You've probably heard someone talk about work-life balance. It's one of the most overused, least helpful phrases in management. It implies there are two things — work and life — and you just need to find the sweet spot between them.
That's not how it works.
There are three bubbles you're trading against at all times: your job, your career, and your personal life. Think of them as a Venn diagram where the total can only add up to 100%. If one bubble is at 90%, the other two are splitting the remaining 10%.
Your job is designed to eat as much of that time as possible. It's the to-do list, the status tracking, the metrics update— all the things that are relatively easy to do from a productivity standpoint. And it feeds on itself. There's always more work. For most of your career, you're rewarded for it: the more you get done, the better you do, the more you get paid. So it becomes the default bubble for most people, and it's easy to let it take over.
Your career is related to your job, but it's not the same thing. You're going to have many jobs over the course of a career. You'll start as an analyst, then a senior analyst, then maybe an analyst manager. Your career is the longer arc, and it needs its own care and feeding. Too many people confuse the two — they grind at their job and neglect the career, then end up bitter when they realize the grind didn't lead anywhere.
Your personal life is going to shift over time. How you operate in your 20s is different from how you operate in your 40s. In your 20s, you've got time, you want to pursue things outside of work, and you're working to live. In your 30s, maybe you're settling down, maybe you have kids — all of a sudden, the personal bubble gets bigger and the job needs to accommodate that. As your kids get older, maybe you can lean back into work. The bubble shifts again.
The Engine Analogy
These three bubbles are always in tension. When someone tells you they're running at 110%, they might pull that off for a while. But there's a reason they call it redlining the engine — you're going to hurt the engine. And in this case, the engine is you.
That's when burnout shows up. You're tired of work. You're suddenly angry all the time. You don't want to do what you're doing. You're tired of travel. You don't talk to your spouse. Your kids don't actually know where you are — they thought you were somewhere else last week when you were on a business trip.
You Have to Be Aware of the Trade
My advice isn't about how you should allocate your time across these three bubbles. That's up to you. My advice is that you need to be aware that you're making a trade-off.
In my own case, I focused on my personal life when my kids were young, during my 30s. I wanted to be there. I was at 95% of the baseball games, the soccer games, basketball at the YMCA. I wanted them to know their dad was there and wasn't traveling for work.
I remember getting up at 3 AM for a flight out of Connecticut, landing at the airport, taking the train and an Uber to make it to a baseball game by 11 AM. I was certainly tired, but my kid got to see that I was there. They don't know about the ordeal of travel — the connections, the delays, whether the meeting went well. They just know you showed up. That was important to me.
But only you can gauge what's important for you.
The Default Trap
The problem I see with too many people is they're not aware that they're making a trade. And when you don't put awareness around it, the default kicks in. Most people over-index on their job by default. They don't think about the career. Then they end up sour.
And here's the thing — it's not the job that you hate. It's that you didn't manage the job. You let one bubble swallow the other two, and now you're paying for it.
Be deliberate about how you're allocating across all three. The ratio is going to change over time, and that's fine.
Just make sure you're the one choosing the ratio.
See you next week!
-Frank
