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How strategically switching off leads to a healthier mind

SEO & Content Specialist Jess Goode went to SXSW Sydney on a mission – to learn as much as she possibly could about AI and content. What she came out with was something far more transformative. 

Jessica Goode

09 December 2024

10 minute read

A little over six weeks ago, I had a problem. I was lost in a swirl of stuff, pulled between the sharp pings of Slack messages, high pressure tasks, mounting deadlines and a voice in my head saying this is too much… but ‘no’ felt too big. I didn’t want to let anyone down. 

Maybe it’s a dilemma you can relate to? 

Luminary’s annual pilgrimage to SXSW Sydney couldn’t have come at a better time. On the plane, a plan came together – I would attend every content and AI presentation possible. I would make the most of the experience Marty and Luminary had afforded me. And then I’d blend all of those moments into a single package, finding ways to add value to my current workflow. Neat and tidy.

That didn’t happen. Or it did, but not the way I expected. Sure, I attended a few AI talks, brand based chats and tech sessions, but they aren’t living rent-free in my brain more than a month later. Instead, the honest reflections of five women changed the shape of what was left of my 2024. 

Productivity = burnout?

Sixty-one percent of Aussie workers self-report feeling burnt out - 13 percent more than the global average. Inspired by the vulnerability of Layne Beachley, Tess Brouwer, Sue Langley and Holly Ransom, I found myself admitting to being one of them. On the surface, Redefining Success: Beyond the 1% was a deceptively titled panel… but only because I connected the idea of success with productivity, availability and task completion. In short, being successful was being on. Online, on-task, on-track. Just on. 

So I walked in expecting a productivity how-to guide, and walked out with the beginnings of a toolkit to do the opposite – strategically switching off.  

Redefining Success: Beyond the 1%

Why did a 60 minute discussion change the way I think? 

No one likes to confront their addictions and Holly Ransom called me an addict. Not directly (of course), but the following words sunk into my mind and they haven’t left since: 

“Our relationship to information is the same as our relationship with food. We consume too much. We don’t question the quality of what we’re putting in our system. And most of us do not give ourselves adequate time to digest. We scroll, scroll, and scroll, we take in so much, but very few of us are actually carving out time for reflection, processing and ultimately doing something purposeful with the information.” 

I won’t lie, my brain instantly went into work mode.
Yes, she was right.
Yes, low value, low energy content is part of the problem.
Yes, SEOs all over the world are part of the problem.
Yes, sometimes, I’m part of the problem.
And AI is only going to make this meaningless consumption worse. 

While these industry based thoughts percolated, another perspective tapped me on the shoulder. Holly’s observation went beyond digital content, it also applied to my work habits. 

Slack was my most used Android app in August and October.
My work email was up there too. 

I even installed Jira on my phone.

I was relentlessly online. If there was a message, I needed to respond. If there was an email, I had to read it. Without realising it, I had been deeply socialised to want, need and even crave digital feedback since the days of MySpace and 20c text messages. It was my sugar bowl. Sweet, tempting and ultimately empty – I always needed more. 

What does sugar have to do with it? 

This idea of digital addiction kept popping up throughout the conference, laying a foundation of change before Thursday rolled around and one of my last sessions ignited an undeniable full circle moment. 

How to Seize Control of Your Workday was meant to be a practical book-end on what had been a pretty theory heavy week. And true, there were insights and usable tips aplenty…  and I didn’t hear most of them because I couldn’t stop thinking about this story:

“I had put my daughter to bed and I needed a hit of sugar. I went to the kitchen, and I’m looking around, I’m opening the fridge, and I’m like, there’s got to be something in here, something sweet. There were vegetables and some cheese, or something like that. I thought there'll be something in the pantry, maybe there’s a half eaten block of chocolate. I saw this tupperware container that was full of raw sugar and I thought… sweet! Maybe that will do the job. So I pulled it out, got a little teaspoon and I sat at the kitchen bench and  started spooning raw sugar.” 

Amantha Imber’s post-partum guilty pleasure collided with Ransom’s poignant comparison. Beyond the food references, the idea of mindlessly putting something into our bodies because we’re hooked on it further cemented the idea that I was addicted, and my forever online lifestyle was making me creatively (and physically) sluggish, bloated and stressed. 

How to Seize Control of Your Workday

Getting hit by a bus is not the answer

As Amantha spoke to the How to Seize Control of Your Workday crowd, I felt myself sliding into momentary defeat. Realisations are all very well and good, but what could I do about it, really? I work online. My industry is online. My colleagues are online.  It takes a tremendous amount of effort to switch things up – effort and energy I didn’t have between motherhood, work, family and everything else. 

