Fab Giovanetti - Reclaim Your Time Off: The 3-step Solution to Overworking

We, the burnout generation, desperately need this book. Fab outlines, with science and sense, how and why we need rest to be at our best and how to make a post-Covid working world work for us.

Chloe Brotheridge,
author of The Anxiety Solution

This book is full of advice for approaching work life routines in a smarter and more fulfilling way. Its a practical guide for managing your time by mastering your mindset.

Nir Eyal,
bestselling author of
Indistractable: How to Control
Your Attention and Choose Your Life

If you want to thrive in the work that you do without burning out, then make sure you read this book! Fab presents a compelling case on the importance of prioritizing our wellbeing and will equip you with the ideas, insights and know-how to unleash your most productive self.

Simon Alexander Ong,
award-winning coach and
international keynote speaker

This book covers such an important topic, which is timely in the current work culture, but timeless in its principles. The journaling prompts truly enable the reader to take targeted action straight away, in order to feel more empowered about their work-life balance

Dan Murray-Serter,
co-founder of Heights
and podcast host

This is the go-to book for any creative or business owner who is struggling to find balance or reclaim their life back. As an ex-hustler myself Fabs book is a refreshing permission slip to reclaim your life back and find balance and peace within your business and personal life

Emma Mumford,
bestselling author of
Positively Wealthy

This edition first published in the UK and USA in 2021 by

Watkins, an imprint of Watkins Media Limited

Unit 11, Shepperton House

8993 Shepperton Road

London

N1 3DF

Design and typography copyright Watkins Media Limited 2021

Text copyright Fab Giovanetti 2021

Fab Giovanetti has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd.

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78678-512-1 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-78678-513-8 (eBook)

www.watkinspublishing.com

CONTENTS

PREFACE: WELCOME TO THE NEW NORMAL

Working from home may have always sounded like a dream scenario for many people, and suddenly that dream became a forced reality in 2020. The working lives of all employed people drastically changed overnight due to the coronavirus pandemic. With the exception of key workers, almost an entire workforce suddenly had to work from home, where they had been used to being in offices or other physical spaces. New questions are now being asked about the future of working life, and how it will affect our wellbeing. How do you set boundaries and maintain a balance between life and work when, technically, youre always at work?

Work culture and overall career expectations have been rapidly changing for the past decade. The multi-hyphen side hustle is almost expected. Portfolio careers are commonplace. We wear different hats as a norm. The modern workplace is now a space which may not have a physical office. This has huge positive potential: the ability to arrange your schedule to suit your personality; the physical opportunity to do some regular stretches if you feel your energy dip (without your colleagues thinking youre a weirdo!); avoiding the stressful commute. Technology has enabled a generation to work more flexibly than ever before. But now there is less room to switch off and recover energies, as work is funnelled into all available gaps. Even then, any smaller gaps are more than likely filled by social media, so the mind doesnt ever get a chance to really switch off and rejuvenate.

We have become used to seeing our colleagues living rooms and families inadvertently popping into meeting spaces so life and work have never felt more intertwined. This has unlocked loads of freedoms which may have not been sought before. Suddenly the drudge of a commute seems a bit less necessary. Or maybe you have seen a new side to your CEO once you saw his toddler climb over him in the middle of a meeting. You may feel that you have more confidence to speak up in a Zoom meeting, now that youre in your home surroundings and feel more comfortable. But there are downsides. What if you dont have a proper workstation, so your bed becomes your office? You may not have storage space, so there is work clutter everywhere, in room and mind. How do you make it all work in your favour, releasing free time rather than allowing work to seep into all the new gaps working from home has created? What evolves out of this situation is going to be the new normal. I do not own a crystal ball (although that would be cool), and as yet we do not know how much and to what extent our lives will change in the longer term.

Whether youre a solo freelance worker or an employee now working remotely most of the time, there may now be no switching off and leaving it at the office in any real sense. A 2017 study conducted by the UN found that 41 per cent of people who work from home considered themselves highly stressed, compared to 25 per cent of those who worked only on-site. Now more than ever we need to learn how to advocate for ourselves and our working wellbeing, by understanding what boundaries there are, and how to implement them. We need to cultivate the awareness and discipline to make that happen. This book is here to dissect the issues and answer the question:

Is a healthy worklife balance possible in the modern workplace?

Everyone was plunged instantly and maybe reluctantly into a new working reality by the pandemic. There are huge positives to this. For the parents who had been requesting flexible working for years but had been refused because there is no IT in place or it cant be done, this fact was instantly overturned, and any reasons for denying flexible working requests will now have to be examined much more closely in the future, given that it HAS been done. For any of us who have craved working a bit more within our own space, to our own rhythms, the pandemic offered that opportunity as a gift. But it may also have revealed to all the challenges that solo workers have dealt with silently for generations: space, organization, communication, motivation. Working practices and societal patterns will have been changed in the longer term, as will our appreciation of what work time versus life is.

The line between work life and home life is blurred. Work culture and overall expectations are changing and shifting faster than ever before. In this book I will present to you the challenges and lessons I have learned when I started working from home eight years ago, including how to create new routines, how to balance work and social life, and much more. This book has a clear blueprint to help you manage your time more efficiently, but offers so much more than that. The real magic of the book stems from the mindset you will learn, and how mindset is everything in the quest for balance. If you want to reclaim your time off, you need to learn how to claim your time, full stop.

The pandemic forced us to change our work spaces and is ultimately forcing us to look at what down time really