Work-Life Balance

Achieving a good work-life balance can mean different things to different people and will change for us as we journey through our careers and life. I believe that we are responsible and in control of our work-life balance. Some companies “expect long hours and ‘blending work and life’” but it is our decision whether to work there. There might be something to blending work and life, but is time the right unit of measurement?

Let me share my experience with work-life balance. All I ask is you keep an open mind for how to approach work-life balance and understand these are my learnings on the topic. I will love to hear about yours!

First, it is important to acknowledge that life tosses us curveballs; when it does our life can intrude on our work. Like spending time away from a project to recover from an injury or help a loved one mend. I hope you work for a caring and understanding company when these events impact your life; I know I do, but unfortunately some are not so lucky.

Work can also be intrusive to our personal lives. This is when most people recognize they have a work-life balance problem. There are isolated events, like the all-nighter you pull before a big deadline, or working all weekend to fix a bad bug. These should be rare. I want to say no more than twice a year. Heroics are necessary at times, but it is not sustainable.

Then we can even find ourselves working for a manager that makes things worse. Like your boss telling you to work the weekend on Friday afternoon for something not critical and could have been requested weeks earlier.

Our manager can be our best ally to protect us, but if you work for Lumberg, I suggest you watch this video.

I know what you are thinking. This Jason character does not work hard. I mean, does he only work two weekends a year? Darn tooting, but that was not always the case.

Time Approach

My first serious job was working for the local lumber yard. I worked 11-hour shifts and rode a ferry boat to the community college after work. Those were long days, but the overtime pay was great. When I finally landed my dream job in tech it was normal for me to work 60-hours a week. I just kept on doing it. Some weeks I worked over 80 hours and sleep under my desk. I distinctly remember doing this when preparing for the Y2K bug and picking up the pieces after the ILOVEYOU worm. I was young, living my dream, working hard, and not thinking about work-life balance.

Then one day I got a glimpse of what a healthy work-life balance was. I joined a team that provided 24x7x365 support and I worked the graveyard shift. I came into work and was nose to the grindstone for 10 hours. I did that four days a week. When I went home in the morning I was completely disconnected from work. It was bliss. I even remember telling a future colleague, and now friend, Tony, that my work-life balance was great when he was interviewing to join the team.

Soon after I found myself getting promoted to a service lead and moved off shiftwork. I worked the normal day schedule at the company and went on-call. Oh, and then I bought a home, got married, and started a family.

Now I really needed a good work-life balance, but it was going downhill fast. I thought it was my on-call rotation. I changed disciplines from SRE to PM and was no longer on-call. That change actually made it worse. Now I could no longer work from home and I had to learn two new roles — at work PM, and at home Dad. Life and work were too much and I was burned out.

Worst yet, Tony joined the team and was like, what the heck man? You said work life balance was great! He was also having a bad work-life balance and here I was burned out myself.

I got desperate. One evening I decided to lock my computer and leave at 5PM, blowing a major deadline with a big customer just to prove I was done working over 20 hours straight due to poor planning. You can imagine how that went the next morning. This was at this time I took a serious look into my work-life balance. I was not in my roaring 20s anymore. I was thirty with a 1-year-old. So, I decided to read a book about the topic.

I do not remember the title of the book, but the one concept I took away redefined how I approached work-life balance. Up until this point I thought time was the unit of measurement for work-life balance and it was my managers responsibility to fix it. I was wrong on both fronts.

Using time as the unit of measurement to balance your work and life is easy to use but it is a trap. There are 24-hours in day so my thinking was:

• 2 hours commute
• 10 hours work
• 5 hours with family
• 7 hours sleep

If I needed to do more work, then it was just simple math. I increased my time at work and reduced my time sleeping. Well, that just made me sleep deprived, my productivity went down, and it was a snowball effect until I was burned out again. I would take time off and start the cycle over.

The solution I learned about in the book was to balance work and life based on energy I was exerting on activities. I could sometimes blend activities, but sleep was a non-negotiable constant since it renews energy.

Energy Approach

We have a finite amount of energy each day and we can use only 100% of it. There is no such thing as doing something 110%. Sleep recharges energy levels and we decide how much energy to spend on what. In this model time is irrelevant; however, since we are humans and thus adaptable by nature, over periods of time, how we decide to spend our energy changes.

This is an example of well-balanced energy levels.

This is an example of how work can push other things out of our energy limit. This happens but if we do this too long then 1) we will burn out and eventually 2) start failing in the areas we do not have energy for.

Let me walk through two examples of how different co-workers decide to spend their energy every day and how that overlaps with work.

1. Shemiele gets into the office and takes a lot of breaks throughout the day and still gets all her work done. She is often found getting coffee and socializing with co-workers. She often has lunch off campus and can be found playing foosball before getting dinner with her team in the evening before jogging home.
2. Jeremy gets into the office is nose to the grindstone from the start. He socializes with coworkers during short periods of free time before a meeting starts and focuses on building relationships during meetings. Most days Jeremy eats lunch at his desk and is basically nose to the grindstone up until his last bit of work is done and he drives home.

Who exerted more energy during their day to get their work done? Does somebody who spends 10 hours in the office always exert more energy than somebody who is there 8 hours? Let us visualize this.

You can see how Shemiele is very efficient with her energy levels. She enjoys dining out and does so with coworkers and family. She gets exercise at and away from work with jogging and foosball. Jeremy has a longer commute but leverages that time to learn; he loves cooking and his family, so he combines the two.

Blending work and life works for some people, and so does keeping clean boundaries between the two. Me personally, I tend to bounce between these two models based on my circumstances.

For example, when my kids were young, I compartmentalized my work by going in at 6AM and getting off at 3PM, and when I was off, I was truly off. No email going to my phone or personal computers. As my kids moved into their teens, I only ring-fenced my weekends, blend work into my late evenings but only for the work items I really enjoy, and then work from home 1~2 days a week. This is only the current formula — staying adaptable is key, and for me, long-hours does not equal productivity.

But There Is So Much Work!

If you are a diligent worker, take ownership, and a people-pleaser like me, saying no does not come easy. But it is necessary to keep that work energy bubble to a manageable size. So how do we say no?

First, I believe there needs to be an atmosphere of trust in your team and across your partners, and then these approaches can help.

1. Have the conversation 1:1 — be honest and transparent. Set clear expectations that you are saying no / not doing something.
2. Use data and customer feedback to help align priorities with partners and clarify why you decided what to do and not do.
3. Suggest an alternative owner or solution. Maybe there is somebody else fitted to take on the work, or an open-source contribution option.

One of the biggest mistakes we can make is not communicating and resetting expectations for a commitment we can no longer deliver on. It is Ok to go from “yes” to “no” but not resetting expectations erodes trust.

Closing

When I accepted responsibility for my work-life balance things got better. Managers are in a great position to help us. They can help shield us from those unreasonable 11th hour asks. If we established partnerships across our team there is no reason we should not be able to take a long vacation.

I can say with a straight face now, Tony, that I have a great work-life balance. I have a perfect blend of energy that I am applying to my family, hobbies, and work. We have to stay diligent and adapt. Whether it is a layoff, new job, or a tough project. Then again, sometimes we just need to play less World of Warcraft.

Ok so this article got little long. It is a large subject with ratholes. I would love to hear from you about your experience with work-life balance.

• How do you measure your work-life balance? Any tips?
• Any suggestions for people struggling with work-life balance?
• What holds you back from saying “no” to things?
• Do you put in long-hours at work out of fear of underperforming?
• How do you see your work-life balance changing over your career?