Tag: work life balance

Unbalanced

Guess where this is going?

It has been a while, in fact I think my last post was in June. What the hell! The topic for today is unbalanced, which is the reason I haven’t written anything in so long. About six weeks ago I made a decision to take on what became a monumental endeavor at work. The whole thing imploded and became what a friend of mine in the Netherlands calls a shit show. A shit show if you didn’t know is pretty much synonymous with a disaster. What started as a seemingly good idea to up my game and take on a new challenge, quickly eroded into some form of torture. Now I’m no stranger to hard work, but the kind of hours I was putting in became a bit absurd after a while. The first 3 weeks were 75-80 hours per week, including working weekends.

After a few weeks of this, which forced me to skip pretty much all forms of exercise; not only was I mentally drained, but I also wasn’t feeling very well. There is always a fine line between working extremely hard and taking care of yourself and I had crossed the line into burnout land. I’m sure you have experienced this before, when you reach that point almost anything can piss you off. You are so mentally and physically tired that your emotions, not the good ones begin to surface. The worst of it all was I didn’t enjoy any of it. I took a trip to Florida to meet with some of my team mates and our customer, and not once did we go out to eat together. After workshops during the day with my customer, I would go back to the hotel room to work and grab something to eat at Publix or Subway by myself. What I began to realize is that 14-16 hour work days are unsustainable, well least for me.

So why am I telling you all this? It kind of sets the stage for what happened next. It became clear to me that I needed to take back my life, so after about 4 weeks I decided I had enough, took a Friday off and started to limit how much I would work on the weekend. We did bring in some additional help, which allowed me to not be responsible for nearly everything and that certainly helped. The thing is everyone gets to a point where enough is enough, and you figure out ways to scale down the hours or you do yourself serious harm. This is usually a choice unless your in a prison or concentration camp. It wasn’t like I freed myself from the situation, but what I did was make it a bit more manageable. The fact that 8 weeks later it’s still a shit show and I am deeply engaged says something about how stubborn I am or my lack of intelligence.

This kind of sums it up.

You always have a choice to leave the situation, adapt and accept it, or do nothing, but that really doesn’t work except in extremely rare situations where leaving or adapting are not really an option. Doing nothing will just result in burnout and really is a form of self destruction. When I say accept it, I mean you are willing to adapt, but not in a passive way. You have chosen to stay, stick it out, or whatever you want to call it, but with some conditions. Please distinguish between adapting including some acceptance and doing absolutely nothing. If down the line things don’t get better than you need to figure out an exit strategy; life is way to short to stay in a shit show indefinitely.

Namaste

Make them better

We all have a finite amount of time most of which we waste on pursuing material crap and satisfying our ever-increasing need for pleasure in various forms. Then we spend whatever time we have left searching for some kind of meaning in our life. It is unlikely that we will find a whole lot of meaning chained to a desk and computer, knocking out work day after day so we can buy more stuff. Knowing that our time on this earth is limited we better come to terms with a need to make these days better as Thoreau suggests.

As I have gotten older I have become less enamored with the stories that this world is constructed around. Stories like work harder and you will achieve more and these achievements will provide satisfaction. Other stories tell us that we must be goal-oriented ever pursuing greater things and not wasting our time. Still, other stories tell us that only through growth in revenue and GDP will we fulfill the capitalist dream of greater wealth for all. Most of these stories are bullshit and have been created to keep everyone in line, following the same path. While I’m pursuing all those goals, making money, and generally working my ass off there is no time for getting to know who I really am or what I really want out of this existence. I’m simply too fucking busy doing what everyone expects of me and adding to my investment balances.

The fact that you spend some time with your family, read a good book, take a walk, write a blog post, or take some time to do nothing but think is, in fact, making your days a little better. I currently work for a company that wants to dominate the world, and instead of my work being part of my life, it is more akin to being in a cult. You know the routine, work, eat, sleep, and repeat. I would guess my situation is not unique and that unless you take the reigns and regulate your behavior your life will never get any better. Remember you are an individual not a cog in the machine, as much as you relate to the organization you work for, their loyalty to you only extends one day at a time.

Life is impermanent by nature, and your employment status is even more precarious. Some of you know what I’m talking about and have been laid off so that the balance sheet looks a bit better. In my work life this happened a couple times and each time something better was right around the corner. I’ve seen people literally crushed by a layoff because they had invested so much of themselves, were extremely loyal to their employer, yet they were naive and couldn’t understand how this could have happened to them. I have a friend who once told me “At the end of the day we are even” and that is that. This is the attitude you need to have in this economy, don’t expect loyalty from your employer, because it does not exist.

Maybe this post has been in many ways a therapeutic exercise to take this quote to heart.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

Henry David Thoreau

Each day is a precious gift, and it up to you to find some kind of balance in your life.

Namaste


This post was proofread by Grammarly.

 

About the author

Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher.[3] A leading transcendentalist,[4] he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail.[5] He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.[5]

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.[6]

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist.[7][8] Though “Civil Disobedience” seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—”I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government”[9]—the direction of this improvement contrarily points toward anarchism: “‘That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”[9]

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau

 

 

Are you repeating the same behavior?

behavior sorry

Last week I wrote about how you could make Monday a new start by setting just one goal that you will accomplish during the week. The idea is that these goals would accumulate and you would certainly be on the road to changing your behavior, and not falling into the trap of repeating the same old stuff. I have found myself as guilty as the next person in falling into patterns of behavior that don’t support my goals.  For instance I ate well for two days in a row and then decided it was alright to eat that hamburger and fries, or I did two workouts from my three day split and failed to do the third on Saturday or Sunday, or instead of pursuing that business opportunity I failed to put out the effort and instead watched endless hours of television.

Yes we all need time to relax, but wasting your time in the evenings and on weekends is another example of falling into a pattern of behavior that leads to absolutely nothing. I’m not saying you should eliminate time with your friends and family because your goals are so overly important, but you should also not give into living everyone’s dream at the expense of your own. This is then about seeking some sort of balance, and yes making some sacrifices along the way.

balance

While I mentioned the word balance I am not a big fan of the term work life balance, the insinuation is that work and life are some kind of different categories of activity and that balancing them is desirable. My view is do what you want to achieve your goals and if that means you need to work more than you relax then do it. Don’t fall prey to patterns of behavior that do not support your goals, but always make sure that the goal you set is what you really want. Sometimes you will need to change your goals or even eliminate some of them as they no longer represent what you really want. There are perfectly good reasons to abandon one goal and pursue another, but don’t let your dreams be replaced by mediocrity and settling for less than you are capable of.

Most of us operate at about 50%-75% of what we are capable of, settling for a comfortable existence when greater things are in your future if you are willing to put in the effort and fully utilize the gifts that each of us possesses.  So make this Monday the day you begin to follow your dreams, set a new goal and just do it. Stole that little gem from Nike, sorry guys.

Namaste