Work/life balance

[nigel99 144]

I am interested to get opinions on how you fix your work and home life balance. It appears to me that you can easily get trapped into an endless cycle of always needing to work, otherwise you feel that you will be falling behind.

It has been bothering me lately as personally it appears to be a never ending treadmill that if you stop for a weekend you will drop behind. I know that I can't work productively for more than 7 hours (actually knuckling down without simply present and slacking). The problem is that clients come to expect that you are on call 24/7 and so you are stuck with people expecting responses for 12 -14 hours a day.

I dropped having blackberry email 2 or 3 years ago and have removed my mobile number from my business card (although with key clients I still give them my mobile).

While I am trying to restore the balance it really struck home last night when having a couple of beers with a client (not as bad as it sounds being a Sunday night as we had to fly to the US for meetings). The client mentioned that they liked travelling as it removed family interfering with work and expecting attention the morning/evening.

Experienced jumper - someone who has made mistakes more often than I have and lived.

[shropshire 0]

So .... um ......Dorkzoning during office hours is O.K?



I had an imposed 'gap year' last year and loved pretty much every minute... had to life off savings but it worked out O.K ... Now that I'm back grafting, I seem more able to get the work-life balance adjusted ...

...... I learnt to say NO

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[Jewels 0]

I don't want to become the person who worries about family interference with work. That sounds like a backwards set of priorities to me. I know a lot of people live for their work and the truly fortunate ones love it so much that work is not a "job" to them, but even in that scenario I think it's important to make family a priority and not to see them as an interference. Sometimes you just have to decide what time is YOURS and block it out on the calendar so that you aren't committed to taking calls or jumping through hoops. It seems like there's always more you COULD be doing but I think you get some real diminishing returns at some point.

TPM Sister #102

[nigel99 144]

Quote

So .... um ......Dorkzoning during office hours is O.K?



I had an imposed 'gap year' last year and loved pretty much every minute... had to life off savings but it worked out O.K ... Now that I'm back grafting, I seem more able to get the work-life balance adjusted ...

...... I learnt to say NO

That is why I mentioned 7 hours of actual work. I tend to BE at work for many more hours than I work solidly. dz.com for me at work is easy in the sense that I am the boss and if I slack off too much the income drops pretty quickly. There are times where I am virtually living at the office trying to catch up, but because I am "doing" so much I end up needing frequent breaks probably working 45 minutes in the hour. Personally that way of life is easy to become a habit (even when the requirements aren't there) but over the past 18 months I have forced home up the priorities list - to the extent that we recently took our first ever 4 week holiday.

But one thing that I have learn't is that getting out of the house and office really helps breaks the work mindset. I took the boys wild camping in Dartmoor 2 weekends ago and it was really nice just having time with them.

Experienced jumper - someone who has made mistakes more often than I have and lived.

[NewGuy2005 51]

Hire someone you can trust to take part of your load. They're out there.

[theonlyski 3]

Quote

Hire someone you can trust to take part of your load. They're out there.

They're called hookers.

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
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