An Essential 15-Minute Work Life Balance Check-up for Product Managers

This is only the second story in my “PM Friday” publication, so I had to ask myself whether it was a little early to talk about work life balance. Shouldn’t we cover Product Management topics like product strategy, leadership, or UX design before we talk about work life balance?

Indeed, in the PM world, work life balance is often an afterthought. How else do we explain our customary 50-hour+ work weeks and widespread burn-out? Alas, despite unprecedented stress in our personal lives from the pandemic, we are still seeing company cultures that frown upon work life balance as a sign of weakness, or PMs wearing their burn-out as a badge of honor.

So no, it is not too soon to talk about work life balance.

And if companies thought work life balance is the sole responsibility of the employee, Covid and the ensuing phenomena of “The Great Resignation” and “Quiet Quitting” are teaching them otherwise, as they experience attrition and significant productivity loss that will no doubt hurt their bottom line.

Why Work Life Balance is so Important to Me

In my previous story, I talked about how practicing PM as a craft enriched my 30-year PM career. The “craft mindset” definitely helped to turn my long PM work hours into fulfilling “flow state” hours, but that alone would not have sustained me through my 30-year PM career, during which my personal life included becoming a spouse, becoming a parent to two children, taking a 2-year foreign assignment to Germany with my young family in tow, nurturing my children through their adolescent years (which on average ends at the age of 28 according to some experts, compared to 18 in my generation), and becoming a caretaker to aging parents.

In other words, as I advanced in my career and took on more responsibilities at work, I also advanced in life and took on more responsibilities at home.

While I was walking my own work life balance tight rope, I was also managing PMs most of my career. My wife and I started out as a dual career tech couple, so I could readily relate to many of the challenges my team members faced as working parents, both the working dads and the working moms. I realized early on that as a manager, promoting healthy work life balance was a win-win-win proposition for the company, for my employees, and selfishly for myself because I could better retain the top talent I worked so hard to attract.

In fact, if any of my former team members or mentees are reading this story, I trust they would not be too surprised I chose to shine a spotlight on work life balance so early in my nascent publication focused on PM best practices.

The “Boiling Frog Syndrome”

Work life balance is a classic example of a “boiling frog syndrome”, where you don’t realize you’re being boiled alive until it’s too late. This is a really cruel and cringe-worthy metaphor, one my Buddhist spouse would certainly disapprove, but the impacts of work life “imbalance” are no less dramatic, ranging from serious health issues, to broken marriages, to midlife crises.

One time a job applicant honestly shared with me that, after working grueling hours at one start-up after another, he one day realized he had completely missed out on his two teenage kids growing up. They lived under his roof but he hardly knew them. Now they are dealing with tough teenager issues, and he realized he could no longer remain absent in their lives at a time when they needed him most. There was a happy ending to this story. He joined our mature and stable company and instantly brought his innovative spirit to our team, while we offered him an environment where he could reclaim a healthy work life balance and become the loving and engaged parent he wanted to be.

As much as I advocated work life balance, you would think I would be immune to losing balance myself. This was not the case. As a high performer steadily taking on more and more responsibility at work, I found myself just as vulnerable to becoming a boiling frog as the next guy.

Luckily, I was working for a company that genuinely cared about developing its leaders not just technically or managerially, but holistically as healthy human beings. As I took on my next big promotion to the director level, I was sent to a leadership camp to help equip me to operate at that level. Little did I know that, in addition to learning executive level best practices, I would leave the class equipped with a handy tool that would help me better manage my work life balance in my more demanding role and for the rest of my career.

I will share it here, in the hopes it would also help you maintain a healthy work life balance as you deal with increased demands on your time as you advance in your career, as well as in your life.

The 15-minute Work Life Balance Check-up

This simple exercise requires a deck of note cards or sticky notes to be used in a card sorting exercise. (Or you could do this in a visual tool like Miro of course.)

1. Brainstorm up to 10 things in your life that are most important to you and require your time commitment, such as health, exercise, family, relationships, work, learning, etc.
2. From this list of 10 things, further narrow it down to your top 5 priorities, and write each item on a card. We will call this deck of cards “My Top 5 Priorities”
3. Create a second deck of cards using the same top 5 items. We will call this deck the “Current Actual Priorities”
4. On a table, sort the 5 cards in the My Top 5 Priorities deck vertically in priority order.
5. Now, to the right of the previous cards, sort the 5 cards in the Current Actual Priorities deck based on how you are?actually?prioritizing your time commitments today. This sorting is not based on how much time you spend on each activity, but how you typically make trade-off’s when two items are competing for your time and you have to prioritize one and sacrifice the other. It is important to be brutally honest here.
6. Stare-and-compare the ordering of the two sets of cards.?Is your current life congruent with your priorities?
7. Identify the major discrepancies by circling them.
8. Come up with one or two corrective actions you can focus on immediately.

Example: My Results

It was more than 20 years ago that I was first introduced to this exercise.

The premise of this exercise is that, “Talk is cheap. What really matters is how we vote with our most precious commodity: our time.”

To illustrate this exercise with a concrete example, I can share my initial exercise. To be clear, I share this example purely to illustrate the exercise to you, not to impose my priorities on you or influence your priorities in any way. Everyone’s aspirations, family situation, and personal lives are different, so it’s really up to you to define your own priorities.

(Extra Credit: I also encourage you to discuss your findings with your partner or spouse, and encourage them to do their own check-up exercise. Your priorities do not have to be the same. Ideally they would be compatible and coordinated.)

