Balancing your Life

These have been strange weeks at work. I’ve never seen so many stressed out people. I’ve seen more 7am meetings and 7pm meetings then ever before. But I’ve also seen and heard from more bored people, people with nothing to do or struggling to find the energy to create things to do. We are fragile creatures, us humans, our motivation is always on a knife-edge. We need to feel good and confident to perform, and we also struggle with having too much and too little to do. These are more reasons to applaud our leaders for putting speed as a top priority during the transition.

Such times should remind us that work is only a part of our life. I have always disliked the term work-life balance, with its suggestion either that work is separate from life, or that work has the same importance as life itself. What rubbish! You do meet people, rather a lot of people actually, for whom work does seem to constitute an unhealthily large share of their life, and these are the ones suffering most now. So the simple message is – get a life! The more we are able to see work for what it should be – an important but not dominant component of a healthy life – the better equipped we are, either to be able to work around boredom, or to show humanity during the transition, or to see our own transition in a wider context, or even to be ready to face life after work.

This is simple, obvious, advice. So why can’t we all follow it? Some things get in the way. Technology is one. Business trips where we tell ourselves we are supposed to check in to e-mail in the hotel each night and thus come home exhausted are very different from the trips of twenty years ago. Blackberries are a particular curse. I came in to work last Sunday morning (more of that below) and sent e-mails to four people. Three of them replied within five minutes! Guys, guys, guys, what are you doing? Why on earth does anyone take their PC on holiday? “So I don’t come back to 500 e-mails” is one reason I sometimes hear. I don’t buy it. You can block out the first day back for that.

Technology is there for us not the other way around. Perhaps when we pander to these temptations we are really responding to our insecure egos, or irrational fears. Maybe we are hiding from other gaps in our lives, but I won’t stray too far into psychology. Whatever the causes, it is up to us to find solutions. The Scandinavians – technology leaders, note – have it right. You won’t find more than a handful of people in any Oslo office after 4.30pm, or in a Stockholm office at all during the month of July. These nations don’t seem to have a problem with productivity.

So we have to fix this ourselves. How? The best tip I ever received about this was from former EC man Paul Skinner. He showed a group of us a printout of his outlook calendar. He described it as under constant assault from work. Most of us let the assault happen without building our defences. True, there are some in-built defences, such as the times before 8am having a different background shade, but increasingly these are ignored by the enemy. Paul’s practice was to fill in his out of work commitments first, by blocking out any time he did not want to be available for work some weeks in advance. How simple, and how brilliant. We can all do this. And if you can’t think of enough stuff to fill most of the weekend, several weekday evenings and the odd weekday afternoon, then refer to my earlier advice - get a Life!

Another thing we can do is to find a routine and stick to it, rather than letting the routine be an outcome. I wrote earlier that I came in on Sunday morning last week. I do that once or twice per month on average, more if I am very busy. It is my way of catching up. Sunday mornings have been a time when I’ve been awake and when my family have been either asleep or dozing, so being away from them hasn’t burdened them. I happen to live near work so by coming to the office (and then going home again) I draw a clear line between work time and non-work time, supported by not taking the PC home and refusing a blackberry. And knowing I have Sunday morning up my sleeve means I can usually leave the office at a reasonable time on weekdays without fear of losing control. That is my routine. It is probably wrong for you. All I’m suggesting is that you should actively define the routine for you, and stick to it.

Don’t defer this activity. How often do you hear people who have just started a job saying that it will be heavy to start with but then settle down? Does it ever settle down? Not in my experience it doesn’t. That is just one excuse among many to avoid facing up to the real issues. I also don’t buy at all the argument that some jobs require longer hours. It is not usually the job that requires longer hours, it is the ego of the incumbent! By the way, I am not arguing that we should all work forty hours and then down tools, or that we shouldn’t accept that there are periods of extra pressure – we are well paid to do a thorough job.

The last duty we all have is to help each other. Often it is stated that bosses should be role models in this area. So they should, but they rarely are. But how often do we offer them coaching? Not often enough, more often we just follow their bad example. While I love the RDS focus on safety, it annoys me that the other elements in HSSE are not given anything like equal focus, notably health. Why don’t we have a Health day? We could save as many lives, at least improve as many miserable lives, by coaching each other in this whole area of work within life.