A while ago my friend Miguel, an Improver at the company where I work, asked me how I balance it all. Being a prolific blogger, giving talks, doing my day job, and still finding time for my hobbies: motorcycle track riding, making music, playing the guitar.
It’s a great question. And I have a blog post about it, apparently. I’ve been joking with people that if Claudio has an opinion, there’s probably a blog post out there somewhere.
I cringe at “work-life balance”
I really don’t like how people frame the phrase work-life balance. It sounds like an either-or, like there’s work on one side and life on the other, and you have to pick. But that’s not how it works. If you don’t have a life, you can’t have work. In my mind there’s just life, and work is a part of it. Hobbies are a part of it. Family and everything else, those are all parts of life.
Turning dials, not running at ten
The way I visualize it is by turning dials. For each part of life I turn that dial up, but not all the way to ten. If work is at ten, what do you do with family? With friends? With your hobbies? So I dial those things according to what’s going on in life.
It doesn’t have to be “this year I’m going full-on work.” That’s not going to work, so be realistic. Instead I ask: over the next six months, do I need to learn anything? Do I need to work on my professional growth, or else in six months I won’t have a job? If the answer is yes, then that dial has to go up. If the answer is no, I’m already a little above the curve, then I can just do the job the way I know with the tools I have.
And that frees me up to do something else. I’ve been wanting to work on my music. Can I afford 30 minutes a day? Maybe two hours a week? I allow myself a Saturday to say: okay, on this Saturday for two hours, from this time to this time, I’m going to be making music. That’s it. I put it on the calendar.
Accountable to yourself
Putting it on the calendar is part of staying accountable to yourself. If you want to work on a hobby, tell yourself why it matters to you. It makes you feel good. It makes you lose track of time because you’re in a flow state, so absorbed in the activity you don’t realize the time is going by.
So you put it on the calendar, and you log it. If there’s something I want to do that I haven’t been doing, like working with music, I put it on the calendar and I keep a log. On this day I did this. I wrote a little something on the guitar, or I spent 30 minutes doodling around and recorded 30 seconds I really like. But it’s logged.
Then at the end of the quarter, when I do my quarterly review, I look back and see all of this. I did all this work. I did this around personal growth. I played 10 hours of music. I went to the track. That’s good.
Balance over a quarter, not a day
So instead of balancing within a day or within a week, I balance it out over the entire quarter, the entire year. And I keep turning those dials as life changes, because life will change.
What I’m learning is that balance is a constant adjustment. Some parts of life are louder than others for a while, and that’s okay, as long as the dials keep turning.
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