On working too hard: finding balance, and lessons learned from others

> Nobody ever told me to work late, but nobody ever told me to _stop_ working. If my boss/bosses boss/ came up to me a once or twice and told me "hey, you shouldn't work past PM", particularly in my first few days, _and most importantly_ they left too, that would have set an excellent example on how to have a work-life balance.

I've had managers try to nanny my working hours like this. It wasn't fun. I know they thought it was a good gesture, but if I have a spare hour or two in the evening and a good idea I want to try out before bed, I don't want anyone telling me I can't work right now.

In fact, I don't want my manager policing my working hours at all, in either direction.

What works better is for managers to gather honest feedback about how long tasks took and how many excess hours were being worked during their 1:1s with employees. It's not hard to ask employees how their workload looks and adjust schedules or resource allocation to compensate.

I thought I was clear that in my comment it particularly applies at the beginning of a job, and _most importantly_ they're not working after.

> New college grads can really struggle with finding balance after transitioning out of college > Ambitious juniors often see this and decide to go all-in

The most common issue I see with dedicated juniors is when work is, by a large margin, the biggest thing in their life.

When work is your thing, it only takes one thing to go badly at work for it to impact your happiness. Given how much can go wrong in a career that is entirely outside your control, no matter how good you may be you'll inevitably hit a bump, and that can be really painful.

I was lucky in that when I started work, I always had a large piece of my life that was outside of it. At first this was rowing crew, eventually it turned into cycling and crossfit.

Finding hobbies like this, where your results are almost entirely within your own power, I found to be a powerful hedge against negative factors at work. It takes a while to figure this out, though, and I don't blame anyone for whom this hasn't clicked or didn't quite work.

> It normalizes the idea that work is inherently bad, and that hating your work is natural

Yes! I have a real problem with this positioning, especially because I don't think a solution to not enjoying work is to suck it up and do a bit less- I'd love more people to aim for work that excites them, and gives them energy.

> No job is going to be fun all of the time, but if you're hating every hour of work and counting down the hours to the end of the day every day then you're probably in a below average job.

Absolutely true. When I first joined my current company, we were 35 people in size, now we're ~650. That growth means I've worked on so many different things, in several different environments.

Sometimes it was great, other times it sucked. Sometimes it sucked even while it was great- finishing an infrastructure migration into Google Cloud was an awesome achievement, but after a 18 month migration, I was fairly exhausted.

If you get the balance right, there's an amount of flexibility and distance you and afford with your work that helps you get through the difficult parts, and maximise what you get from the good.

> Downtime is not an enjoyable experience anymore

This sounds more like a lack of anything to do than downtime.

If you prefer to be doing something and you hate when you're doing nothing, you need to identify more somethings to fill your time with. If the only "something" you have in your life is work, then you're going to gravitate back to that by default.

Flip it around and start identifying the things you enjoy, then make an effort to do those things in your non-work time.

Downtime doesn't literally have to mean sitting around, doing nothing productive. If you're the kind of person who must be active, then you need to become the kind of person who picks activities you enjoy and makes a point to do them.

Anything that suggests that work is the beginning, middle and end of life is utterly and completely misguided in my humble opinion.

As the great sages tend to say, you're not going to be on your deathbed wishing you'd signed that extra deal, you're going to be lying there thinking of your family, your love, the time with your kids.

Now that's not to say there aren't moments in your life when you're up for working hard. And your 20's can be a good time for this: you're full of energy, you're free of encumbrances like kids and mortgages, and it can feel pretty great to bust your balls doing something you enjoy.

But let's not forget that it also feels great busting your balls actually enjoying yourself properly, too. When you're in your 20's that can be sex or travelling or socialising or a million other things.

As a whole though, the ethic of "gotta work hard all through your life" troubles me. There aren't enough spaces for creativity, relaxation, debate, books, or simply doing nothing.

It's these things that make a life worth living, not (just) some meteoric rise through a career.