Wow, it’s TSQL Tuesday again! Tjay Belt (blog|twitter) is our host this month and he’d like us to talk about work/life balance.
This ended up being an interesting post for me. I wrote and scrapped multiple versions of it. I started out with the title Work/life balance is a sliding scale, while imagining a teeter totter. Work on one side, home life on the other. Sometimes work wins, sometimes life, but over all they kind of work themselves out.
But then I realized that wasn’t really detailed enough. I mean let’s just look at work. Is that just my 9 to 5? How about my blog? Any articles I write as a side hustle? Speaking? How about work around the house? Yardwork? Dishes, laundry, cleaning? The list goes on and on. I can break down life in the same sort of way. Now I’m starting to view work/life as more balancing on a ball. Or maybe balancing on a ball while juggling? It’s complicated, it’s messy. I’ll be honest, at this point I’m not sure what to title the post.
Now I started thinking a bit more. Some days my wife needs more attention. She has a project she wants help with or just wants to hang out. Sometimes I’m inspired and I just have to write that blog post. My 17yo is leaving for school in a week. That means more time with him before he goes. School starts for the 12yo soon too and so I want to spend more time with her. Then I’m on-call and end up getting woken up several times and I just don’t have the energy to do more than just get my work done and move on. Now we’re balancing on a ball while juggling different shaped objects that constantly change shape and size.
Good grief! How do any of us manage?
But we do. We take care of the tasks in our life, we spend time on our hobbies, with our family, our friends, etc. Maybe we can use a form of the spoons theory of depression. Basically we each have so many spoons (or units of energy) each day. Someone with depression or chronic illness has a limited number of spoons to get things done for the day and it can be a trick to finish out your day before you run out of spoons. While a person who isn’t depressed or ill may have a lot of spoons, it’s not infinite. Some days you get more spoons than others, and some days a task might cost more, or even less spoons. But in the end you get to decide how you spend them throughout the day. And I can really only give you one suggestion.