Balance is course 2/4 for me this year (I’m hoping to get through the training this year, and then potentially do certification next year). Previous I took Fundamentals (coaching 101), and Fulfillment.
Similar to Fulfillment, I opted for the 5 half days (0900-1330), which is exhausting enough – I can’t imagine doing any longer each day on Zoom. As it goes through the weekend, I took a day after to relax and decompress. Giving these trainings space is a big part of enjoying them for me, as well as getting the most out of them. Whilst I was a bit sad my previous classmates have left me behind (the majority of people work through the courses much faster), I know this is the best way for me to do this, especially on top of a job I have no intention of quitting. Approaching this learning as an investment in my own growth (versus a box to check), and coaching as a very enjoyable side project has only become more important to me the further I go with this.
Balance is about getting unstuck. It’s more in the tactics of helping someone live their best life, versus fulfillment, which is about helping people determine their values and purpose. It’s more concrete, and as such it felt more immediately applicable. I’m excited to try it with more people (versus Fulfillment, which is still vaguely terrifying to me).
What I got out of it
It helped me get unstuck. I got front-of-the-room coached (client in a demo with one of the instructors) on the first day, and it helped shift my perspective on writing. Still more work to do, but I do feel like I’m heading towards the other side of this miserable writer’s block.
I saw more concretely what co-active coaching can bring to engineering leadership coaching, which is helpful in making me feel more integrated in my approach.
It was fun! Balance is all about getting out of your head and escaping the current perspective. Much more fun and joyous than fulfillment coaching (more deep and meaningful).
What’s Next?
My next course (Process) is not until October, so I have a break for a bit.
I’m continuing to practice and maintain contact with my classmates, which is nice. I much prefer taking this online, but I do miss the opportunities to meaningfully connect with other people also on this journey.
I continue to work with engineers to develop, mainly with BestPracticer. I am really enjoying it – I worried I would struggle to find the time or energy, but actually I find it so energizing it’s easy to make it work.
There was an article a while ago with Marissa Mayer’s thoughts on work life balance. Essentially it was that long hours were fine, as long as you didn’t miss out on things that would make you resent it.
I try and work manageable (sustainable!) hours but sometimes my work gets prioritised over my life. And my view is that sometimes that just is my job. Sometimes my job is to be in New York and I happen to get stuck in a snow storm and miss my ski vacation. Sometimes it’s to work over the weekend to get something out, or to stay late because someone needs something finished. That’s just how it is.
But for me, resentment is tired to outcomes. I won’t resent long hours leading up to a launch, because yay! Launch! But I might if that launch gets cancelled, or delayed, especially if those reasons are ones I don’t agree with, or think could have been addressed in advance. And if I was putting in long hours to show that I deserved something, or was ready for something, and I didn’t get it I might well resent that, too.
I’m acutely aware of the stats that say women are likely to drop out within the first 10 years, and for a while now I have been convinced that yes, I will be one of them (a non-techie friend was horrified by this stat, and pointed out that that is a shorter career than a professional footballer). So sometimes I feel like, time is limited, put career first, and other times I consider that when the end does come, I’ll need to have other things in my life or it will feel very empty.
The other thing, is when you make a big choice where you prioritise your career over your life, or vice versa (like when moving) is even when it’s on the whole a good decision, there will be days when something goes wrong and you doubt it. When you imagine the road not taken, and wonder. When your heart breaks all over again, for whatever it was that you gave up.
I think this is normal. This is the cost of an interesting life. The price of increased options is having to make (sometimes really hard!) choices between them. It’s the curse of knowing what is out there, and what you’re missing out on… and what you gave up.
I’ve had this conversation multiple times lately, so it’s time to document it. I feel like a hippocrite offering these observations, since I don’t feel at all at home in London yet, but at least I’m mindfully unhappy about it.
Even somewhat 1-dimensional workaholics have multiple aspects to their lives (they normally have somewhere to sleep, for example). Most of us have many. Mine are:
Career: Where am I working, what am I working on, am I learning, progressing, appreciated? Friends (and Family): Who do I hang out with? Who can I call if I need to chat? Do we have standing dates? Life Infrastructure: Apartment, commute, food, gym, airport (where can I go for a weekend?). Culture: Art, theatre. Romance: Who I’m dating, or the dating scene if I’m single.
