What's up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew welcome back to founders journal my personal audio diary where I give you the

Business Builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better whether that's building a business a team or a new product.

Today I'm talking about unplugging from work incredibly necessary but so many of us suck at it.

After this episode you will have a toolkit for stepping away from the computer and keyboard let's hop into it.

Entrepreneurs and competitive careerists I came up with that's not an actual term they are notoriously bad and unplugging.

I am one of those people and if you're listening to this podcast I generally assume that you're one of those people either an entrepreneur a an aspiring entrepreneur a competitive careerist and I assume that because this podcast is all about accelerating your business and your career.

And so when I think about it what makes us great at work is what makes us horrible at unplugging from work.

We take our careers really seriously we don't settle for good we need perfect and we want to move up the totem pole of our given companies as fast as humanly possible.

And this ambition is great and it leads to results in your company and over the long run of your career.

But this mindset is a double edged sword when you prioritize excellence in your job it can have downstream negative effects in other aspects of life.

You may work two hours past when you promised your partner you'd stop working so that you could eat dinner with them.

Your mind may ruminate before you go to sleep and when you wake up based on something you're working on in your job and it causes you to be disengaged in conversation with your family or friends.

So at this point I hope those of you who are bad at disconnecting like myself are cognizant of the fact that you're bad at disconnecting.

Now before I talk about tactics and strategies to unplug effectively I want you to also just understand what the long term impacts are of having attachment issues with your work.

So the first long term impact created by being attached your work is burnout.

We've all heard of burnout but I think until we actually experience it we kind of call bullshit on it.

I'm exhibit a when I started working full time on morning brew in 2016 I remember it like it was yesterday we didn't have an office yet we were working in an incubator on NY use campus and I thought burnout was a complete excuse.

I assume that if you really love the work you are doing which I did with morning brew it was my baby it would be impossible to do too much of it.

Well I just ended up learning the hard way that that was not the case at all.

For several months my co founder Austin and I were working 15 hour days and oftentimes we would finish up the newsletter both writing it and coding it into an email template at one or two in the morning and then we would start everything back up at 8 am so we're probably running on five to six hours of sleep.

It took very little time for me to feel the impact on my way of working in my way of living by driving myself into the ground like this after about two weeks I felt fuzzy my anxiety my base level of anxiety was probably 50% higher and I was just overall less effective in my work because I didn't

hate myself appropriately in the prior weeks I treated entrepreneurship like a sprint when it was really just a marathon for the next seven years.

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