Arianna Huffington on Burning Out at Work

I disagree with a policy of needing to be at the office. I don’t want rules about where people work. The whole debate around where you work is just a tiny part of what we’re dealing with. Because we’re able to work from everywhere, we’re expected to work from everywhere. You answer e-mails until midnight and get up to answer more at 7 in the morning. What I say to people here is, “Once you leave the office, unless there’s an emergency, you’re off.”

I learned this the hard way. Five years ago, I fainted from exhaustion. It was still the early days of building the Huffington Post. I’d just returned home from a college tour with my daughter, where I’d agreed not to be on my BlackBerry while we were looking around. We stayed in hotels where she would go to sleep and I’d start working. When I got back to my office, I fainted, hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone, and had to get five stitches around my right eye. It got me thinking about what kind of life I was leading. I was getting four to five hours of sleep a night. I had to slow down and reevaluate the choices I was making.