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
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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.
Itâs not like one is right and another is wrong. But trying to define a rule will always create edge cases where the rule doesnât 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
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 doesnât creep into your life, but it may deprioritize work.
If you âhave to beâ during certain hours working, but you have no more work to do, youâll be just warming up a chair. Youâll pick low-value things to keep yourself âbusyâ, and make time until itâs time to leave.
Mr. Iâm always available
You donât 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.
Iâll 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.
Iâm 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.
Itâll be an evident situation but youâll never voice it out, so they canât 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.
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.
