Morning! How do you feel after the break... if you had one?

Ideally, you worked to the end of Thursday, then turned away from your desk and didn’t come back to it until Tuesday morning. It feels like a bonus holiday, four days off in a row with more to come in this Jubilee year.

But the reality might be quite different for you and your colleagues.

That Thursday finish might have been a little later than normal, to get yourself far enough ahead to be able to have any sort of break.

Or maybe that went a step further and you had a discussion with the family about which one of the two days you could take off. Or maybe you’re in the situation that many find themselves in, like the bosses of SMEs and startups, where there just isn’t time to be away just yet.

So you bank the Bank Holiday and press on, hoping a couple of 80-hour weeks will create a gap.

One of the key elements of our Level Up campaign is health and wellbeing. It had to be in there as a priority, because no proud North East business would prosper without looking after its people.

Spend £500,000 on a new piece of kit and you would expect to keep it maintained so that it gives peak performance every day. Those same instincts have to be applied to every person in your business - the problem is, sometimes we are the architects of our own problems.

We’re well into April and I wonder how many workers haven’t taken a holiday yet? Inexplicably, we may be a bit proud of that because think it denotes usefulness to our business and an ability to live up to our end of the deal and do whatever is needed.

Sometimes, that’s spot-on and admirable. But, for me, the trick is to get the balance right and to be able to work the long days and a few hours over the weekend or on a day off sometimes, but not as a normal shift.

Pick the essential times to push yourself above and beyond, but use that same judgment to say no and ditch the desk instead of banking the break.

As we Level Up our opportunities as a region, there always needs to be time to Level Up our own work-life balance.

Invest in yourself, there’s a good RoI further down the line.