SUSTAINABLE WORK/LIFE BALANCE

In November, I had the opportunity to attend MindCamp 5.0 in Seattle. It was the first “Un-conference” I have ever been to.  My interest in the event was peaked when the great Bryan Zug started a Twitter conversation.  This was not any old conversation, but one regarding a passion of mine–establishing a sustainable balance of work and life.  So, of course I was more than willing to jump in and share my own thoughts on the subject.  Bryan must have been so struck by the wisdom that emanated from my twitters that he suggested that we facilitate a discussion on the topic at MindCamp. I was totally down with that. We put up our session form for people to vote on, and given that I am writing about it, you can probably guess some people were interested.

It seems that there is a shift taking place in the creative workforce.  I think that people are starting to see the negative effects of a life whose gravitational pull is a paycheck and promotions.  Even for those of us who are extremely passionate about what we do, there is beginning to be a rising backlash against the workaholic lifestyle.  Bryan and I wanted to use this opportunity to facilitate a conversation with our peers.  The result was a great session where we were blessed to hear different ideas about where people currently stood on the topic. What qualified as work? Did we consider attending the conference work? Some did and some didn’t.

One idea that really struck me was the effect that a person’s station in life has in altering/determining what good work/life balance is. I understand that one’s station in life effects the balance in their life, and in some ways I totally agree. I was totally willing to work a ton and have very little personal time when I wasn’t married.  Yet, my willingness does not answer the question, “Is that approach to work sustainable under any circumstances?”. I don’t think it is. I don’t think overworking is sustainable, even if you’re single, have no friends or family. The concept is more about personal health rather than relational health. Of course your relationships will suffer if you don’t attend to them. But your personal health will suffer as well if you don’t pay attention to that.

I know that when I was working all the time, I didn’t take time to exercise at all. The most exercise I would get in a given day was walking from my apartment to my car, then to the office, then the “reverse commute” on the way home. That was pretty much it.  I had a membership to Lifetime Fitness, a 24 hour gym that I regularly drove by, yet, I never went because I was too worn down from my work day.  I just wanted to get home.

Two years ago my wife and I decided that we wanted our life to look different.  The way that I know so plainly that my previous overworked lifestyle was detrimental to my personal health is that when we moved from the suburbs to the city and ditched our car, I started to lose weight. I didn’t eat any differently. I wasn’t actively pursuing exercise, I was just more active.  I made time to be more active and that improved my health. It wasn’t only my physical health that was affected. My relational health suffered because I was working a lot.

I didn’t want to admit that if I worked 12 hour days six days a week, I would not have a close intimate relationship with my wife. But I expected to. I think that I should have that close relationship with my wife no matter what. It’s important to me. But the truth is, if it is important to me, I need to invest in it. I wouldn’t expect to know what was going on my industry if I wasn’t willing to spend time to learn about. That sound logic is often thrown out the window when it comes to our personal lives. I am totally willing to invest in learning a new programming language, or reading blogs and articles to stay up to date with the tech industry. I invest in it. But investing in relationships and people take more time, and attention than learning a new language. People interact with you, Objective-C doesn’t (not yet anyway).

Through Bryan’s and my discussion and the subsequent discussions that developed throughout the evening I was struck that the key to this work/life balance is boundaries. I think this is a very scary concept to our 21st century American selves. It flies in the face of everything we stand for as Americans. We don’t like boundaries in our lives. We want to have whatever we want, whenever we want it. We deserve to have it all. We work hard, we pay our taxes. We want it all at little or no cost.

Some people have the desire to have boundaries in their life but are ill-equipped to do the hard work of implementing those boundaries. Leif Hansen did a session about the Portals and the intersection of the online and offline world. In it he mentioned a few tools that he uses to give himself boundaries. He mentioned RescueTime to track how you spend your time on your computer. It has revealed a lot about where I get sidetracked. Some folks also mentioned some tools to lock you out of your computer at certain intervals. All of this technology to help us set boundaries.

Ryan Carson from Carsonified recently did an interview at floobe.com where he is asked if “any company can do a 4 day working week?” To which Ryan replied, “You bet. It just takes a hell of a lot of determination and a specific decision to focus on quality of life instead of revenue.” I thought that was a great answer. It really embodied what I think a sustainable work/life balance really is.