Perspectives: High-intensity interval training at work
HIIT for your career.
This issue of Perspectives is a guest from
(she/her), author of The Offbeat, a publication about leadership, inspired by music, psychology, and culture. Allison is the SVP of Brand, Culture & Media of Shipt. Allison describes herself as “on a mission to jazz up workplace leadership,” “mom” and “overzealous exclamation point user.”Allison and I connected here on Substack and I resonated with the opening line of her the “About” page: The way we work is broken. (Plus her cover images are very cool.)
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic story "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" set off a national debate that’s still raging today. Her thesis:
“[M]illions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).”
More than a decade later, a balanced life is still effectively impossible for caregivers of all kinds who have professional ambitions outside their caretaking responsibilities.
Moreover, even if you don’t have small children or elderly or disabled relatives for whom you’re responsible, or if you do but you have the infrastructure with which to manage those obligations without encroaching on the exertion of maximum effort toward your career, maybe you don’t want to exert that maximum effort.
Maybe you’re in a life phase where it feels best to prioritize self-care, exclusive of any deeper existential meaning your vocation may provide, or you feel called to pursue a lifelong dream like traveling or volunteering. Maybe your life is relatively, reasonably balanced most of the time, and your job is just fine, not great but fine—and that’s fine with you for the time being.
What if we approached our careers the way many exercisers approach fitness: through interval training? Methods like HIIT (high-intensity interval training), SIT (sprint interval training), and Tabata all involve several rounds that alternate between high-intensity movements with short periods of lower-intensity movements.
During the lower-intensity time periods, there’s no guilt about lowering your heart rate or sweating less, there’s no pressure to get back to high-intensity mode as quickly as possible. The low-intensity phases are as critical as their high-intensity counterparts; they’re two halves of a whole workout.
Based on what’s going on in your life (because that’s all work is, one part of life), your career may be full throttle or you may be in a chapter where personal obligations or priorities are relegating work to the bottom of the list. And all of those variations, “having it all” be damned, are totally fine.
Thinking about your approach to work through the lens of interval training—of course respecting the need to earn whatever income your personal circumstances require—does a few things:
It alleviates the pressure to win, win, win; to strive, strive strive
It’s kind to yourself, circumventing—or helping heal from—burnout
It injects realism into the professional picture; it recognizes that the “all” in “having it all” can be more big-picture and long-term—the “all” still counts if it’s over the course of a lifetime
As I’ve gotten older, especially as a mom of two young kids but even before they were born, I’ve found my professional energy varies much more than it used to. In my twenties and early thirties amidst the addictive, voracious hustle of 2010s New York City, I could work from 8 AM through midnight without motivation waning.
I was literally hungry for professional advancement; my ambition was a tangible thing like when you can feel humidity in the air. It’s almost impossible to believe now, but there was a time I’d voluntarily go into the office on the weekends to “catch up” on work.
A combination of COVID, getting older (read: more wizened and jaded), becoming a parent, and transitioning to mostly remote work has led to me being a) more tired and b) more aware of my energy rhythms.
I’ve found that leaning into this idea of an interval training approach to work, even as a structure for a work week—stacking meetings in the afternoons and later in the week in recognition of when I have the most creative brain power for solo-focused work, helps me stay attuned to my natural motivation and therefore not only produce more effectively but feel better doing it. And that means I’m leading my teams most compellingly, which is my primary obligation at work.
Most of us have to work to live, even if we love what we do, or love the people we work with. or both. We might as well feel our healthiest, and therefore model a healthy approach as leaders, doing it.
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