2 Comments // Jan 15 2010
Separate or Together? Work, Life, and Happiness
Let me get this out of the way: I don’t believe in “work-life balance.” There are only work-life priorities. Sometimes work takes precedent, to our detriment or not, and other times, life takes the lead. However, we still try our damnest to get it all to gel. There are two trains of through in order to do this: separate work and life completely or integrate work into your life even more.
The former has been popularized by The 4-Hour Workweek where Tim Ferris encourages separation of purely financially-driven activity from pleasure-driven activity while the latter has been written through several blog posts, two of which were on 24ways: A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just for Christmas and Make Out Like a Bandit.
Now, I love design (of all types) and I love making money through design so I don’t necessarily want to completely separate my “financially driven” activity from what I consider fun. Work shouldn’t be a drudge! But, to me, creating personal projects that are almost directly tied to skills in your day job, can help burn you out instead of re-inspire you. I mean, one can only take so much staring at Photoshop even if one is a paid client project, and the other is a passion project. You’re still in Photoshop (or your software of choice). You’re still designing. You’re still… well, you’re still working. You’ve just switched clients from someone else to yourself, and as we all know, we’re all our own worst clients.
So what to do? I don’t want to separate work and pleasure completely, nor do I want to completely integrate my hobbies to my work. Here’s the deal: design is my passion but it sure as hell isn’t my entire life. (no offense to those who have Design is Life mandates)
My proposal? Limit the amount of hobbies you integrate into your work that may or may not make money (perhaps maximum 1 or 2) and the rest, keep it offline. Don’t even think about monetizing the rest. It will guarantee that it’s strictly in the hobby mindset because you’re not necessarily out to make money off of it. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that sometimes people on the web live in this strange vacuum where only the internet, design, and code exist and of course, trying to profit from it. Sometimes, it could be nicer for certain things to remain analog, offline, and private.
I think that might be a good compromise.
2 blabs to Separate or Together? Work, Life, and Happiness
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Name Matt Brett
Date Jan 15 2010
03:01 PM
Well said, Lea. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
Happiness has been the missing ingredient, so I’ve been evaluating the things I sink time into, and more importantly, what I get out of them.
I’ve recently discovered that offline hobbies generally leave me in a happier state of mind when I’m through with them. And as such, I’m striving to make more time for such activities.
Coming to terms with the facts that I’ll always have to work, and always be in debt (in one form or another), was a tough hurdle for me to get over. Having accepted that, I have to make sure I have things going on that truly make me happy. And the best way to do that, as you’ve stated, is to have activities that are completely segregated from my work life.
Name Rich
Date Jan 15 2010
05:25 PM
You’ve summed up and clarified what the work-life balance game is about pretty well. It’s a lot of gray, but it’s about managing the gray that makes sense at the time.
I also liked the part about profit. I know that topic has been on my mind a lot lately, too, and I think designers and developers are finally warming up to marketing and ROIs.