Typically, a move is driven by one of the big two (career, romance), but everything else changes too. You have to work to build up the other aspects of your life, or in the case of the Life Infrastructure category just accept that they are different.
Career
If you move for your career, that is a lot of pressure to put on your job. If your job is the major thing in your life, and it sucks, then you life sucks. Sometimes it is going to suck. I moved to Sydney for career/life infrastructure/culture reasons (I wanted to live in a city again). For the first 6 months, my career was great – I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, I got promoted, I felt stretched in the right ways. Later it kinda started to suck. And I was so grateful that I had friends outside of work, that I could call and cry on.
And then I moved to London so that I would have a better job – I evaluated the data on what helps women in tech (essentially, a sponsor), I found it. I followed it. It was a good decision. But because this was a 1-dimensional move, I had to work extra hard on all the other aspects to make them manageable.
Friends (and Family)
The book I recommend to everyone who is moving is MWF Seeks BFF. It’s a book about a woman who moves to Chicago for her husband, and how she managed to build a group of BFFs. The big thing: follow up. You ask someone to do something specific, and if they say no you have to ask again. Unless they say, “no I never want to see you again”, of course. If you suggest a theatre show and they say “just not into theatre” you suggest brunch. If you suggest brunch and they tell you they don’t eat out because gluten/money suggest a walk, or a free show somewhere.
Possibly weird behaviour, but… I read the Londonist, filter through the mass of information, and pull things that appeal to me into a spreadsheet. I add restaurants that appeal to my todo list on foursquare. This means I always have things that I can suggest someone do with me.
I have managed to get to the point that I will follow up after one rejection, but that’s it. Maybe at some point I will manage to follow up twice.
Meeting people, get intros, or take courses, I’ve met some great people via Twitter. If someone seems fun and you chat suggest that you get coffee together. Most people will be flattered, and what I’ve found is that there are very few people who already feel like they have too many friends.
Life Infrastructure
I tend to choose an apartment by deciding what is important to me, and finding something that fits those criteria. In KW, this was basically “walking distance from office, has a washing machine” – this narrowed it down to one apartment building, which made things very easy. In Sydney, I liked where my friend lived – close to downtown, walkable to work, so I just got (well, she got for me) an apartment in her building. London was harder, but also less pressing because I could commute weekly from my parents place. So, I took the train in for the week, and booked surprise (secret) hotels in different parts of town. This helped me see different parts of town, and get an idea of where I would like to live. Eventually I picked Kensington and Chelsea, now I know more people, I wish I lived in East/Central London, but it’s manageable until October.
It’s important not to underestimate the misery of the commute. This is well documented in behavioural psychology. Long commutes make people miserable. Don’t do it.
Other key things: I’m on a tube line that goes direct to Heathrow. My gym is less than a 20 minute walk away, and it’s really nice – a little oasis of calm in a hectic city. There are places to eat, and an M&S nearby so I don’t need to cook (or own plates). These are the things that are important for me.
Culture
This is the one thing about London that I have to admit is amazing. I do something cultural every week. I also did this in Sydney, but in London there’s even more. I love the small shows, and that I get to see originals of artists that I’ve seen online and loved – like Liu Bolin (the invisible man), Leonid Tishkov and the Republic of the Moon, The Architecture of Density. There is so much theatre, I got to see I Can’t Sing, which was such a disaster that I doubt it will ever be shown anywhere else, but I really enjoyed. In Sydney, I adored Cockatoo Island, and the Biennale.
Everywhere has stuff going on. KW was surprisingly vibrant for such a small town – Ignite was a big deal, for example. Find out what’s going on, and go.
Romance
The second big reason to move, not that I have ever moved for this reason. If you move for your partner, you have to find a way to create a life for yourself there too. Otherwise, it’s a lot of pressure to put on your relationship, and them.
