The Elusive Work-Life Balance

Every large company brags about their superior grasp of the concepts of work-life balance and their abilities to achieve it for their employees. In my experience, very few actually achieve it. To be fair, though, it’s not really the company’s job to achieve a work-life balance. It’s their job to support the concept, it’s on us as employees to achieve it.

Missing Out

My five-year-old son and I had this conversation one Friday night while he was eating dinner, and I was preparing to head into my office for a late call.

Son: “Are you all done with meetings today?”

Me: “No, I have one left.”

Son: “I’m growing up, and you’re missing it. You should call your manager and tell him you quit.”

“I’m growing up and you’re missing it” is a little bit complex for a child of his age, so I’m not exactly sure where he heard this, but I’m assuming he’s quoting some movie he saw. However, the truths in his statement still stung. The harsh truth; I’m missing out by spending too much time at work is hard to digest.

Let’s shed some additional light on this situation before we overdramatize it, though. First, I work from home and have for several years. I try to be very diligent about “work” time vs “home” time, but I don’t have a commute and come out to spend lunchtime with the family, so I probably get to spend more time with him than most fathers. Second, my wife is a stay-at-home-mom, so she’s here with him all day. Due to the pandemic, she is homeschooling him, so they spend a fair amount of time together.

I really have to assume that this comment, if it isn’t him just repeating a TV show, comes from the sheer fact that mom spends more time with him than I do.

That being said, I’ve always battled with the concept of work-life balance.

Finding Balance

Early in my career, and for the first year or two at my current company, I worked a lot. I received projects with tight deadlines, sometimes ridiculous deadlines, and I met each and every one. My manager created mini competitions to see who could reach an unrealistic deadline first, and I fed into that like a starved lion. I would check my email first thing in the morning. I would even run some tests or write a little code before breakfast.

I’d commute the forty-five minutes to work and complete a full 9-5 workday. I’d then commute home, have dinner with the family, then when everyone was in bed, I would work some more. My manager needed daily, sometimes hourly updates on our progress. He wasn’t a developer by trade and rarely understood what we were talking about, but he insisted on hearing all of the details anyway.

Some days it felt like he wanted a printout of every line of code I looked at for the day. But I trudged on. I met my deadlines, sometimes I crushed them, but I saw the red haze of burnout looming on the horizon, and I could tell my time at this company was short if I didn’t make a change.

One summer, within those first two years at this company, my manager took a two-week vacation to compete in a bike race. During those two weeks, I took full advantage of not having someone breathe down my neck at all hours. I worked 9-5 and nothing else. I caught up on sleep. I resumed some of my hobbies. I had more energy to enjoy time with my family. And something else amazing happened. I not only hit my tight deadlines, but I completed an additional two projects within the same deadline.

When my manager returned, he was amazed at what I had accomplished and bragged in many meetings about the three projects I had completed in a record amount of time. And for a while, I couldn’t quite place my finger on what had happened, other than the fact that I hit a great stride in my workday because I was free from his constant interruptions. But what really happened? I had relaxed.

I momentarily stopped walking into every day carrying the stress of the weeks prior and the weeks ahead on my shoulders. I woke up and viewed every day with fresh eyes. I committed time to things outside of work and actually found myself excited to be there when I finally got to my desk. I cleared my mind of all the rubble that was blocking my rational thought and allowed myself to really focus on the problems at hand… and when I did, they weren’t nearly as complicated as they seemed. I had found a brief oasis of work-life balance.

Demands

Of course, my manager returned, and with him came all the stress that a normal micromanager brings to the table. Now, this specific situation is dramatic, micromanagers aren’t the only source of work-life balance issues, but it was in this specific situation. There are others. A couple of years went by, and I found myself on a new team with a new manager.

This manager was not the micromanager I had before, but he was incredibly demanding, as was his manager and the manager above him. Their entire chain was wrought with unrealistic demands, and everyone was scrambling to make their superiors happy and I had been thrown right in the middle of it. I returned to working long hours, nights, weekends, I even pulled an all-nighter to bring a production system up on a new stack for no real reason other than I was told to.

(Yes told, not asked). And at every step of the way, the rest of the team and I were constantly told (in public settings) that we weren’t good enough. That we had to work harder. That our work was not acceptable and not up to the company standard. We were pushed harder and harder, and no matter what you accomplished, it could have always been better. We were publicly shamed, humiliated, forced to demo broken features or bugs. And all the while, we were asked to put in extra hours assuming if we did it would eventually get better.

It did not.

When it comes down to it, our customers were happy. They loved the tools we were creating. The applications brightened their days and made their lives easier, but to our management chain they were a blight on the company’s good record. And so we worked.

