The Hard(er) Part of Work Life Balance

My first note on work life balance largely focused on using your time more wisely; this note is about overcoming the mental hurdles to allow yourself to have good work-life balance in the first place.? Also, FYI I'm trying out Substack so subscribe there if you'd like to catch all of the updates! Ok…onward.

You know the feeling…you’re just working too much: answering pings and emails immediately and at odd hours, saying yes to every project because you think that’s how you get ahead, and agreeing to way-too–short deadlines to make sure that you deliver for your team. But you’re burning out and you wish you could just work less. You blame the job, the company, or maybe your boss, but the first thing you should do is to understand what YOU are doing to cultivate poor work-life balance.?

When people try to improve work-life balance, they often look to time management techniques or simply look for another job. While you should definitely make sure you’re spending your time efficiently and on the most important things, the mental blocks I see most often cause poor work-life balance are:

1. Not making time for what’s important to you (because you think everyone works all the time)
2. Taking on too much work with short deadlines (because you think it leads to success)
3. You’re in a job that isn’t aligned with how you want to live to

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TACTIC ALERT: Work Life Balance Experiment!

When you’re done reading this note, you can put the tips into practice with a product experimentation mindset. Pick a 2 week period and commit to one or more of these practices. Spend 5 minutes at the end of each day writing down your observations: did something break? The purpose of this process is to show you that your worst-case scenarios (everyone thinks I’m a fraud, I’m going to get fired) don’t actually happen and you may actually end up doing better work.

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Let’s dig into how to overcome these mental hurdles.

1. Not making time for what’s important to you

Problem: Everyone around you is working nights/weekends so you think you should too. Your boss responded to something at 10pm. Your coworker sent out an email over the weekend. Then your peer sends out their status update at 7am! If these people do it, then that must be what’s required to be successful and you commit to answering pings quickly and spending time on weekends to make sure that you’ve done everything you need to…right?

Try This: Acknowledge that you don’t see their breaks and then schedule your own.

While some things are truly urgent, most things are not. Tips to better manage your communication channels will help increase your efficiency, but you’ll never dig yourself out of the hole until you acknowledge that you can’t possibly answer everything coming your way.

Everyone has different values, and first you need to understand yours. In the example above, your boss may have kids that they take care of starting at 4pm and then catchup on work later. Your peer could get their best work done in the morning so they shift their focus time to that and take time off in the middle of the day to workout. The point is, you rarely see the breaks that people take, especially in a remote world, so you conclude that people are working all the time and you need to as well in order to be successful which is often very wrong!?

Once you know what’s valuable to you (e.g. a walk outside everyday, meditation, listening to music), put blocks on your calendar to do them. During these times, don’t multitask. If you need to, turn off notifications (or even wifi altogether) and set your away status to tell people you’re not reachable. (If that’s too scary, put your phone number in your away message for urgent issues…you’d be surprised how placing a little bit of good friction to reach you helps people solve problems on their own). Scheduling these blocks starves your “urgent but unimportant” tasks of time and you’ll notice that many tasks resolve themselves and some just didn’t need to get done at all. If you need help getting started, ask your peers or manager how they set their schedule and what keeps them sane. Which brings us to point 2…

2. Taking on too much work with short deadlines

You may read the above and say “sounds great but I have 25 hours of work to do per day and everything is due tomorrow…I can’t prioritize.” Sounds like a recipe for disastrous results, so, let’s talk workload and timelines. People with poor work-life balance take on too much because they think that’s what will make them and the business successful. But, taking on too much, too quickly, actually leads to worse outcomes for the business AND leads you to burnout (and potentially quit) more quickly.

Taking on more work and/or with shorter deadlines has tradeoffs: either on the quality of your other work or on your well-being. To prove this point let’s look at the two ends of the spectrum.?

1. On one side, you could do just one project for a year. Your entire effort is focused on it and you don’t spend time thinking about anything else. If you have a very complex and important project, this approach makes sense but often businesses (especially in Tech) need more, faster since the market changes quickly.
2. On the other end of the spectrum, you could have 50 projects where you can give ~1 hour/week thinking about it. You probably can’t even keep these projects in the air and everything fails.

So how do you figure out where to land between “every fiber of your being on 1 successful project” and “50 projects that are definitely going to fail”? The first step is for you and your manager to have a clear understanding of what success looks like for your charter. Are you in an area where short-term results (heavily competitive environment, lots of consumers making decisions) are important or do you need an innovative big swing to reinvigorate the business (market has changed or new market opening up, getting it right matters more than speed)? Both of these will be important, but you need to prioritize which is most important to dictate which, and how many, projects you take on. If your manager says “do everything” try taking a tip from Dilbert and have this chat with your manager:

Tactic ALERT: weight your work portfolio

Once you understand what success looks like, put together 3-5 potential portfolios of work. Each portfolio allocates a %age of your time to a project and estimates a likely outcome for the project. Discussing these tradeoffs with your manager and team is the key to understanding how you should spend your time, and therefore which projects to say no to. This allocation should change over time, so make this a quarterly or semi-annual conversation.

3. You’re in a job that isn’t aligned with how you want to live to

The problem: The tradeoffs to be good at your job don’t let you live the life you want.?

Let’s say you have that conversation with your manager and all of the work is required and only you can do it. Then the question becomes whether or not the reward of the job is right for what you want. I spoke a bit about personal drivers in the My Best Management Tip note but the tl;dr is you need to figure out why you show up to work and then align the work you’re doing to those drivers over a ~6 month period.

Try this: Talk to your manager directly about your drivers and/or find another job/company that supports you.

If your #1 driver is “have enough time to develop hobbies” or “spend time with family/friends” then an 80 hour/week job won’t align with that. You should be direct with your manager that this is the case and they’ll either adjust (if you’re doing well and they want to keep you) the job or you should find a new job. You’ll likely end up rage-quitting in 6-12 months anyways when you’re burnt out if you don’t address the issue, so have the conversation now and save you and your manager some pain in the interim (trust me; I’ve learned this the hard way).

On the other hand, if your top drivers are things like learning from experts in a space or driving massive positive impact through your products then the tradeoff on time/working more is worth it. In this scenario, it’s important for you to own the outcome that you want (your driver) and acknowledge the work that you need to put in to get to it. I find that adding date milestones of what you hope to achieve by when to be a powerful motivator so that i) I remind myself what I’m working towards, ii) I know when I’ll have achieved a step towards my goals, and iii) I know how long I’m trading off this goal for some of my other personal drivers (e.g. I will work late nights for 1 year to achieve a promotion).

On to Better Work Life Balance!

To recap, if increasing efficiency doesn’t solve your work life balance woes, work smarter and make time to keep your whole self happy and healthy. You can carve out time in your calendar for what’s important to you, decrease your workload through prioritization conversations with your manager, or find a role with responsibilities that better fit the life you want.

What else has worked for (or plagued) you in your work life balance journey? Let me know in the comments or DM me!