Fixing Your Work Life Balance

Being a workaholic is one thing (and over-diagnosed by internet “bro science” experts, but whatever), but work/life is something that many people struggle with. We value our work and we often enjoy it. Furthermore, we often feel a sense of loyalty to our teammates. We also are often concerned that if we don’t work more than expected, that we’ll be first on the chopping block when the inevitable round of layoffs occurs. This is especially true for older developers who have been around the block a few times. When we talk about overwork, the first and most important thing to know is that the typical suggestion of “just work less, man” doesn’t actually fix anything. It’s a complex phenomenon arising out of a number of issues, such as insufficient staffing, poor planning, fear of losing your job, comradrie with teammates (and a desire not to disappoint them), or even a misunderstanding of what constitutes a “good enough” work ethic all play a role. Further, because overwork produces short-term gain at the expense of long-term mistakes, it often establishes a feedback loop that causes you to have to overwork even more. Once you make a habit of working too much, the problems you create become reasons to stay a little later to get things done. Adding to the madness, more than likely your manager is aware of at least some of these problems, increasing your fear of getting fired if you were to cut back to a reasonable number of hours. If you don’t want to quit your job to get away from being overworked, you need a strategy that takes these things into account. Fortunately, many bad work situations with inherent feedback loops would solve themselves if the feedback loop wasn’t present. Overworking is one of those work situations that relies on a positive feedback loop. If you can get rid of the inputs to the feedback loop, the actual problems start to become tractable. If instead, you decide to try to simply work your way out of being overworked, you’ll be in an even worse situation afterward. The key to it all is very similar to much of the debugging we do every day – you determine which of the inputs to the system is causing a problem and then you either keep the input out of the system or you modify the system to be tolerant of the input. Poor work/life balance is corrosive to your quality of life. Not only does it chew up time and attention for the things that matter, but it destroys your health and your enjoyment of life. Even more insidious, it often contains a feedback loop that causes it to perpetuate itself. This can stymie any effort you make to fix the problem. However, if you understand that you are dealing with a feedback loop instead of a linear system, it can become easier to fix. Provided, of course, that you acknowledge the feedback loop and do things to reduce its power until you can fix the problem. Episode Breakdown Start tracking your time and tasks accurately. While your intuition about where your time is going may be right, you can’t really prove that things are better until they are measurable. The goal here is to fix your work/life balance, not to constantly be trying to test out different ways to do it. Measurement also has another interesting side effect in that it changes behavior. Everyone has a couple of recurring tasks that they despise – you’ll often find that you become more efficient at these tasks, simply because you realize how miserable they make you and for how long. Time spent on various tasks is proof of their actual priority. You can tell a lot about someone’s financial priorities by looking at their bank statement. You can do the same with their priorities in general by looking at where they spend their time. The other reason you want to do this is that you may be able to correlate how you feel on certain days w...