If you move for other reasons and leave someone behind, or go long distance… it’s so hard. This I have done. I felt sad, and guilty. They can be resentful, angry. Everyone gets to have their own emotions here. It’s hard to leave; it’s hard to be left.
The last date I went on was the one with the misogynist that I live tweeted, after which I decided to take 6 months off dating. But typically if I’m single, I try and go on dates. I have to put myself out there, and it’s a good way to see things and meet people – even if you don’t end up in a relationship with them. The thing, I think, is not to let it become a distraction. It’s easier to find date-dates than friend-dates, so don’t focus on it to the exclusion of other aspects of your life.
In Summary…
Your life has more than one dimension! Think about what these dimensions are. The dimensions that suck the most after you move are the places which require the most effort. Don’t neglect them.
This Thursday, it will be two months since I arrived in Sydney. I came to work on a specific project, and that project came with a pretty ambitious deadline. I don’t know if anyone, including the person who thought this deadline up, really believed we would make it. But we did, just about. We as a team, did. And that moment, where you can say, “yeah, did that” – pretty awesome. But there are moments that happen before that, where people start to look at what you’re doing, and say, “hey, you just might do that”, and those are pretty cool, too.
I ran this project. Which means if we didn’t make that deadline, it would be on me. Making it, well, good leaders give away credit and take blame. But I do get to feel satisfied. But the biggest thing I get to feel satisfied about, is that in the last two months, I have consistently worked around 40 hours a week. I have gone out, a lot, and found friends and things to do in Sydney. Got (kinda) settled in my apartment, even taken a day’s vacation. Worked out 4-5 times a week, and averaged 4.5k fuel points a day. My life is a little loopy, but it’s definitely diverse.
Extensive reading around personal development, and watching other people run things, and running my own, much smaller, things meant I had some ideas about Planning, Leadership, and keeping sane under pressure. So this is my three most important things in each area, most of which I tested by breaking at some point.
Software Development Planning In General
Eliminate your Known Unknowns
This is the most important thing. You have a feature set and a deadline, some things you know how to do, and some things you don’t.
The thing you don’t know how to do is the most important thing you need to do today. This unknown falls somewhere on the scale between being very easy, and being hard / time consuming / requiring someone else to change their thing / flat out impossible. The sooner you know what it is, the sooner you can adjust your estimates, or your features, to be more realistic.
Think Medium Term
I don’t hack. I worry, actually, that I literally can’t hack. I can’t fight with something, and be happy with a one line fix labelled “DO NOT TOUCH THIS”. I always need to understand why, and to rationalize why things interact, or work the way they do.
Hacking is short term thinking. I’m in a hurry, do this quickly, come back later. It borrows time from future-you, to save time today. But you don’t know when future-you is going to pay the bill. You might find it’s tomorrow (before you ship) – that’s the worst case. And hacks multiply, the more you have, the more expensive each one will be to fix, so here’s the next worst case, you ship something full of hacks, and now you can’t do anything interesting until you unravel them all.
The thing about long term thinking, is that the world is going to be different a year, hell, a month from now than it is today. Long term is an investment in the future, but you have no idea what the future is going to look like. Isn’t that one of the awesome things about working in tech? Everything changes, all the time.
Medium term is the balance, and I find when I think medium term I know what issues will result from that decision, and I know roughly when they will occur. Choosing X over Y will mean that we have to adjust some things, in a relatively minor way, if we do Z, but I’m confident Z won’t be on any of the next few iterations I’m OK with that, but document it somewhere.
Medium term is doing things that will get harder over time sooner rather than later. In this case, Y is a pain, but needs to happen for Z. If we do it now, it’s very easy, and has and intermittent slightly higher overhead for a while. If we wait, it becomes a huge problem that takes someone a long and miserable time to unravel.
Ruthlessly Prioritize
Feature creep is the biggest problem with tight deadlines, and the temptation is always to slip things in because “things are looking so good”.
But why are things looking so good? Because you eliminated so much of this stuff. Because you were ruthless in the first place.
UX wants the widget to slide in and out, but when they realize it is as much work some feature, maybe they will reconsider.