The Problem

As I stated at the top of this stream of consciousness that I’m attempting to call an article, the company can support work-life balance, but it’s not responsible for maintaining it. That falls on the individual employees, and here is where most of us get stuck.

My managers were employees. Their managers were employees. Employees who did not have a work-life balance, and so did not believe their reports deserved it either. So they pushed their employees to work.

My first manager, the micromanager I discussed, also had work-life issues of his own to consider. He would often talk about how he had so many meetings in a day he didn’t have time to answer emails until 11 PM. He reserved 11-12 PM as email time, and it was not uncommon to receive vital feedback you were waiting on at that time (and he expected you to respond and take action on it at that time as well, but that’s for another article).

I believe this issue boils simply down to a construct very similar to jealousy. As managers adopt more and more responsibility, they see their ability to control work-life balance slip away, and so they jealously steal it from those below them. Force everyone to work as hard as they do so that they don’t feel like they’re failing themselves or their families. “This is just how it is here” or “we work hard we play hard” are common sayings amongst these people. But let’s be clear, all this is is a failure to properly manage your time. The higher up you go in a company, the more pressure you have to produce results, and thus the more pressure you put on those below you to work.

The Solution?

I add a question mark there because in my 12 years of experience, I can’t say for sure that I’ve figured it out. The brief periods where I’ve felt that I had a good balance, I always worried that that balance would make me look lazy and cause me to lose my job. This is due to the pressure on my managers to produce unrealistic results, yes, but it’s still a concern. Further, when I did achieve a great balance that I discussed earlier while my manager was on vacation, I tried to retain that balance upon his return.

Of course, this was met with failure and even started to jeopardize my career slightly as my manager saw an employee who used to be “all in” suddenly pulling away. It was easy to assume this was my fault at the start. I was too quick to agree to work long hours and reach unrealistic deadlines but when you really think about it, what was the alternative? Missing deadlines and potentially being fired? No, that’s not an option at all. We do what we need to to survive, and that is what I did, so I don’t believe the blame rests on me but with those making the unrealistic demands.

The point that I’m trying to make is, if your company doesn’t have a clearly defined path to success with work-life balance, anyone who achieves it will be held in a negative light, so how do we solve this?

In my opinion, you have to do two things. (Note: failure to do one isn’t a complete failure, but I do think achieving both is a path to true success).

1) Be upfront at the start of your career at a new company on your work-life balance and rights.

I don’t mean that you confront your manager and tell him you’ll never work a second over 8 hours a day. In fact, I don’t suggest having a conversation at all. I think you should walk into the position assuming you have a right to a work-life balance. At 4:30 PM, when someone asks you for something, tell them “Sure thing, I’ll get on it tomorrow” instead of working late. When a manager asks you for an estimate, be honest. Don’t try to impress them, don’t try to create something unrealistic to beat out the competition. Be. Real.

2) Only bend the rules when it is absolutely required

This one may sound stupid, weird, or obvious at the start, but think about how many times you have done this or been asked to do this, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so obvious. Even in situations where I have been very blunt about my hours and ensured that my estimates are realistic. Even when I’ve made sure to be upfront when I don’t think a deadline is feasible, there are situations where you will find yourself compelled to put in that extra work.

Either you’re excited about a project, or you want to impress someone to earn that big promotion, or you just can’t think of a good reason to say ‘no’. We have all been there. I have learned that it is best to walk into a conversation saying “lets get more information” while assuming the answer is “no I will not do this right now.”

This achieves two things. First, the customer feels heard, and second, you’re not committing to anything until you have the details. The next step is to determine emergency status. If something is a genuine emergency, then work on it. Who cares if it’s 4:30 PM on a Friday. When you took the job you agreed to keep the lights on and that’s what you should do. But if it’s not an emergency, it can wait for Monday (or at least tomorrow).

So what constitutes an emergency?

Emergencies are different for every application, but the general rule of thumb (for me) is: Can everyone do their job?

That’s it.

Super simple.

Can. Everyone. Do. Their. Job?

If Joe in accounting needs to take an extra 5 minutes using a workaround to complete his $5M forecast, fine.

If Joe in accounting literally cannot complete his forecast and the CEO is going to fire him (and probably you), then that is an emergency.

As usual, this is a completely overdramatized situation, but the fact is: assess whether or not you are actively impacting anyone’s job before committing to after-hours work. If there is no workaround and the bug/issue/feature is critical, then it might be time to bite the bullet and just work on it. If there’s a workaround (even an annoying one), it can wait. You might believe people hate you for it, but if it were them, they'd expect the same leniency.

Wrap up

Work-life balance is a problem. It’s not up to your employer to solve it, but it’s not up to you either. We all need to work together to set realistic expectations to move forward happily and healthily.