What would you consider a balanced life? I consider a it as a state in which you are getting the right amount of time devoted to the important aspects of your life. So what are these “aspects”? Well, I call them segments to simplify things. It is my opinion that there are three important segments of one’s life. These segments are Work, Personal Time, and Sleep. I’ll go into detail on the different aspects of each of those a little later on, but knowing we have three distinct segments, we can start talking about life balance.
In your career, you will most likely have a job that is 5 days a week. That may change in the future, but for now, that is considered the “norm”. So given we have 5 work days a week, we can look at the three segments and fit them into a given day. If each segment is 8 hours, we have a balance (Math Time: 8 + 8 + 8 = 24). If any segment is not 8 hours, we have imbalance. Imbalance happens all the time. Few people can have a work life that puts these three segments into place, but being aware is the key to balance.
Another part of having a balanced life is the quality of each segment. Later on we will touch on this, but for now, just know that when the quality of a segment goes down, the others are usually impacted.
Work
A “normal” work day is usually considered 8am to 5pm. Wait, that’s 9 hours! Yeah it is, but it’s considering an hour lunch break. I find that a lot of people just eat at their desk and come in around 9am and leave around 5pm. With that, we have 8 hours. Some people still come in at 9am and leave around 5pm, saying they will “make up the hours”. I’m guilty of this, but considering that there are times where I’m needed after hours or on the weekends, it kind of figures itself out.
Sometimes we find ourselves staying at work late, or having to get on in the middle of the night on the weekend because the code you wrote that was pushed to production at 4:30pm on a Friday. This does happen, and it does suck. I have a rule that states: Never push to production at 4:30pm on a Friday, unless your company is super awesome and has Continuous Delivery set up for Production with things in place to ensure the stability of the system (future episode).
Accepting that work hours are not always 8am to 5pm gets you one step closer to managing your life. If you have to work extra time, knowing that the other segments of your day will be impacted, you can mentally prepare yourself. Anytime you work more than 8 hours a day, you are taking away from another segment.
An important piece of this your work-life, is the quality of it. If you don’t like your job, your sleep or your personal time can and probably will be impacted. Maybe you come home from another crappy day at work, what kind of things could happen? You might just want to say, “Screw the laundry and paying bills, I deserve a break! I’m just going to binge watch some shows and eat Cheez-its until I pass out.” When this kind of thing happens, you start to lose your balance. The quality of your other segments usually go down.
If you do have a job you don’t like, you can try to look for a new one. As a Software Developer, if you are good at what you do, finding another job isn’t too hard, though, sometimes, you will have to move away from Small Town, USA. Big cities offer a lot more opportunities. You could also consider looking for a job that allows you to be remote.
Another option is finding out why you don’t like your current job. If the parts of your job that you don’t like can be fixed, try to fix them! You might find that it wasn’t a bad job, but instead, it was your boss or a specific project. There are ways to fix a job you don’t like. Identifying the reason you don’t like your current job or position is really important to finding a different situation that makes you satisfied. If you take these issues you have, you can use them to either find a better job, or improve the quality of your current one.
I did a bit of research (like 2-3 web searches…research) to see if there were any statistics that shed light on the amount of people who like their job vs. those who don’t. I found that there was a poll done a while back (when I wrote and recorded this episode) that showed 51% of US employees feel satisfied with their jobs. That number, at the time of writing, now has gone up to 54%! I was shocked. It is good to know that having a job you like is an attainable goal. Of course, those numbers are for all kinds of jobs. I don’t know what the percentage of satisfied developers is, but I believe it would be a bit higher.
Sleep
It is known that adults need between 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night. Any more or less sleep we get will affect our day. Oh look, 8 fits right in the middle, how nice! That aligns right along with the 8 hours of work most people put in a day. Let’s face the facts though, getting the “right” amount of sleep is hard to do. Right now, as I write this, it’s 12:41am. I’ll still get up between 6am and 7am, but my work and sleep will be impacted due to the extra hours I’m putting into my personal time. Sometimes though, we have to adjust and make room for things, even if it costs us instability.
College for me meant tons of all-nighters. I remember cramming for tests, trying to get my assignments done at the last second because I procrastinated. Oh, those were the days. I thought after I graduated, those days were behind me (spoiler alert: they were not, see above). My life continued to be imbalanced well into my late 20s and sometimes occurs now.
Staying up all night for school, going to classes, then somehow still hanging out with friends is not a balanced life. In college though, that was life. As you enter your career, you might think those days are done. Well, they should be, but Software Development is not a normal career. Sure most people in other careers can work a normal 8 hours in a day, but in my career, I’ve experienced a lot of all-nighters. Sometimes, even my personal time has me pouring extra hours in. I find that sleep almost always loses the fight for balance.
There are times we get the right number of hours of sleep, but still wake up feeling deprived. This can be caused by several things such as: your bed, bad dreams, temperature of the room, noise, etc. If you can identify the reasons you had a bad night of sleep, you can take measures to fix it. Proper sleep, in my opinion, is the most important segment of your day. Do what you can to get good sleep. If you don’t, well, life won’t be great.
