Self-care Hours

If there is any profession more concerned with tracking time, I’m unaware of it. The legal profession has made an art of splitting hours down to tenths, and assigning value to each of those 6 minute intervals. And those that accumulate the most are rewarded.

Yet the same skills aren’t applied to taking care of ourselves. We don’t track hours spent meditating (unless our phones do it for us) and we aren’t rewarded for who gets the most full nights of sleep. If anything these non-billable hours are sometimes viewed as necessary evils, something our bodies need that detract from our billable totals.

And yet the reward for most billable hours, often are transient. Increases in pay or position, possibly even to partner, until we decide we’ve billed enough. Yet the result of burning out because we don’t take care of ourselves enough, that can be far more permanent.

We have the skills. As a profession we could work in expectations for self-care. We just need to change. As a profession, that change will be slow. Yet individually we can all start doing our part, both formally and informally, to start promoting the self-care hour.