Working a day job without it eating your life.

Posted on June 3, 2008

This is not an excuse post.

One of my personal strong dislikes are bloggers who repeatedly post excuses about why they’re not posting.

So, I’m not going to do that.

My day job is currently taking up a lot of my normally free time - which isn’t a situation I’m overly happy with. So, here’s what I’m doing about it.

1. Put a limit on it. In my case, there’s some stuff going on that requires a large volume of my attention - on top of my regular duties. This is coming to an end soon (early next week, if all goes to plan), after which I plan to drop down to a more regular number of hours per day.

2. Take some leave. Next Monday is a public holiday here, and I’m taking the previous Friday off as well, giving myself a 4 day weekend. I may even take the Tuesday as well. I find that 4-5 days is enough to give me what feels like a real break from work - it also serves to remind people that I’m not the only person who’s capable of taking care of certain things. This also gives my team a bit more freedom to grow without me there, and I think this is when they have the chance to really shine, without me being there to back them up.

3. Rearrange your workload. I’m lucky in that I have a team to whom I can pass certain tasks. As I build up their abilities, I’ll be able to pass more to them. Some tasks I can put on the back burner, and not deal with until I have time and mental space to deal with them appropriately - often, I’d rather do this than give a task less attention than it requires to be done correctly. Of course, time-critical tasks often force time frames onto things, and on these items, well, you just have to compromise your standards a bit. Sometimes it’s a simple mater of communication and prioritisation between myself, and the relevant stakeholders.

4. Arrange additional resources. There’s an ongoing conversation between myself and my manager about additional resources in my team. It’s a bit of an uphill struggle to get it into the budget, but it’s either that, or we’re going to find that some vital tasks aren’t getting completed. I’m approaching this as an opportunity cost situation:”Well Boss, if we increase the resilience of the core servers by adding hot failover boxes, then we won’t have the resource to implement the intranet Wikis or combine the two wireless networks to increase and standardise our coverage.”

5. Acknowledge that work is a part of life. I’ll often answer work related email of an evening, or on a weekend. If something comes to mind when I’m at home, and it’s work related, I’ll take the time to note it down, or deal with it then. By the same token, I’ll also do some things during work hours that are truly personal in nature - booking concert tickets, chatting with friends online. Not an excessive amount, of course, but some. My job doesn’t define me, but it does make up part of the definition - and I need to acknowledge that.

6. Set some time for yourself as part of the “Hard landscape”. The Hard Landscape is stuff you can’t change, and won’t even try. I don’t often set things in stone, especially personal blocks of time, so when I do, I mean it 100%. Thursday is my beloved’s birthday, and we have plans for that evening. There is no way I’m letting anything work related impact on that. For you, the same may apply to your Wednesday evening camera club outing, or your Sunday golf game.

I’m lucky that I’m in a position to be able to do most of these things (albeit with different amounts of success for each), and that I’m based in a country that has fairly strong employee protection. Depending on your job (or your boss), you may have to push back a little more firmly, start working only the hours you’re contractually obliged to. Myself, I’m a long way from that (and I’m angling for a promotion), so that’s not the way I’m playing things. But even with that in mind, I’m going to start pushing back a little more firmly, letting some of the less critical tasks slide.

So, that’s how my week’s been… how about yours?

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  Sometimes, less is more. I firmly believe that you can improve your quality of life by carefully limiting what's included in it.
  
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