🕹️ Stop trading life for work today (find balance in the long term)

There's no one-size-fits-all solution. Understanding your work style, without being too rigid, will make things bearable without making sacrifices along the way

Companies like Google take pride in their rule that 20% of the time is spent on personal projects.

Other companies like Basecamp take pride in their healthy culture of limiting to 40 hours per week and no more.

And startups will take pride in working long hours to achieve great things.

It’s not like one is right and another is wrong. But trying to define a rule will always create edge cases where the rule doesn’t fit the situation.

Companies like Amazon have adopted the term work-life harmony. However, most people will think this is just a way for an employer to justify expecting overtime

Regardless of what the employer experts say, the concept of work-life harmony is something you can use for your own good.

✏️ 4 approaches to work

1️⃣ The swiss watch

You know your start and end hour, your break, and you deviate little from this.

This is a healthy approach to ensure work doesn’t creep into your life, but it may deprioritize work.

If you “have to be” during certain hours working, but you have no more work to do, you’ll be just warming up a chair. You’ll pick low-value things to keep yourself “busy”, and make time until it’s time to leave.

2️⃣ Mr. I’m always available

You don’t seem to do anything outside work. You may even want people to recognize you for your long hours, so you make a lot of noise when working off-hours, just so people notice.

I’ll never support this mindset. You are creating an unhealthy expectation on other people to work off-hours to balance the load. If you are working on a commit on Saturday, wait until Monday to send the PR for review. Nobody should read your message until Monday morning anyways.

The best visibility is not the visibility of warming your chair for long hours. The best visibility is the visibility of work completed.

3️⃣ I’m just milking the cow until it dries out

For some reason, you are waiting to leave that job. But why would you quit, when you can underdeliver but still get the paycheck for a few months? You can even get a severance package after that.

It’ll be an evident situation but you’ll never voice it out, so they can’t fire until this is a repeated behavior. And by then, you already milked the cow long enough.

This is similar to the concept of quiet quitting. However, quiet quitting advocates to do the bare minimum to meet expectations, not to work below expectations.

4️⃣ The pendulum

Sometimes you swing into working overtime. Other times you swing into prioritizing personal matters and you arrive at the office almost at lunchtime.

If you look at a single day or a single week of these people, they may seem completely off-balance. You may confuse them with someone working crazy overtime. Or someone milking the cow.

But over the entire year, their working hours average out. They were self-aware enough to see their surroundings, both at work and in personal life, and make tradeoffs in each season.

💵 Budget your time like you’d budget your money

Many people decide if they can buy a house or a car based on the monthly payments, not on the total price (and the opportunity cost they pay).

The same with time. Don’t take on responsibilities just based on the weekly time required but on the monthly or yearly impact.

The best money advice I received is to plan a yearly budget, not monthly. If you try to spend diligently $200 a month on things for pleasure, you may end up with tons of crap. If you plan to spend $2400 a year instead, you can buy a few things that make a big difference.

Same with time. You can’t expect to dedicate exactly x hours each week to training and x hours to working on the sprint. They’ll have to shift. Still, it’s helpful to set some guardrails.

Personally, I track my time and I set some limits on how much I can dedicate to off-sprint responsibilities. I’m a mid-level engineer, my performance is on a sprint board. If I dedicate myself too much to interviews and other programs, then I won’t be meeting expectations due to decreasing my throughput in the sprint.

This is also a good reminder not to snack your time into little, frenetic activities. Instead, batch them up and do solid blocks of work.

🕹️ Adapt like a pendulum

Some days the best use of your time is delivering the work in your name. Others, it’ll be pairing with someone to unblock them. Not two days are created equal.

Be known as someone who adapts based on the team's needs. Someone whose judgment about where to dedicate their own time is to be trusted.

Early in my career, my manager at the time kindly suggested: “Why don’t we do it on the weekend?”. I was the one supposed to stay that weekend as on-call, and I turned defensive immediately.

At that moment, I thought this person was breaking all the boundaries. In the end, on-call means being available to mitigate a customer impact if something breaks, not fixing it. This situation was to meet an arbitrary deadline, there was no customer impact.

But over time I developed a different mindset. Instead of reacting defensively, a more mature approach was being solution-oriented. How can we fit this into working hours? What has to change so we can deliver on time?

The outcome of this particular situation was that the work could be fit into regular working hours. We released in faster intervals, as the risk was low and we could rollback in less than 10 minutes if something went wrong.

🎯 Conclusion

Don’t ground yourself too much into your working hours or into saying “yes” directly to any request at work.

Think critically, evaluate the alternatives, look for a better solution.

And make sure you'll get the autonomy to lean on both sides, not only on the side of working more.

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Here go some good reads for this week:

1. Build Your Credibility As You Grow by

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2. How to Communicate With Impact as a Software Engineer by

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3. Replace All Staff Engineers with Multiple New Grads! by

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4. The impossible task of engineering managers by

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   . Being able to dial up or down how you show yourself is an exercise of self-awareness. Many people will think "That's how I am" and won't try to change anything. But with the ability to self-regulate, you can act according to what the situation needs