routines.

That’s it for this post — thanks for reading!

This post is a small sample from Balanced Being: How to Find Purpose & Meaning in a Digital Career.

This 7-module workshop helps infuse your life with new energy and purpose by teaching you how to be more intentional about your personal and professional choices.

The course usually sells for $297, but you can get Balanced Being free when you buy a copy of Molly’s book, Click Happy.