In short: sleeping. Taking real breaks. Doing nothing.

Working more and more will not make the work better. That's a thing you discover with age maybe. Often young Service Design professionals will push themselves so hard that they'll stop taking real breaks and will cut out hours of sleep in order to get some more work done.

The book Why We Sleep explains in depth the importance of sleep. In it I discovered that a lack of sleep is like being drunk for the brain. You would not come drunk at work. But we come with a lack of sleep. Which is basically the same.

Making sure you get enough sleep has some nice domino effects. You might have to re-negotiate a deadline or deliverable. You might have to say "no" to requests. And these are very valuable skills to learn for young Service Design practitioners. As our job is empathy, helping, caring and serving we might forget that to be able to do these things we need to stay humans.

I one day summarized this to a learner in this way:

"How can you make the life of other humans better if you don't have a life yourself?"

Backstage of this article

This article was written and illustrated by hand on a refurbished Remarkable II tablet. I used the Connect Service from Remarkable to turn the handwritten text into a typed text. If you are curious you can download the original note below.