Once again, Amantha broke through my excuses with this: 

“I really wanted to get hit by a bus, but not so badly I’m killed. I want to go to hospital for a few days, and just get a lot of sympathy from everyone in my life, so people just really understand my pain of what I’m going through, and have a few days off.”

She followed this anecdote with a request – put your hand up if you’ve ever felt this way. My raised hand wasn’t alone. It was in the majority. Most of us, if not all, have at one point wished for a moment when time would stop, and the noise would give way to a gentle silence. 

Because getting hit by a bus is easier than saying no. 

So easy in fact, that 77 percent of us abandon no because we fear what will happen if we don’t say yes. It’s the workplace equivalent of the man or the bear – we’d fantasise about taking a soft hit from a large vehicle before dealing with the potential negative consequences of a two letter word. 

At the time, I didn’t have this stat in my back pocket. Instead, Layne Beachley’s compassionate voice issued a challenge, crashing my pity party for one and completely distracting me from Lisa Leong's sympathetic comments: 

“I can sit in this struggle and honour the fact that it’s tough… but what are you going to do about it? Action is the antidote to fear.”

While gentleness from those around us in times of great stress is important, the ability to be kind to oneself is more powerful. By making it someone else’s responsibility to press pause, to say no, to walk away, I was robbing myself of the ability to be successful. 

For the first time in a long time, I didn’t check my messages at the airport. I boarded the plane without looking at my emails. I listened to music and flew home to my family, entertaining philosophical questions of success and connecting the dots between what was said and trends I’d seen online.   

How to switch off strategically 

Nothing really changed immediately after SXSW. I obsessively threw myself into work again, without stepping back and acknowledging how I felt or why I was feeling it. Questions, trends and debates were all fine – or as my therapist likes to say, easy for me to intellectualise – but feelings? Those are messy.

Let’s be real.  

Rewiring the brain is really hard. We label and categorise ourselves. And then our minds (plus the people around us) highlight actions, thoughts, behaviours and feedback that align with those categories, strengthening sometimes destructive thought pathways (thank you, Sue Langley). I wasn’t going to get off a familiar rollercoaster simply because I listened to a handful of women talk about their lives… 

And then I had to. 

A string of serious events that crashed into being just before Sydney and came to a head in early November compelled me to pump the brakes for the first time in my working life. I needed to do – less – for a little while. I had no idea how to do less. I asked my husband, my friends, my therapist, even my mum for ideas and while some of them were less than helpful (although occasionally funny), the following offered a solid starting point that continues today:

Doing less looked like:

  • Removing Slack and Jira from my phone 
  • Checking my email once a day, instead of every hour 
  • Creating set times of availability… and mostly sticking to them
  • Attending every school assembly and being there for the little moments, like school awards.

Doing less meant putting down the spoon and stepping away from the sugar bowl, so always-on transformed into strategically switched off outside working hours. This would have been terrifying if I didn’t have a blueprint ready to go. It still is sometimes, but it’s getting easier to lean into the antidote and ask myself the following questions, stolen verbatim from the Beyond the 1% panel: 

Wellbeing

  • How do I feel today?
  • How did I sleep? 
  • What am I grateful for? 
  • Am I frustrated about anything? Is it holding me back?
  • How much water have I downed… at 10am, 2pm and 6pm.

Work/life

  • What are my priorities?
  • Today, success for me looks like… 
  • What is the cost?
  • What are the barriers?
  • What are the conscious choices I need to make?
  • Does this path continue to light me up? 
  • Is my enthusiasm earned?

While the results of this daily mini-quiz  have only begun to bear very small and slightly misshapen fruit, it’s something I wish I’d done before I reached burnout city. If you’ve seen yourself at any point in this piece of writing, or even if you haven’t and everything is a-okay, give the above check-in a try for a week. You don't need to tell anybody about it, write it down or even go through the whole list. Take the questions you know you can answer regularly and see what happens. 

I'm not sure what success is anymore, outside the metrics of search and content, but I think Layne is on to something here: 

There’s no right or wrong way to define success, the only right or wrong is the judgement of it. What does compromise or sacrifice certain aspects of our lives is the way in which we go about achieving that success, and that’s what we need to be personal about. Because we need to become aware of how we’re feeling and then be accountable to that, and then be agile in our response, because there’s not going to be one way to address whatever challenge you have.”

— Layne Beachley

Maybe success is knowing when to choose the bus or a two letter word, and being okay with both as they serve your life… or perhaps success is like SEO. It depends. 

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