Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

Do these types of jobs even exist anymore in tech? At least in SV, every job I've come across these days seem to require on-call and an implicit requirement to work into the night hours in order to finish your work. Not to mention super competitive teammates that don't mind working 24/7 and putting pressure on me to work even longer. I would gladly take a minimum 25% pay reduction if it meant I only needed to work 9-5pm with no obligation to answer emails or Slack messages after-hours. I would love to hear examples of companies with this type of WLB if they do exist.

As someone whose default ringer setting is off unless I'm expecting a call, and have been like that for almost a decade, giving fewer people a guaranteed option on my time is a great start to being able to build and choose with calm, higher quality decisions. We get what we reward. When you don't set boundaries, you can't expect other people to anticipate them, let alone respect the ones you have in effect imagined. Writing and answering emails at 2am just makes you the 2am email guy and who wants that person in their life?

In the morning, I read from a physical book first thing to set a boundary between my real day and the internet. It's not a trick and I usually forget most of what I've read, but it's a boundary I set and a choice about how I relate to the world. Forget about hacks to steal back moments so you can find a way to bear the suffering you've accepted as normal. Just learn to value calm, and place its priority above everything you feasibly can.

The quality of the decisions you make as a result of valuing calmness as a principle will alter the trajectory of your life. It can't always be the supreme priority, but being deliberate about making exceptions to it is most of the way there. When we worry about missing opportunities (FOMO), we tend to overlook that it presupposes those opportunities come from someone else. It is a figment of how we have chosen to relate to those perceived people. It also goes away as a result of recognizing that perception as an inessential obstacle to the calm that you value.

Sure, if you haven't set boundaries before, choosing to set them will be disruptive, initially. The relationships that dropped off were the ones that involved emergencies, panics, and ultimatums. They were also similar to the ones that dropped off anyway once I became more successful because their basis in shared, co-misery wasn't there anymore. It creates a self-selecting filter where your only remaining connections are to people who respect those boundaries, and in effect, you.

Anecdotally, it's a pretty good way to live.

This "tech-life balance" approach is a start and is a sign of the need we have for it. I'd argue a more effective approach would be to just choose calm. Make an active decision about how you relate to the machines and the perceived relationships they represent, using calmness not as a goal or temporary state, but as a principle.

Then, turn off your ringer.

Indeed, and I remember those years too

right now I have to get a kiddo to school by 7.50am, so we get up at 6.30 and she goes to bed at 7.30.

TFA is talking about carving out 4 hours a morning of "me time". It's hard to do that with a kid and a job

My kids go to bed at 6pm.

~16 is about when my kids seem to start trying to manage their phone obsessions. There's nothing really weird about it.