Work-Life Balance

I have become very interested in concepts of work-life balance. I had two very illuminating conversations about this yesterday, centered around whether one can be happy and whether one can develop meaningful relationships with others (friends, significant others, kids, etc) if one doesn't allocate enough time to the 'life' portion of the work-life balance equation. The answer certainly varies for each individual, but I want to put down some of my initial thoughts here after a whole year of full time working (hah!). My goal here is to just be thoughtful about how I am living my life in hopes that I don't wake up one day and feel that I have done none of the things that make me happy and/or feel the need to drastically change major aspects of my life in a state of panic. Well, that may still be entirely possible! One thing I'll stay away from is trying to figure out what a perfect allocation of time is for me, because my time allocated to work is mostly deadline driven and because, simply put, I don't know what a perfect allocation of time is for me just yet.

Happiness
Will Herman has a nice post about this. My thoughts align with his in that I am also a believer in the concept that hard work leads to happiness. I don't think spending a lot of time outside of work leads to greater happiness, necessarily. I feel a lot of contentment in producing what I think is high quality work product. As Will posits, "For me, there’s nothing quite like the exhilaration that I feel from knowing that my efforts were the root cause of the creation or success of something. From my perspective, there is no life without that feeling."

Relationships
In relationships (whether with a friend or significant other), I tend to think that quality time spent together is more important than time or hours spent together. I think some may disagree; that time spent together regardless of whether its considered 'quality' is as important as trying to squeeze 'quality' out of little time together. I think thats a valid point of view. I have never been able to spend as much time with others as I would like, so I have always tried to apply the quality over quantity strategy to various relationships in my life. It has and has not worked, depending on who you talk to. I don't think I have a lot of experience here, but I am ever aware that I am thinking about this in a wrong way, mostly because, I have the emotional intelligence of a four year old. Excerpt from Will Herman below:

As I see it, kids and marriages are both pretty resilient, to a point. There are no absolutes and there’s no rule book or even a guide book for relationships at any level. For the most part, though, people want to make things work. Even kids. I think there is some point with every relationship that is sorta like a point of no return. If you cross that line, or cross it frequently enough, you can’t recoup what you had before. At the very least, it’s fairly difficult. If you’re going to burn the candle at both ends (and maybe in the middle at the same time), you need to have a total understanding of where that point lies. You can push the accelerator until the needle almost hits it, but the cost of the ticket for exceeding it is more than you can afford.

That was my governor for balance. I thought I knew what was important to my wife in terms of showing up at home and I felt comfortable, as naive as it sounds, reading my kids emotions and body language about my choices. And then one day about five years ago it hit me. I had run out of runway. I had used up all the slack in my family relationships. It became time to make a major change before my kids moved out of the house without knowing me. As much as I had thought I had known about where everything stood, I really didn’t (isn’t that a shock) and I went into a sort of panic about it.

Balance
To me, having more time for 'life' in the work-life mix is not necessarily going to make me happy. I also think that left to my own devices, I'll probably stray towards working more. So I have tried to create some rules for myself that ensure that I don't stray too far in one direction. Below are a few things that I've tried and a few things I would like to try at some point in the future:

• Work/Life Space -  I learned this from one of my house-mates, Kevin, while at Vanderbilt. Since Junior or Senior year, I have always tried to not work in my living space. Even in law school, I always studied and worked at the library or coffee shops and never at home. I try to do the same now, but admittedly bring work home from time to time. When I do though, I try, when possible, to do the work in the living room and not my bedroom. This helps me not think about work when I'm not working. 
• Be a Person - I don't have a great attention span, and its something that I've worked on over the years. One of the girls I used to date always used to say that to me.  This was a signal to me that I’m was not present in the moment, that I had drifted off in my head. Whenever I’m not present, it only takes a short phrase to pull me back from wherever I’ve drifted off to. 
• Meditate - I use the term meditate loosely, it just refers to unplugging from the world and spending time on your self. Working out or running is my current form of meditation. Its time that is totally unconnected from the world and its time spent just on myself. My other way to meditate used to be reading, which generally required long, sustained concentration, so I need to incorporate that a bit more in my life. 
• Spend Time Away - One of the partners at the law firm does this periodically, where he will take several short vacations. He says that it goes a long ways for him to keep his batteries charged. I'll have to give that a shot going forward 
• Life Events with Periodicity - Brad Feld talks about creating events, that have an appropriate periodicity. He explains that this helps him create satisfying base to build from. Below are a few periodic events that he's come up with to spend time with his wife: 
• Life Dinner - "We have a standing dinner date on the first night of every month. Life Dinner has three key parts to it. First, we have a pre-arranged, regular, repeating evening where we both can reflect on and talk about what is going on in our lives. Next, we give each other a gift. Finally, we have a fun night out and either explore a new place or enjoy one of our regular haunts." While we’ve had a few tough Life Dinners over the years (as we’ve used them to work through things in our relationship that we had conflict over), when I look back on the 70+ evenings we’ve spent together having "Life Dinner" it’s clear that it’s incredible bedrock for our relationship." 
• Four Minutes in the Morning - "Amy and I created a tradition about a decade ago we call “four minutes in the morning.” We try to – fully clothed – spend four minutes together every morning 100% focused on each other." Of course, the “four minutes” is metaphorical. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes. A few times a year it turns into an hour when we end up in a discussion about something. But it’s always 100% bi-directional attention, except for our dogs who often want in on the discussion." 
• Off Grid Vacations - this post is already pretty long, more on this later.