“A heart attack made me realize I was working too much”

It took a heart attack to convince Jonathan Frostick, 45, manager of British banking group HSBC, to reconsider his priorities and understand that the balance between his work and private life had to be necessarily rethought. Also because, when he started to feel bad, as he wrote in a post on LinkedIn soon went viral, his first thoughts were not directed to family or loved ones, but to work. Face to face with the risk of dying, he immediately thought, in order: «1.

I have to meet my boss tomorrow, and this was not needed. 2. How can I secure funds for X (business stuff) 3. Fuck, I haven’t updated my will 4. I hope my wife doesn’t find me dead. ‘

After arriving at the hospital, Frostick decided that the list needed to be renewed instead, because his priority couldn’t always be work. “I made the following decisions, while lying here, on the basis that I wasn’t dead: 1. I won’t spend all day on Zoom 2 anymore. I will reorganize my approach to work. 3. I won’t put up with any asshole at work anymore: life is too short. 4. I will lose 15 kg 5. I want every day to count for something, at work, otherwise I will change roles. 6. I want to spend more time with my family“. Because “so far, that’s what near death has taught me,” concluded Frostick, sharing a photo of him from the hospital bed.

In an interview with Bloomberg , Frostick claimed that smartworking has helped to blur the border between work and the rest of life. “We no longer have the opportunity to have a chat with the colleague on the other side of the desk or the coffee machine, or go for a walk.” Sharing his story, he hopes, might be useful to some other workaholic. “I feel I have a responsibility to myself and other people,” he explained. “This happened to me, but it could happen to you. You have to change”.