How to re-find balance in your life (because things won’t go back to how they were)
2020 saw a revolution in how many of us work. A great experiment, the most significant sudden shift in working habits since the war, has been underway, which has brought remarkable benefits, but a dark side also. I will show you how to positively manage this change for yourself, and why you may have to because, for many of us, there may never be a way back to the old ways of working, especially as the UK goes back into ‘lockdown’, and the ‘COVID economy’ shows no signs of abating any time soon.
THE NEW NORMAL
In the UK, the majority of white-collar workers now face a new day-to-day reality under lockdown: in front of a screen, communicating with others through many back-to-back video calls, all without much of an end in sight.
For many, this has felt incredibly draining, particularly with social isolation, but it’s also important to reflect on 3 significant benefits this has brought our lives:
1. Increased Productivity
Overall, we are wasting less time. It is hard to understate the importance of this.
How many of these activities have been largely eliminated from your life? … travel booking (planes, trains, hotels, cars, visas..); re-arranging those travel bookings; commuting; travel delays - traffic jams, cancelled flights, or late trains; waiting for others delayed by these delays; waiting weeks for an in-person appointment…
Then there’s everything that goes into the preparation and recovery from travel … fuelling the car, packing, preparing itineraries, finding places to eat, buying work clothes, hanging around airport shops … the list goes on and on.
At a time when people feel like they are working harder than ever, it is worth reflecting on the huge amount of time that we are saving every day, and it’s all being re-applied to higher-value work.
Take the example of James, a self-employed consultant. Prior to the pandemic, he used to spend around 15 hours a week in face-to-face meetings with customers. With a fully virtual service offering, he is now regularly spending over 25 hours a week in conference calls with customers. This allows him to spend more time with each customer (providing a better service), and to work with more customers or bill more hours (increasing the overall value of his time). The net effect of this is that he is able to earn more money and provide a better service, whilst simultaneously reducing his costs - a rare and clear improvement.
2. Increased Autonomy
The dream of ‘flexible working’ has finally been realised. People are now more able to manage their time than ever before, deciding when to work, and when to relax or take a break. Dog-walking, running, child-care, and hobbies can now all, in theory, be intermixed with work requirements, at a time and pace that suits each person. Night owls and early birds can each play out their own working rhythms and styles without direct oversight.
This autonomy is most pronounced in those who are self-employed. Fixed employees reap less of this reward - shared calendars, for example, can significantly reduce it. Nonetheless, the opacity of how workers’ time is divided up has increased, and a new acceptance has emerged of mixing personal and working time each day...
3. Increased connection between work and home
It’s worth reflecting how recent a phenomenon it is to peer directly into colleagues and strangers most intimate spaces. In a very short space of time it has become OK for a call to be interrupted by children, to take a call from in bed, or to dress hyper-casually. Teams are acquainted with one another’s pets, bedrooms, and home décor preferences.
In many working environments, this has led to increased intimacy, and more complete understanding of and empathy for our co-workers. It feels like there are barriers there that have been broken down.
THE DARK SIDE
The combination of these 3 changes has also led to darker consequences, some we might not have anticipated, which are experienced as an erosion of personal time, and expansion of work. So how can this be happening, if productivity has improved?
Let’s look again at the example of James. Remember that he is now in a situation of earning more money, all from the relative comfort of home. However, consider the some of the following changes he is experiencing:
- He has agreed to 7am meetings with some customers (something he would not previously have done), and now finds he cannot stop offering them that slot.
- The new working pattern has led regularly to days where he is, in effect, in constant meetings, without break, from early in the morning to late in the evening.
- As he spends so much time with clients during the week, he has taken to following up on emails and writing reports in the evenings and at the weekend.
This is all causing him to start feeling exhausted, and yet he can’t find a way to get back to the previous working patterns that he is now starting to miss.
James has fallen into a trap, a paradox few realise until it happens to them. There is a common fallacy that runs along the lines of: “If I can increase my hourly rate to xx, then I’ll only have to work 20 hours a week, and I’ll be fine.”
The reality is that, when your productivity increases, so does the value of your time. And when the value of your time increases so does the cost of not working. The incentive to work more grows stronger, not less. So, you end up in the situation of earning more, and not having the time to enjoy it.