I think it’s pretty easy to eliminate the large things, if you are ruthless about it, you’re clear about how long things take, and your PM and UX people are realistic. The thing to watch here is the small things. I find these are the things that I could fix in an hour or less, and it’s tempting to just agree to them, because it wouldn’t take much more time to write the code than have the conversation – and coding is more fun than having meetings! But I think you get 4-6 hours of good coding a day. So 4 “little things” and you’ve just allocated most of your day away, and were these things the most important things you could be doing?
Maybe not.
Leadership
Give Away The Stuff You Know
It is super tempting to look at the list of things to do, identify the things that you know and could do quickly, and just get cracking on them. You’ll feel an awesome sense of accomplishment, you’ll make super fast progress, and then there will be barely anything left, so that won’t take long at all.
This is complete nonsense. Especially if you have new people who you don’t know. If you give them something you know, you can evaluate how they do it, provide guidance, easily conceptualize it in the bigger picture. If there’s an issue with it down the road, you’ll be able to fix it.
And, importantly, you can instead work on one of your Known Unknowns. And when you’ve figured that out, you give that away too, so you are continually at the boundary of what you know and what you need to do, figuring out how it all fits together. You have the big picture in your head, and enough detail on everything to dive into it at need. Maybe you don’t know anything the best, but you can rationalize about everything, and that is really, really useful.
One of the biggest mistakes I made, that came closest to causing us to miss the deadline, was that I gave away something I only 50% knew how to do. I missed something crucial, and it became an emergency as a result.
This isn’t about being a control freak, it is about you knowing enough about everything, even if there is nothing you know everything about.
Learn Your Superpowers
I learned one of my most important lessons about leadership from someone I worked with, not at the time, a year after the fact.
We worked at a camp, and she was the director. A year later she tells me, “I always used to show you the numbers of how many kids we had in each class, because you would just remember them”. And so she could ask me at any time and I would just know. I could also lay out the classrooms in my head at need.
This, to me, was completely normal, so it didn’t occur to me that not everyone would remember a list of numbers after seeing them. But my friend knew it wasn’t, so she used it to make her life easier, and I never even noticed her doing it.
I think people can be really bad at knowing what they are good at. They don’t always value or notice things that are so natural to them that they don’t realize they are doing them. The more you notice about it, the more you can give people the things that they are fantastic at. The person who has a really good eye for UI flow, and usability, they get that slightly un-specc’d feature. The person who is really stubborn and diligent gets that tedious problem that is going to take patience and bloody-mindedness, rather than a flash of brilliance to fix.
Create a Space
This is about balancing the desire and need to shield your team from the outer world – politics, negotiations, long term planning, and the need to situate what you’re doing in some wider coverage.
Too little shielding, and too many people are worrying about things they have no control over. Too much, and your decisions can seem arbitrary and unfounded.
Some things are “PM problems”. I can’t do anything about them, but I need to know the status of them. I stay out of them and try not to worry about them. I probably want to share that there is a PM problem, when it is clear that it is going to hold something up.
Eng problems I’ll share as they come up. Like, I know it seems like I’ve gone mad on test coverage, but this is coming from these directions and this is why it’s important. I know it’s frustrating that we are doing X, but there is this medium-term plan of doing Y, and investing in X now pays dividends then.
Personally
Don’t Miss What You’ll Resent
I took a day off to go skiing. I knew if I missed it, I would be sad and resentful that I didn’t ski during the winter here. So I went, and it really energized me. Those things if you miss out on, you’ll really miss, you don’t want to lose out on those. Your work is part of your life, it’s not something that should happen at the expense of it. And your life is not something you should put on hold for something that is not 100% under your control.
Don’t Borrow From Tomorrow
My theory of working late is that in the best case I borrow time from tomorrow, and in the worst, I do that and I break things, which I then also need to fix.
So when I feel like I’m done, I go home. I go home well before I start breaking things. One of the things I find as a result, is that I am consistently productive 5 days a week. There’s less of a range. In grad school, I had insanely productive days, and some which were just a write-off. There was so much variance, that it was really hard to know how much I could get done in a given week. Now I have a pretty good idea, and I have evenings and weekend to myself, both of which greatly improve my happiness.
