Work Life Balance
Or should we say, professional-personal-balance instead ?
You cannot separate work from your life. To exist in this world means we have to participate in the economic world chain, to own a profession. (please check my other post regarding ikigai https://hariesef.medium.com/ikigai-8f8672bf4f8b). Definition wise, this would mean that you cannot balance the work with your life, because life itself is a superset class, and work, is the subset.
However, if we speak about professional and personal separation, basically our life during weekday can be divided into three
- Things we do for only ourselves
- Things we do to make a living (job)
- Things we do with our family, relatives and friends
Things we do for ourselves only
This is obvious. Sleeping. Adults need 7–9 hours daily dose of sleep. Anything less than this number will impact physically and mentally to health in long term (https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need).
Things we do to make a living
If you are employee just like me, than most of the companies out there will require mandatory of 8 productive hours per day. Add one hour for non productive lunch. And then add another two hours for non productive back and forth between office and home. In total we have 11 hours gross for our professional work.
Things we do with our family, relatives and friends
Do your math. We now only have 4 hours left for other personal things 😄
So you think 8 hours per day is not enough, many other tasks that you have to complete at office, and continued again at home afterwards. Having realized that at normal pace we only have 4 hours for our personal life, don’t you think this is unfair? I do think so. Given the numbers, most of our time is spent for our professional work. Can we reduce the numbers? most likely not, unless you are lucky to have forever Working-From-Home (in this case you can extend the working period to 10 hours) or your home is very near the office.
So we just accept as it is ? Yup. The point is to maximize your throughput during 8 hours reservation. Did you spend it productively ?
Communication is the key
If you are individual contributor and you get overloaded, you need to let your manager informed about the situation.
If you are manager, you need to grow your team to be independent and high performing (https://hariesef.medium.com/book-synopsis-5-levels-of-leadership-a99e62b1676a), give your trust to them and cascade tasks accordingly. This will give you chance to focus on tasks that must be done, and can only be done by yourself.
Some overtime is not avoidable
Yes that’s life dynamics. But we need to ensure that every single hour we spent additionally can be recovered and transferred to another day in form of day off. This is called professional. Doing overtime task and just get over it with thank you from management, is not professional. Know what you are eligible for and ensure to take day off when it is due.
Q: Should I convert my overtime into paycheck ?
Even if your company offers it, I really do not recommend this. The already spent time can not be re-winded even for one millisecond. The portion of lost time must be allocated into personal part. Money can be searched. Company will not look after you forever. But your family and friends will always be there for you — if you allocate your time correctly for them.
Q: In the end it seems not possible to follow the recommendation. I keep working for at least 12 hours per day, and even I have to be standby during weekend. What to do now ?
At this point, you can only make two choices
- accept it. If you are happy with current situation and already considered all the risks in what your job responsibility brings to your body and to your family — then please do so. This will be your new balance standard. Just please don’t tell us that you are getting tired. And more importantly, do not try to bring your own standard into your team or somebody else.
- accept the fact that your working place is toxic. So you have properly made the communications with stakeholders, tried to bring out the best performance during working hours, but this is just not enough and nobody seems to care about personal life. They kept pinging you during off peak hours, during weekends, during your rest time. Well probably this is time to search for new working place.
Q: This article seems has no solution for work life balance then ?
Indeed. 😆 There is no way I am able to solve your life matters. There are huge articles on internet that we can read regarding this topic, but I suppose they contain similar advice. The purpose of this article is to give new point of view on how our professional life should be and what can we do to achieve that ideals.
Cheers mate 🍻
