This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

You have tried three productivity systems and you are still exhausted. That is because balance does not break in the calendar.

The advice that treats the symptom

Block your time. Turn off notifications. Stop checking email after seven. You did all of that, and by Thursday you were answering messages in bed anyway. The reason is that nothing about your schedule caused this. The office moved into your home and no physical signal tells you the day is over. You do not hand work over, because doing it yourself is faster — which is true exactly once, and then never again. You cannot stop, because some part of you is waiting to be found out. And a large share of the conditions you are fighting were designed by somebody else and are not yours to fix by trying harder.

What this course covers

Forty-one lessons, and deliberately none of them is a time management lesson. The boundary first: what actually changes when the office is your home, rules for the working day, sleep and eating, living with family inside working hours, setting up the physical space, control against self-control and how to hold a pace with nobody watching, tools and the meetings worth having, motivation and isolation, looking after your health when the commute has gone, the specific skills remote work demands, and how culture and security work at a distance. Then the load: the psychological barriers and myths that stop you delegating, the direct link between not delegating and burning out, six stages from choosing a task to checking it, RACI, feedback that does not demotivate, delegation used to develop somebody, and what the freed time gets used for. Then the diagnosis: what the research shows, the actual difference between stress and burnout, auditing an environment for the factors that manufacture it, what your manager and your organisation each control, the link to turnover and engagement, and pulse measurement. Then yourself: MBTI, DISC, PAEI, Belbin, Hogan, the Big Five and the sixteen types, and reading someone in conversation without a test. Then the thing that keeps you working: who an impostor actually is, the seventy per cent, the trap of finding it too easy, what market value is made of, and standing on three legs rather than one. Finally the half you do not own: how a company designs the experience of working there, and the benefits, flexible plans and cafeteria arrangements you can ask for with an argument attached.

Four blocks recorded from the employer's side

The remote work, burnout, employee experience and benefits blocks were recorded for the people who design these things rather than for the people living inside them. That is half the point of the course. Balance is a joint product, and knowing how the other half is built is the only reliable way to tell a problem you can solve yourself from a condition that has to be renegotiated — and to know precisely what to ask for when you do.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 41 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the remote transition checklist, the delegation barriers and the six-stage process, RACI, the stress and burnout diagnostic and audit, five personality frameworks, the market value model, the employee journey map, the WorldatWork benefits model and the flexible benefits design

• A balance course with no time management module, on purpose

Where to start

Write down the three tasks you did this week that somebody else could have done. That list is the first thing this course takes apart. Enrol now and start today.