It’s Not Just Hours, It’s Energy
Last Thursday night, my friend and I are in a cab headed out to a comedy show. We were running late, because we’d both been completely absorbed in what we were doing and hadn’t really considered how we were getting there, or even where we were going, and there was terrible traffic.
And we got there, and had a great time, but waiting in the traffic jam, I admit that I think Thursday nights should be reserved for the gym and mall food (the mall food here is delicious, and the mall is only open late on Thursdays).
My friend says “Yes! By Thursday, I have made so many decisions, that if I don’t recharge I have no decisions left for Friday”.
Even the “worst” weeks I had probably didn’t exceed 45 hours. The most stressful day I had, I finished working before 5. But that didn’t mean I had any emotional energy left when I left the office for the day. I was exhausted.
And it’s hard to go out with someone new, when there’s really only one thing on my mind and I just feel like I have no conversation. I have to make more time to do things that recharge me – reading novels, hanging out at the gym watching How I Met Your Mother. The morning after the most stressful day, I went in late because I felt compelled to spend 2.5 hours in the gym before I could face the next onslaught. The biggest challenge I’ve had, is feeling like because I leave the office by 6 I have the time and energy for daily early morning workouts and going out almost every night, and I just don’t. I’d sooner work out in the evening, because it decompresses and de-obsesses me before bed. I want 9 hours sleep when I’m stressed. And that’s OK.
I discovered something new about where I live at the weekend. The nearby drugmart doesn’t sell bagels. I’d always assumed that they would, but when I tested that theory I found it lacking. Living in a small place, there wasn’t anywhere I could continue on to and so I ended up at my boyfriend’s apartment practically in tears saying “I hate it here”.
Something of an overreaction. To be fair, I was a little strung out because after nearly two months of deliberation my paper got accepted (yay) and I was given… two and a half weeks to make edits. Of course I get this news last thing on the Sunday night of a long weekend, and it hangs over me all week. My earlier paper was invited to be extended as a journal paper (something I’ve been ignoring with everything else that has been going on) but I should be able to put some of the stuff that is being cut from the second paper into that… Meanwhile, I discover that my work permit has come through and I can leave the country again (!), making tentative plans of New York next week and MTV the week after into reality.
Except MTV is infeasible because I have to do these papers – the timing of that trip is more flexible than my attitude on travelling with two laptops. But, what better motivation to get cracking on Saturday morning than a trip to NYC?
And instead I’m having a crisis on where I live. There are so many things that I love about KW – my job, the people at work, the office, the people in the community and the amount of stuff happening. It is, in so many ways, an awesome place to live.
The problem, for me as a city girl, is not things to do, but when I’m not doing things. Going to the grocery store is such a palaver because it’s so far away (although I did end up trying a closer one that I’d been nervous of because it looked sketchy. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought). I’ve finally found a tasty Lebanese place that will do lamb kebab sandwiches (perfect post spinning – protein, and just enough carbs so stop me from keeling over), but it’s a 10 minute drive away in the middle of an industrial park. There is nowhere within walking distance to pick up Asian food (there is one really good pizza place, but I try not to eat that kind of stuff) and there is only one place we will order in from (tried others, with varying degrees of fail). The result – for me – is that whilst it’s easy to go out, it’s actually really quite stressful to try and have a night curled up in my apartment with a book. I flit about enough, that doing a weekly grocery shop and stocking up on stuff just seems to end up being wasteful – I never know how much I’ll be home. Mostly I shop for clothes etc when I travel, in the US, Toronto or Ottawa, but I ended up doing some shopping the other week, and it involved going to two malls – at either end of KW – because they are both small and don’t have a huge selection of shops.