My initial Top 10 list looked something like this:

Then I further zoomed in on my My Top 5 Priorities and stack ranked them (I cheated and grouped together two cards that were closely related):

Then I stack ranked My Current Actual Priorities, based on a brutally honest assessment of how I prioritized my time commitments when there were competing priorities:

Now, I am able to put them side-by-side and see if there are any discrepancies. I circled the discrepancies, and started identifying corrective actions:

I’m a big believer in “If you can clearly visualize the problem, you are half way to a solution.”

In my case, the side-by-side stare-and-compare exercise revealed I was prioritizing “work” and “learning” before other higher priorities. I would hear a little voice justifying it in my head, saying it was because work had very concrete deadlines and the team depended on me, and learning was something I just loved to do.

On the other hand, I often sacrificed parenting commitments on evenings and on weekends to accommodate work commitments because by that point my wife had decided to be a stay-at-home mom, and it felt harmless for me to be absent once in a while. Health-wise my outward appearance was still slim and fit, so I always felt I could put off exercising to another day.

These were my day-to-day knee-jerk trade-offs. But during this check-up exercise, when prompted to revisit these decisions strategically, I began to regret these trade-offs. I always wanted to be an active parent who did not miss out on the magical moments of my children’s development. I also knew that although I could fool people with my skinny frame, I was losing muscle mass and starting to gain some belly fat, my cholesterol was creeping up, and my endurance during strenuous exercise was on a noticeable decline each time I played on a sports field.

This exercise had a purpose. It served as a wake-up call, and it was time for me to heed it.

I decided to implement two main changes in my life:

1. Protect my evenings and weekends?so I can be an involved parent. This required my being more mindful when making commitments at work and not count on being able to work evenings and work/travel on weekends. Working in tech, one cannot avoid the occasional exceptions, but I made sure they were truly just exceptions.
2. To?improve my physical fitness, I incorporated stair climbing into my daily routine at work. I stopped using the elevators and often walked the stairs during breaks just for the exercise. I also took tennis or volleyball classes at work or at the community recreation center once a week, two sports that I loved and would be very motivated to play.

The astute reader would notice some issues did not get addressed, like “home chores” and “financial planning”. Rather than dilute my efforts with too many changes all at once, I decided to revisit those after my first two changes had taken hold as habits.

What About Work? Did It Suffer?

Interestingly enough, not at all.

This actually made sense because the leadership training program I attended was sponsored by my employer. They would not have incorporated this work life balance segment into the curriculum had they not genuinely believed it was in the company’s best interest to insure their high potential leaders learned to lead a healthy and balanced life. They knew burn out was a real issue, especially amongst high performers, and they chose to be proactive in working to prevent it.

And they were right. The changes I made did not take too much time away from the company, but my enthusiasm, creativity and energy improved because I was living a life congruent with my values, and I was physically getting into better shape. Sound body, sound mind.

The fact that I am still feeling so thankful to them 20 years later tells you the loyalty points they earned with me by caring about my well being. I ended up working for them for nineteen years, and they got their money’s worth from me as I went on to lead a groundbreaking innovation that became a flagship product.

Unfortunately, not all employers truly believe in work life balance, and in such cases it is up to the managers and employees to do the right thing and set healthy boundaries, with a strong conviction it is a win-win proposition.

What’s Really at Stake

So far we have been talking about life’s priorities in abstract terms such as health, parenting, etc.

At such abstract levels, it is often difficult for these priorities to compete against all the tangible deliverables and pressing deadlines at work.

To give our personal priorities a fighting chance, we have to try and make them tangible as well.

For health, how many people do we know around us who are suffering from health issues rooted in a sedentary lifestyle or from chronic stress (“the silent killer”)? Do we want to become part of that statistic?

For parenting, how many people do we know around us have a child who is dealing with depression, anxiety, or a learning disability that is causing them to struggle in life? What if our child was showing symptoms, but we were too busy to notice, or we were too late to seek professional help?

In other words, when we talk about parenting as a priority, we are not just talking about those missed soccer games or piano recitals. We are talking about being there for our children to support their physical and mental health and be their advocate when help is needed.

Lastly, remember that job applicant I mentioned earlier who regretted missing out on his children’s childhood years but was later able to reclaim his work life balance? His story had another unfortunate twist. A few short years after he reformed his life, his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away just before his eldest son was to graduate from high school. Although this was extremely sad, he was thankful he had reclaimed his work life balance a few years earlier and could enjoy a few years of quality time with her and the kids when she was still healthy. He was also in a strong position to support her end-of-life, as well as support his two children through the deep loss.

I debated whether to share this story because it is so deeply personal I felt it was not really my story to share. Since the dad in this story is a long time friend, I decided to consult with him and get his permission. He not only graciously agreed to share his story, but as a father of young professionals, he agreed work life balance is a monumental challenge of our time that needs addressing and was eager to help.

If Covid has taught us anything, it is that life really is very fragile, and we should never take our loved ones for granted.

Closing Thoughts

Given how many PMs I know are struggling with work life balance and burn-out, I decided to emphasize this issue as early as possible in my “PM Friday” publication. After all, what’s the point of sharing my PM best practices with you if helping you to become a higher performer is going to drive you toward bigger responsibilities and workloads that lead you to make more sacrifices on the personal front, sacrifices you may someday regret?

If you are already successfully managing a healthy work life balance, huge kudos to you! I always looked up to people like you because even after all my years in the business, work life balance was still something I had to work hard at.

If you are now convinced you want to reclaim your work life balance, I hope the simple check-up exercise I shared above gives you a place to start.

If you are still on the fence or just want to learn more, I would recommend a great book: How Will You Measure Your Life, by Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon, and James Allworth. (Clayton Christensen is the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma.)

Okay, now that this difficult conversation is out of the way, I promise my next story will be on a lighter topic.