Personal Time
Personal time is your time. I consider it the segment of your day that you have to do what you want or need to do. Personal time includes: family time, movies, playing games, hanging out with friends, creating a vlog/blog about careers in software, etc. Personal time is not always the fun stuff though. Paying bills is personal time. Doing the laundry, driving, getting ready for work, etc., all fit into personal time.
Personal Time is not really a segment of your day. It is the remainder of the time you spend sleeping and working (Math Time: 24 – (sleepTime + workTime) = personalTime). If you spend 8 hours working and sleeping, the gaps are your personal time. Remember earlier, when I mentioned that a typical work day is considered 8am to 5pm which is 9 hours? Well, that hour in the middle is personal time. The same goes for driving to and from work and getting ready.
Thank God for the weekends! On the weekends, we typically don’t work (unless you release to production on Friday at 4:30…see the work section). Because we don’t usually work on the weekends, we get 16 hours of personal time per day.
Having 8 hours of personal time (or 16 on the weekends) is important. We do a lot of stuff! Doing a lot of stuff requires a lot of time. We must ensure we can get the stuff we need and want done. But, just like the other segments, too much or too little affects the others. If you have too much stuff to do outside of work, you might be taking on too much, or, you need to move things that can be moved to the weekend.
Having quality personal time is just as important as having quality sleep and enjoying work. Issues with family and/or friends happens. But when it happens, the quality of our time goes down, again, affecting the other segments.
The Three Thirds Rule
Given everything we’ve already discussed, I’ve identified something I call The Three Thirds Rule. Considering that an average workday can be broken into 8 hour segments, we are left with each segment being a third of your day. Looking at each segment, there are two important things to identify. First, increasing time in one segment, decreases time on another. Second, the quality of a segment can and will affect other segments.
Now I’m going to try to create an actual definition to make this a real thing. Here we go:
The Three Thirds Rule
noun
Given that most people work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours and spend 8 hours doing what they want, we can identify a balance. If one segment of a day is increased or decreased in time, the other segments are affected. The quality of each segment will affect the other segments.
Hey, look at that, its official now, right? Cool!
I’d like to provide some examples of the rule in action using both aspects of the rule, time balance and quality balance. Let’s start with some time balance examples:
- Staying late at work probably affects your amount of home time more than your sleep.
- Staying up late affects the amount of sleep you get
- Sleeping in directly affects home time in the morning, having to rush, and it can potentially affect your work time.
Now let’s look at some quality balance examples:
- Hating your job affects your home life and your sleep. You might spend your home time complaining about work and work might be all you dream about.
- Having a bad night of sleep (tossing and turning), makes you groggy in the morning and grumpy all day
- Spending your home time doing something you don’t like, can possibly affect your sleep and work
Having one bad quality segment usually reduces the quality of other segments.
Balance
So how do balance your life? My belief is that understanding that a typical work day is split into thirds can help you see how each segment can impact the other. Changes to a single segments time or quality creates ripples. It is rare that you will be able to achieve a perfect homeostasis but trying to get close will greatly assist your ability to manage your day to day. The goal of the three-thirds rule is to illuminate pitfalls thought out your day.
So let’s say you don’t like your job, if you can find a job you like, the other segments of your day will reap the benefits. Need to work late? Prepare for it if you can. If you had to spend 10 hours at work yesterday and only got 6 hours of personal time, try to leave work early today and make up some of that personal time.
Sleep issues can be a major impact and it can be hard to correct. Try to understand what gives you the b477est sleep. It could be your bed. Maybe dropping the temperature at night could help. Just try to identify areas where you can improve each segment. Quick note about kids. Kids will destroy your sleep schedule. This is an example of the three-thirds rule breaking.
Consider how you spend your time at home. Are you able to do things that make you happy and feel relaxed? It is not always possible to be happy in your personal segment but do what you can to find joy when you can. A happy personal life will directly affect your work and sleep.
The Good Life
Now, I’m not saying that if you follow The Three Thirds Rule you will instantly be living the good life. No, what I’m hoping to get across is that life is hard and full of chaos. But, we can create order from that chaos if we understand what causes chaos.
Having a low quality and/or imbalanced life is no fun. Sometimes, that’s just how it goes. There is no single way to lead a balanced life (if there is though, let me know). If I went to any bookstore, I’m 100% sure I could find tons of books about how to live a balanced life. I am not writing a book…yet. No, I’m just pointing out and naming something most of us already know. The rule exists to assist you in illuminating potential pits you can fall into.
I believe that a balanced can lead to a better life. Using the rule to help you identify areas of imbalance in your life can lead to a better life. A better life might get you to “The Good Life”, or whatever that means.
Good luck on finding stability. Finding stability in a career in Software Development it tough. I consider it the hardest part, even harder than naming variables, which is seriously number 2 on my list “The Hard Stuff” that I plan on publishing someday.
I hope sometime all of us can find “The Good Life”.