To come back to the work I was supposed to be doing when I was instead having a crisis… I don’t enjoy writing papers. It’s a lot of work, in a very rigid structure, for what? A trip to Switzerland – the best part of which was the date in Geneva with my boyfriend and the train ride to and from the conference through the stunning country. The new paper is in Singapore, somewhere I’ve long wanted to go, and we’re likely going to make it a holiday. Unfortunately the timing of it means I’m supposed to simultaneously be in Singapore and Seattle. Thankfully the time-zone difference makes that almost possible! I know, I’m lucky to get to go to these places, but the reality is – and anyone who travels for work says this – mostly it’s not fun, and you barely see anything. In California, I just end up at work 8-8 and yes, the campus is amazing, and it’s much warmer in winter, but unless I’m somewhere for the weekend as well I barely get to see anything. It seems that I spend ages on a paper, send it away, wait for ages, have to make the changes they request in a hurry, wait some more, travel, and I get to list one more thing that is somehow supposed to be an “achievement” but really just feels like a chore.
So – the question I have to ask is, why am I doing this if I hate it? Why am I more likely to be doing something that I feel “obliged” to do than something I actually want to do? Because I don’t like to let people down, and because I feel that I need to prove that I was smart, talented, and hard-working enough that me escaping rather than graduating from grad school is not completely my failure. That I didn’t just learn about things that make a terrible manager, and walking away from a sucky situation – that I also learned how to play the publications game. With this latest paper, I met the goal I set myself – of two on-topic publications – that would prove that if I had been willing to pay thousands of dollars to bang my head against a brick wall for a while longer, I’d have an MSc. Comparing this to working on products that get used by an unfathomable number of people, it seems like I shouldn’t care. But I do.
Meanwhile, why do I live here, if I hate it? Because it’s not for ever, and because mostly the good outweighs the bad. It just didn’t seem that way, that morning. It’s rare that you don’t end up having a trade-off between where you live, and what you do. Pick the city, or be tied there by your partner’s career, and you’re constrained by what’s available and how far you’ll commute – and of course, often these constraints limit your career, and I refuse to to let that be me. Pick the company, decide that the opportunity is more important than the location and you end up living where the opportunity you follow is.
Mid- way through June, I paused, and wondered – why was I focusing on little things during a month of big things? I hope that end-of-May-Cate realized that this was something that June-Cate would need to stay sane. This month’s focus gave me permission to make time for small, unimportant (but important to me), things in order that I wouldn’t get buried by the big things.
The big things were – launch. I’ve been working on Google+, it’s very exciting to share what we’ve been creating with the world. Unfortunately, my visa didn’t arrive and so I couldn’t be in California with the rest of my team (a big thing, yes, but one I can do nothing about. I’m trying to stay calm and wait it out). I’ve now started working on a 20% project, which is really cool. The article that I’ve been working on went through several iterations and will be out soon. I gave an Ignite talk (this has been a vague but big-scary goal I’ve had for a while, it was good to stretch myself in this way). And my co-author refined and I edited my first journal paper. Since he’s done most of the work for it, he’s first author – but still, exciting! Towards the end of the month, two other big things came up – first is the panel Serena and I are working on, and second is a web-profile, which I’m going to keep quiet about until it’s out. But still – exciting! Not exciting but still big things – I actually got sick, as in, go to the doctor, give me antibiotics sick. I tend to get the same couple of things again and again in response to stress, and I don’t think I’ve ever needed an emergency doctors appointment before. That sucked.
Anyway, in the midst of all this I read a lot of books – especially novels. Made time for breakfast at my favorite cafe a couple of times a week. Went to the gym. Went out to things happening around town. Applied face-masks. Walked to uptown for dinner. Tried a couple of new restaurants. Got a pedicure. Didn’t travel – June was my first month without a trip in… I don’t know how long. Had a guilt-free day off. Basically, I tried to carve out as much unstructured free-time as possible. It’s been great.
July may have to be the opposite. There are a number of bureaucratic things that I’m not on top of – filing my taxes, claiming health-insurance coverage, etc. I also want to get out and explore more – to that end, I may need more structure. My boyfriend and I are going to plan things for the weekends and go and do them, first up is an aerial exploration thing, but we’d also like to go canoeing and stuff.
