Work/Life Balance

My first job out of college was working for a major consulting company. As is common in large companies, corporate principles and values are conveyed through long-thought out materials… standardized presentations, decks, and emails.

One of the values that was always conveyed to me was creating and maintaining a standard work-life balance. At that point in time, I couldn’t understand what that meant. Don’t you just come in the morning, do your work, and after eight hours, go home? As I was working in the government-consulting sector, with strict laws limiting the amount of hours I could legally work in a week, that wasn’t an issue. I was forced to maintain a work-life balance. My work-life balance heavily favored life – with a clear barrier delineating work time and personal time, and a set quota on the former.

As I moved on to my new role as a core member of a startup creative agency, the world flipped for me. I find myself at the extreme opposite of the spectrum, where work becomes such a dominating factor that it has all but eliminated the aspects of life one takes for granted. Eighteen or twenty hour work days. Six or seven day work weeks. Fighting for that little bit of time to go out and even grab groceries. It’s all self-inflicted, of course. I chose this path.

When you are working for yourself, or in any kind of environment with no set roles and an endless flow of both possibilities and deadlines, the work never stops. You can’t see a project and assume one of your other fifteen thousand co-workers will take care of it when you are the only one out of the three of you who can handle it. There are no timesheets, no rules.

Enhancing productivity becomes even more important.

Isolating problems.

And sometimes, leaving things on the table and getting a good night’s sleep!