Here are my notes and slides from an event I was speaking on yesterday about work-life balance organized by TechFellows and Engineering Leaders Community.
I want to convince you that as a TechFellow, Engineering Leader or an IT guy in Slovakia or in Western World in general you do not have to pick between work and life.
When people talk about work-life balance, they usually think about weights and having one lower than the other, and it is just a trade-off.
It is more of a balancing act. Why is this difference important?
Sooner or later if you have imbalance
Either “life” will crush your “work” or “work” will crush your “life”.
This happened to me several times. At the university I was suicidal because of this balancing act and literary one slap.
Why is this happening? It is inevitable if we try to balance it as two separate things.
Day has only 24 hours and for driven people it is not enough to do everything.
Most of your day is spent on things like sleep, work, commute food.
For the “life” part, less time is left, but people want to do a lot of stuff usually.
If you want to be perfect at everything, you will overstretch you and something will give
What people usually do, and I did, is tried to change sizes of stuff.
Less sleep is the fastest and worst idea for your work and life.
Changing to Home Office works for some.
You can work part-time.
Or you can go drastic and take a large part of your life away, such as marriage.
But you will still grind with the balancing act.
The other way is to integrate work and life, do not take them as totally separate things but find overlaps.
Slight overlap brings you more to balance and leaves you a large part of nonwork life as a fallback if thing go really wrong with work.
Safer strategy but more work as still balancing is needed, but not as much.
Tight overlap will lower requirements on the balancing as you almost totally integrate your work and life.
Usually path for owners of companies.
But also for really engaged people who love their jobs.
Downside is that if you lose the job, it can be pretty destabilizing as you will not have much out of work.
I choose tighter but leave friends and stuff to do outside of work, so I can change without it being devastating in case of need, but still have most stuff related to my current job.
Now, how to do this?.
Explore the possibilities. Evaluate them in context. Have clear values. Know your roles. Set goals. Deal with setbacks.
7 habits workshops really helped me integrate a lot of the stuff I knew and stuff as Roles and Values are explained there greatly.
Now let’s get over this.
I will now tell you more about my professional and personal journey before I get back to the integration of life and work.
Exploration is needed, because if you do not know the options and your limits, it is hard to start integrating.
This is just the work part, remember that alongside work related stuff I still had to manage life, relationships, family and other important stuff – did not go great often.
Exploration is best done when you are young, you say yes a lot and try to take as many responsibilities as possible.
I had a lot of parallel jobs and responsibilities, civic societies, student clubs.
And I tried stand-up, comedy writing which was a dream of mine – not anymore.
I also tried to go into politics, which was a hobby of mine, also not for me.
Tried to start my own beer tour company.
And other stuff.
When you are young say yes to (almost) everything and find your limits, take multiple roles and responsibilities until you hit your limits, and then you cut from the least important.
At some point, you will start hitting your limits. Usually thanks to success at work – getting promoted – and life – having family.
So I started cutting back over time to focus on those stuff that made sense to me mostly.
And ended up with not so many things to do except of occasional side job which I do not take as a commitment but as a might do if I want to.
Exploration is not only about trying stuff out yourself but reading, talking with people, watching great movies and much other stuff that broaden your horizons and perspective.
As you can imagine, it was a mess. What helped me to cut down over time is clarity of my roles.
You have many roles in your life over time.
In the past I had a tone, when I first did 7 Habits eval in 2018 had about 12 roles that I considered important.
Now I cut it down to 5 over past 6 years.
Self-care did not even exist as an important one for me until 7 habits and what really changed it was when I ended up in hospital with my lower back unable to walk.
Roles help you prioritize if me have conflict in responsibilities.
For example, when I felt that my family is being affected by my job responsibilities, professional is lower than my son and wife, so I decided in the past to quit a job despite having no other option yet on the table as my roles priority is clear to me.
Finding balance between roles – if family is more important, you still need to provide roof over head, food etc. so it is not black and white. I try to be able to support my family without my current job to be free, so even with radically lower income
So back to the integration, how do I do this.
As I mentioned, important is clarity in roles and also goals.
For each role you should have strategic long term objectives, you can break them down to smaller goals on day to year timescales. This is your doctrine.
What is the magic in this, that when you think in long term, you start seeing patterns that will help you set short term goals which integrate work and life easily.
For me, it is staying fit for me, my kid and my wife. Sleeping is important therefore, I used to sleep a lot less, even 4 hours on average, now I am on 7 and more. I started exercising 4 times a week and have trainers.
And I love to learn, and it helps me in everything. I do not have social media outside of LinkedIn. I use RSS Inoreader and books.
As a father, I want to have fun and want my son to have fun. So we play Playstation or solve some puzzles. And I try to teach him basic stuff but not suffocate him.
If you do not set relationship as a priority, it will degrade. I try to support my wife, she has changed her career thanks to that e.g. not being stressed being a while without a job – freedom.
And I want to have experiences with her and spend time with her – and we try to find common things to do as much as we can.
At any company I try to leave it better than I found it – document stuff, improve processes, improve structure, improve tooling, automate. And I try to do a good job on tasks assigned to me.
It paid off over long time both strategies, made yourself not needed and instead of firing you they will promote you.
This is an example how.
Staying fit contributes to other strategic goals.
Or improving your current company contributes to other strategic goals.
You could link most stuff together, not 100 percent but quite a lot.
For example, speaking at this TechFellows event, why I said yes. Improves my self-care as I needed to learn a bit and reiterate over this. Improves my professional standing. It improves my community leader role.
Instead of balancing, I now find common activities for multiple roles.
Travel e.g. job if you want to travel, your employer can pay for it. Commuting is something people hate, I integrate it by walking to public transport, listening to podcasts I would otherwise have no time to do or reading books.
Also at office I have a standing desk I tend to use due to my lower back issues.
I can take steps in the office and when I return home, 12 floors of steps is great free exercise.
Some more examples.
One important stuff is dealing with setbacks.
Getting fired. Sickness. Economic crisis. Many other things can change your integration and life.
What will help you with setbacks is clear values.
If you meet really religious people, they do not get really thrown out of their life by setbacks as they have inner peace.
Unfortunately I am not religious despite my upbringing and a lot of my growing up was fueled by cynicism, which is not helpful.
Again 7 habits helped me a bit alongside with other stuff and I wrote a personal and with my wife family constitution we have on our fridge with basic values and rules we refer back to when something is unclear.
Circle of influence is great concept, helps you cut down unimportant stuff from your life with little impact on it.
Do not overspend, have a cushion of money – I do not increase my life standard drastically, but tend to save more than buy stuff.
But realize when you can finally buy some time and freedom (e.g. better phone, TV, Roomba, personal trainer etc.) – I waited too long and in the end it hurt me by being not as effective or healthy as I could have been.
Last piece of puzzle is taking stuff in context.
These are more or less accurate numbers, we live privileged lives.
Despite, I see a lot of people complaining about their jobs and lives.
Jobs in IT have privileges, flexible time, mind work, realize it and use it and be thankful.
Do not compare with people working in a factory. But also not with billionaires.
Huge advantage if you have worked in a kitchen or chicken factory or building buildings or in a factory for a while to get perspective.
This does not mean I do not bitch about the state of things in Slovakia or at the company or in my personal life.
But it helped me with the realization that I can really easily integrate work and life thanks to my great privilege of being born where I was born to family which provided me with good childhood and opportunities to choose my way and find myself at peace in the end between work and life.