So July’s theme is Organization. I’m not particularly excited about this, but who does get excited about filing taxes? Some things just need to be done. Exploring is exciting, but it’s easy for this weekend not to be the right time to do whatever it is, the point is to plan and make it the right time.
How was your June? And what are you planning for July?
I’m a little… tired and uninspired lately. Not at work – but at not-work. Once home, I’m not driven to write, or code, or read that stack of papers. I’m actually reading novels. I’ve been beating myself up for procrastination. Wondering, how do you tell the difference between being a little burnt out and needing a break, and procrastination. My inner dialogue is arguing with itself about whether I’m genuinely tired and in need of a break, or in the throes of procrastination so deep that I’m developing involved reasons and stories for not-doing stuff, rather than constructive procrastination, or better, just getting shit done.
How could I spend a day curled up on my sofa with not one, but two novels? How could I read four novels in a week? A deadline is heading towards me and I’m just looking at it with interest, wondering, idly, when inspiration will hit – rather than going and seeking it out.
The pace of my life is different now than it used to be. In school, there were always periods of intense activity punctuated with crashes which I would spend consuming novels, or TV box-sets, or both. It was a series of sprints, and every few weeks or months I would crash, and regroup. Normally once at the end and once during each semester.
Now, my life is more like a marathon. And whilst over-achieving-productive-Cate yells at human-Cate “how could you just do nothing all weekend?!?!“, human-Cate responds – “because sometimes I need to do nothing!”
This week, I’ll give my 4th and 5th talks of the year. It will be my 5th trip this year. I’ll also host the first Girl Geeks KW. I’ve submitted a conference paper – twice. Since getting my Kindle in December, it tells me I’ve read 14 non-fiction books, plus a couple of physical ones (and 32 novels, most of them on planes). Maybe this is a normal amount of stuff to do on top of 40-50 hours a week at work, but I’m starting to feel like I’m planning sprints, but never allowing myself to crash – my baseline is now 40 hours at the office, whereas the baseline in grad school is nothing. I got sick twice this year, once with a week-long temperature, and once with a throat infection. During the first I spent one afternoon home sick.
For a while, I wondered if the problem was getting dressed every day – some of my most productive days used to be spent in my pj’s, but even if I didn’t work to draw lines around my day it seems insane to work from home when the office is one block away and so awesome, whilst my apartment is not set up for working, and also never contains any food (to be fair, I do see some people in the office in the pjs on occasion, but I don’t have the nerve). But perhaps the problem I’m having is adjusting to this new pace of life.
I’ve been thinking about sustainability, rather than balance. When I consider sustainability, apparently I don’t consider my need to sometimes do nothing. I’m going to have to figure out how to factor that in. At work, I tried blocking off a week that said “DNS – Cate is Anti-social“. It was a useful experiment that I’ll likely repeat. Can I do some equivalent for my personal life? Like a “No commitments, Cate is reading novels” weekend (or week!) a month?
Sustainability is a work in progress, and a constant balancing act. But – at least I’ve moved from novel-reading to structured procrastination. That’s progress, I guess.
Arriving, stressed, on a Monday morning the other week I decided to shut the mail tab on my browser, with no intention of opening it again. This impromptu panic started a new thing – I’m checking (work) email at most once a day, if I have a meeting. No meeting days – usually one a week – are now even better than before. I think I’m more productive, but it’s hard to quantify. Those half an hour chunks which seemed only good for going through email turn out to be surprisingly productive.
I’m definitely happier and less stressed out by my inbox. I appreciate the good things that arrived (my patent is going through! Yay!) and get less stressed by the bad things. It could be the novelty – we’ll see how that goes. People are supportive of my eccentricity with respect to my inbox. It’s hardly a secret that I loathe email, and I’ve managed to keep the volume low by sending as little as possible.
The worse thing that happens is that I miss something important, but if it’s that important someone will IM me. I missed meeting someone when they emailed at the last minute, which was unfortunate, but hardly the end of the world. The tradeoffs that seemed so worrying turn out to not be very bad at all.