The most insidious part of this trap is how it changes our thinking towards personal and family time. It’s possible to fall into thinking how much time off is costing you. This way of thinking makes sense, but has dangerous potential psychological consequences, even including feelings of resentment towards family or self for being ‘taken away’ from valuable earning time.
What has happened is that the expectation of working time has increased. What this means is that either the pull of increased revenue, or the push of higher expectations from employers, have caused a shift in the relative balance of working to personal time. The boundaries of home and work have eroded, and flexible working has come to mean ‘always on’.
WHY YOU CAN’T GO BACK
There is a law in economics to the effect that, once an improvement in productivity occurs in an economy, it can subsequently never be reversed. As soon as someone has worked out how to do things effectively in a more efficient manner, then the rules of competitive markets dictate that it gets embedded into a new normal of economic activity.
Once this round of pandemic restrictions are lifted, some travel will re-start, as there are aspects of collaborative work that are more effective in-person. But a full return to how we previously worked will not, simply because that improvement in productivity has now been collectively ‘banked’ by the economy, and anyone that does so will be left uncompetitive.
So, does that mean that we’re committed now to extended working hours, and being ‘always on’? It does not, but it requires personal discipline to ensure that doesn’t happen to us.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
In my book – Sweetspot (www.sweetspot.guru) - I provided a simple model for saving large amounts of time, in order to spend time on higher value tasks.
A key concept in Sweetspot is to ‘put a number on your time’ i.e. to set a nominal hourly rate to your time and use it to decide what activities and tasks to hold on to, and what to delegate or outsource. For example, if you’ve worked out that the value of your time is ￡500/hour, then decisions about what tasks to let go of (using the ‘SODA’ method – either Stop, Outsource, Delegate, or Automate) come down partly to the question of ‘Is this ￡500 / hour work?’.
For many people, the new normal has increased that number, as there are fewer hours in the day taken up by lower-value, travel-related activities. However, this increase has an unexpected negative consequence, because it can cause personal time to become relatively de-valued.
So, a re-balancing of our personal psychological economics is required, we need to increase the value placed on time not working. This challenges each of us to reflect: how much is an hour of my personal time actually worth? Stories with the children, walking the dog, a meal with a partner, getting exercise, a hot bath. What are really worth? It feels like a strange way to think about it, that an hour spent in the bath is ‘worth’ ￡500. Many people might be tempted to jump out at the thought, but I suggest that’s the wrong reaction.
As we’ve had a sudden calibration in the ‘value’ of a working hour, what is now needed is a re-calibration of the value of a rest hour. We have to get comfortable with the fact that we need to place a higher nominal value on time not working.
Once that is accepted psychologically, the next step then is to put it into practice. Here are two practical ways that you can put this concept to use in order to re-find a balance in your life:
1. Re-Contract
Regardless of whether you are an employee, a self-employed contractor, or an entrepreneur, you’ve probably allowed the following thing to happen in your life this year: you’ve let someone else bank your time saved, as extra service from you to them.
As we’re starting a new year, now is the time to re-contract this. Have the uncomfortable conversation. Explain that you’ve been willing to provide the extra support through this ‘exceptional time’, but now things need to go back to normal.
Maybe you agree to split the difference, or gradually phase it back, but the key thing is to negotiate back your time.
2. Bracket your calendar
Parkinson’s Law is a powerful thing. If you think a resource is available, you will use that resource (think how teams always spend up to the budget allocated to them), and it applies especially for time. So, how to re-create time scarcity?
The answer is simply to block out more of your availability. Fill in every Friday as ‘unavailable’ (a ‘Free Friday’), add calendar slots for ‘reflection time’; block off a week now for a holiday, even if you don’t know how you’ll spend it.
Fighting the psychological lure to work more requires deliberate hacks to force us to re-calibrate for more non-working time.
Immediate action
We will be running a Sweetshop workshop (‘Sweetshop’) on the 22nd January at 9:15am, and will be going through the Sweetspot exercise helping you to find ways to ensure you are spending time doing what you love, are great at and adds most value to your life, especially in this ‘new normal’.
Join us, to find practical ways to win back time for yourself, so you can enjoy a more peaceful 2021.