Work-life Balance
Yesterday after a long escalation call with the customer, I needed fresh air. I asked my wife, who is eight months pregnant, if she wanted to take a stroll within the society.
We strolled for over 30 minutes, sat for another ten and then returned to the house. I wouldn't have taken this break a year back. I would rather keep switching between calls, emails, and slack messages. Breaks would be only for lunch and breakfast. This lack of attention to personal lives did come at the cost of alienating the people I loved.
I started my career with Deloitte, and while I was there for five years, I heard this work-life balance term used profusely. It did not make sense to me as the work pressure was minimal, and I was working for a cost centre and was not in a customer-facing role or a revenue-generating function.
I moved to BNY Mellon which was similar to Deloitte and barring one day when I had to work for 15+ hours in the office; I had a reasonably good work-life balance. There were other issues there, but nothing that couldn't be solved.
After working in large organisations for close to seven years, I decided to get into a Startup (Chargebee). I had a chip on my shoulder. I wanted to prove that I could sustain myself in a high-pressure environment and a customer-facing role. I did six months of the night shift to support customers in the US, which impacted my body.
I worked 12+ hours every day for almost three years because I wanted to. The learning and growth I experienced are steep. It did come at the cost of neglecting other parts of lives, but I took a decision knowing the consequences. I talked about this to my wife, and she grudgingly acknowledged the justification.
Now, as a child is coming into our lives and after putting in the long hours for three plus years, I do not want to continue doing the same. I consciously want to make space for the other aspects of life. I want to learn to become a good father, play fantasy premier league with friends, maintain and strengthen friendships, travel with family, and write.
Most content on work-life balance does not appreciate the complexity of the problem we in the 21st century are experiencing. It is not as white and black as 'experts' claim; it's grey and everything in between.
The above tweet by Daniel Vassallo gets it right. It is not about the hours you work in a day. It's about your choice, whether your life needs to adjust according to your work or if your work has to fit in your life. The choice keeps changing as it did with me. We can only be diligent and conscious about what we are doing to our work and lives.