I think, though, that what really makes me happier is that I’m drawing lines around my day, which means that I feel more in control. It’s like not taking my laptop home with me after work. I could take it home with me and not work, which a lot of people seem to, but by not taking it home I don’t even give myself the option. It’s not, “oh I could catch up on X but I want to read my book instead” – it’s “I’m home now, what do I want to do?”
Of course, there’s a lot of things which I don’t define as work which others might – and my personal laptop carries more than it’s share of guilt. Events to attend. Talks to prepare and papers to write. This blog. What’s important to me is that whilst I might be stressed out by having too much on, I’m not stressed out by my job. I’ve drawn a clear line in my head between what is my job, and what is not – even if it’s professionally helpful to me.
There’s a few people at work who are legendary for their balance. They probably call it something different, but interacting with them I see that they too draw lines around their day. This is when I go home. I don’t work at the weekend.
Those people legendary for balance? Also incredibly productive.
My view is that that I work as long as I’ll be productive, then I leave. I don’t work later than that – at best, I borrow productivity from tomorrow. At worst, I do that and mess things up that I have to fix tomorrow. As a result, sometimes I leave at 4, sometimes I leave at 7. Overall, I don’t think I do more than 45 hours a week.
I’m not sure it matters too much what the lines are, or where you draw them. The point is, to have some – you’ll be happier for the control.
When I started work, I set myself a simple rule – one that I’d less deliberately followed last summer. At the end of the day, leave work computer at work. Do not put work email on phone.
It works. I enjoy my evenings and weekends. I wake up excited to go to the office. I have insights about how to solve problems when I’m away and focusing on other things. Most recently whilst out with a friend at the KW Symphony, I realized that I needed to redesign (and what the design should look like) the interface to the component I’d spent the day fighting with.
If work-life balance is the problem, then I seem to be doing OK. But, with just two variables, that makes it sound like a seesaw. I.e. if you’re balancing “life” and “work” then everything’s OK.
That seems like a vast over-simplification to me. I prefer to think about sustainability – to me, that means that the pieces that make up your life have an arrangement, and a quantity, such that if this is how life is going to look like for the next 3 months – 6 months – a year – that’s okay.
I’m inching towards sustainability. Helped by the fact that I can’t leave the country. But also because I’m working at it. Prioritizing the things that might not be concrete achievements, but that I need to make me happy. More novels. More time at the gym. More video games. More time hanging out with friends.
Of course, more of some things means less of others. Life is not a seesaw, it’s more like balancing a non-uniform disk. I’m trying to find the spot where I can stand without sliding off, but it’s hard. It’s hard because we all get the same 24 hours in the day, and we all get to choose how we spend them. And, it turns out, we can’t do more with less sleep (it’s good to be vindicated, I’ve long refused to compromise sleep!).
My problem is not, how do I divide my time between work, and not-work, because that’s been pretty easy. It’s how do I prioritize all the not-work things I’d like to do? The paper I’d like to finish. The project I’d like to build. The apartment I’ve still not quite finished arranging and organizing. The books I’d like to read. The blog posts I’d like to write. I’ve lost the habit of working late into the night, or at the evenings, and I have a hard time sitting down and doing anything much on the computer after work.
I wonder if it’s in part due to not having my “work spot” that I had in my old apartment, on my old sofa – a corner that I’d curl up with my laptop on and hours would pass, and stuff would be produced. My current sofa is pretty uncomfortable to work on. But maybe I just need the mental downtime outside the office.
My friend Tammy once told me the secret to her productivity was “incremental progress”. I think an evening a week and a space where I could focus might help. But I also enjoy doing whatever takes my fancy in my off-time. It’s new having freedom, and not feeling “the guilt” (a term I use to describe the constant feeling of “I should be working” that plagued me through university).
So, perhaps things are in balance, it’s just that I think I should be achieving more than I am. Nothing new there! Perhaps I should set aside “project time”, but for now I might just keep enjoying living, rather than waiting for things to be over in the hope of eventually enjoying life.
Achieving things is good. But, so is a killer workout followed by 10 hours sleep. A good novel. An evening of Lego Harry Potter (Amazon). Or martinis and food with friends.
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