Picking Work Life Harmony

Pick the right things for your whole life

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

- Arthur Szathmary (not Confucius!)

I don’t like the concept of "work/life balance". It presumes work and life are at odds and need to be balanced against one another. I feel the opposite. Work is part of your life. The right approach is finding how the two integrate and complement each other to achieve Work/Life Harmony. You want your whole life to be satisfying.

Disclaimer: I’m not the only one to propose this. Jeff has a nice section about this in his book Invent & Wander.

When I was CEO of my own startup (Patronus), it was easy for me to have a polyphasic sleep schedule when my son Jaxon was just born and needed to be fed in the middle night.  While I only got 1 week totally offline for paternity leave (I recommend much more if you can by the way), I had complete flexibility to work whatever schedule was needed for Jaxon. My professional environment enabled my personal life to thrive.  

If you agree with the thesis of Work/Life Harmony, you should take a different approach to evaluating your current work and future opportunities. They should be evaluated in relation to the collective whole of your life rather than in isolation. After all, you only have one set of time and one brain. They aren’t magically split up. Think holistically. 

When picking how you spend your 168 hours / week, you need to prioritize among six criteria.  

Purpose - How much fulfillment you feel from what you spend your time on and the real, societal value it has.

Lifestyle / Workstyle - Self explanatory I hope, but hours, commute, flexibility, schedule, operating rhythm, and environment factor into this.

Compensation - How much money you make from how you allocate your time (not how you allocate money!)

People - The quality of people you spend your time with and if more are coming into your life.  Do they bring you joy? Do you learn from them? Do they inspire you?

Status - Is other’s approval and interest in your time allocation important to you?  Example: working at Google versus working in something less “known” or having a lot of followers on instwitterbooktok.

Learning - Chances to further develop. Are you learning new things, enhancing skills, and improving yourself?

To be clear, these are interdependent. But for the purposes of an exercise you should stack rank them in order to help you make tradeoff decisions.

For my life overall, I would put them in this order (mind you, I have a high bar for all of these):

Purpose

People

Learning

Lifestyle / Workstyle

Compensation*

Status

It’s very important to me that I’m working on an important purpose, with great people in my life who inspire me, in a way that we can continue to get better and be effective. And, to put a fine point on “People”, this includes my loved ones and personal relationships.

However, it’s important to revisit this. In any given year the order may be different because priorities and needs can shift. 2020 sure was different than 2019! At the end of 2016, we had just sold Patronus to RapidSOS and I had a 3 month old. What I wanted then is different than what I want now in 2021.

You can see that my top priority was quite different back then. 

When we sold our company in 2016, it wasn’t a home run financially. So, it was really important to me to ensure a solid financial position for my family (Jaxon was 3 months old). I was willing to trade off against my purpose because I had just spent the previous 3 years working to make 911 much smarter and we sold to the company who leads the area (and have now saved > 6,000 lives!). Whereas today, it’s different. I’m lucky my previous choices, along with many other privileges, have ensured some comfort for my family to the point that compensation is important, but not the top factor.

You can also see my 2021 stack rank is different from my life-long ranking. With all of the craziness of 2020 and likely 2021, I’m willing to give up learning opportunities to protect the way we have coped and adapted during this time. Of course I’d rather not give them up, but I know what comes first if I have to make a hard choice.

It’s a new year and we have learned a lot. Take out a sheet of paper and try this out for yourself. Hopefully you will find everything is in order. And if not, you will have some valuable clarity! 

Pick work life harmony so you’re solving for the whole of your life, not just one part.

Preet

*Beyond providing some level of comfort for my family, I principally look at money as a tool. It is to accomplish objectives and underwrite experiments. Navel gazing at a specific net worth number in and of itself isn’t important to me. I’m very lucky to be in this position.