Saturday, March 31, 2018

Work-life balance or blend?

In my job I travel a lot. I work on projects across different time zones. I like coffee.
About a year ago we moved to Houston and, although I’m officially based in our Houston office, I often work from home. It’s a habit I picked up in Kansas but now I’m in Houston with a reasonably long commute when the traffic is bad - as it often is in Houston - it’s tough for me to drag my butt to the office. Add to that the fact that my wife set me up with a nice office at home and bought a fancy Nespresso machine and the commute really loses it’s appeal. Did I mention I like coffee?

I could write a blog on the pros and cons of working from home versus the office but it’s pretty clear where I stand on the issue... I thought instead it would be worthwhile discussing the thorny issue of managing your time when you’re a remote worker.

Balancing Act

One approach to managing your time when working from home is to “clock in” and “clock out” at the same time you would if you were heading into the office. This takes some discipline but hey, you already saved the hour commute into work and the hour back, so it’s worth the effort. There are two major benefits to this approach
  1. You’re in sync with the office
  2. You get to balance work time with home time better. 
I think the first benefit is self-evident but perhaps the latter needs a little unpacking. One of the big dangers with working from home is that you never stop working.  Your 9 to 5 becomes an 8 to 8 (am to pm that is) and your work to life balance gets way out of whack. The stress from commuting is replaced by plain old over-working stress. I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt, when I was based in an office, so I certainly don't want to repeat that mistake when working from home.

Now I should back up and mention that I've never been one for watching the clock. One of my early bosses once said that if you're the kind of employee that's always watching the clock then you're not the kind of employee he wanted.  I appreciate some flexibility in the hours I'm working.  Poop engineers generally work on multiple projects, billing their time to several each week using the beloved timesheet (ah, second only to expense forms as the most hated business tool in existence), and the mystical project numbers. As long as I do 40 hours of useful work in the week it doesn't really matter how that was completed, within reason.

House Blend

I think it was my current boss that I first heard use the expression "work-life blend" and it resonated with me. As I mentioned previously in this post, poop engineers work on multiple projects.  This means my workload varies quite widely.  There are days where I have deadlines to meet but still someone needs a piece of advice or help that was unscheduled.  On those days it's not unusual to have to work into the evenings.  As someone who works with colleagues around the world, it's also common for me to have a conference call in the evenings. In parallel with this I may have obligations with family and friends or my church. My wife takes it pretty easy on me with "honey-do's" but still I have a few.  How do you manage that with a fixed, evenly balanced work day? The answer is, you don't.  So you have the option of just being a workaholic, e-mail junkie - been there and still don't like the T-shirt - or seek a different approach.

Enter the "work-life blend." The gist of this approach is that you don't compartmentalize your life into work time and private time, but you blend the two. I found a nice article on Forbes by Ron Ashkenas titled "Forget Work-Life Balance: It's Time for Work-Life Blend" which is about perfect for this blog!!!  He discusses how we should acknowledge how work intrudes into our personal lives in the connected world in which we now live and rather than fighting it, look for ways to integrate the two and manage it.  The two implications he highlights are (1) less guilt for working outside of traditional hours and (2) the need for greater flexibility in how and when we work.

Bringing it Home

So what do I do?  To be honest it's a bit of both... the work-life balanced-blend!! The backbone of what I try to do is to balance the time I spend in work so that I don't slip back into my bad workaholic habits.  I make a conscious effort to disconnect from work at the weekends. If I have an evening or late night call overseas I'll sleep in the next morning, or take some downtime at some other time. But there are times when I have to let the work and private stuff blend and then I appreciate the flexibility my firm gives me to be able to do that. It's give and take. It works.

Oh, and I drink plenty of coffee.  Did I mention I like coffee? ;)