Work-Life Balance

Learning about yourself, finding your balance

👋 Hi, this is Ryan with this week’s newsletter. I write about software engineering, big tech/startups and career growth. Thank you for your readership; we hit 65,000 readers this week 🙏 🎉

This week I’m sharing some thoughts about finding work-life balance for yourself. Hope it is helpful; enjoy!

---

A few years ago, there was an unprecedented change in how we worked. For the first time, we were forced to shelter in place. This changed my life because I couldn’t travel or spend time in public spaces.

Since I didn’t want to waste that time, I decided to work more. Even though I was working most of my waking hours on weekdays, I still felt like I had work-life balance.

What I’ve learned is that “work-life balance” is highly personal. It varies based on your circumstances and you need to find what it means for yourself.

Factors To Consider

1. Intrinsic motivation - The more interested you are in your work, the more you can do without feeling burnt out. I was able to do a ton of work and still feel balanced because I was excited about my work and got fulfillment out of achieving my career goals.

That could be completely different if the project I was working on was some boring migration or my values didn’t align with my career goals. If that were the case, even 40 hours a week could feel like bad work-life balance.

2. Opportunity cost - During shelter-in-place, the opportunity cost of working dropped lower than it ever was. Because I didn’t have much competing for my time, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything.

My work-life balance could have been poor if I felt like I was missing out on exciting life plans (e.g. travel, family). 

3. Health - No matter how much I worked, I always made sure to take care of my health. No amount of excitement could make me give up sleep or exercise for an extended period.

I felt that doing so would be short-sighted. Late nights take time to recover from and lead to worse results. What matters is quality throughput.

Backyard gym we used during shelter in place. Although it doesn’t look like much, having a way to exercise while we were locked up was huge.

It takes time to find what work-life balance means for yourself and it changes throughout your life. The only constant is that you should never sacrifice your health for extended periods.

There’s a lot of advice on the internet on how to improve your work-life balance that I won’t repeat. One unique way to improve your work-life balance is to find something you’re excited to work on.

How do you find work that energizes you? Now that is a deeper topic for another time. If you found this useful, please share it with a friend and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman