The Work-Life Balance
April 26th, 2007
If I were writing this post exclusively about myself I would have to title it the work-life imbalance. For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while I’m sure you’ve noticed my posts haven’t been as regular as they used to be. Why is this? Well the reality here is that my work-life balance has fallen way off the deep end into the work. I don’t like this and I’m taking some steps to correct this. But the idea of this post came to me a few days ago in that when the work-life balance becomes completely imbalanced you start loosing the flavor of life and replace it with stress.
If you concentrate on work for say 70,80, or even 90 hours a week like some people do you might make a small fortune because you’re probably quite successful at what you do. Unfortunately you won’t have time for anything other than work! You live, eat, sleep and breath work. Now don’t get me wrong there are times when something like this is important and you need to do it but this should be the exception rather than the norm.
My definition of the work-life balance is pretty simple it’s the balance between the amount of time you spend on making money working and everything else in your life. You need time to enjoy and spend time with your friends and loved ones as well as time on things like hobbies and yourself. When you don’t do anything other than work you don’t have time to stay current with your hobbies and activities and you begin to resent the fact that you can’t do anything about it (at least I do).
Our lives are complex things that force us and push us into all sorts of different roles and if any one of them starts to monopolize out time we intrinsically know that something is off. Personally I’ve gotten to this point and I don’t like being here; it’s starting to impact all my other roles along with the role that’s taking most of my time. Its starting to feel like I’m spinning my wheels but not getting anywhere which is nothing but a recipe for insanity. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is how I’ve heard insanity defined.
Since this is a personal finance blog I also wanted to tie this post into the cost impact and although a work-life imbalance doesn’t look like it would have too much of a financial impact it does. You become stressed and for as much as we’d all like to deny it the moment we’re stressed we end up spending more money in general. We look for shortcuts and ways to relieve this stress and bring balance back.
Technorati Tags: work, work-life balance, stress
Posted in Commentary, Productivity | 2 Comments
Big Results = Time + A Little Effort!
March 19th, 2007
From the title of this post you would think I’m going to talk about compound interest but I’m not! It’s the same idea or at least a similar one with one small twist; it not only applies to how quickly your money grows but to everything. A little bit of effort continued over a long period of time will make a dramatic result. The reason I wanted to write about this is I’ve been seeing the results of this at home. I’m not a neat freak by any stretch of the imagination but I’ve been making an effort to keep the kitchen clean. Initially I was spending maybe 15-20 minutes in the mornings cleaning up but this small effort has been kept up and now that 15-20 minutes is spread over the length of the day and not only is the kitchen regularly spotless other parts of the house have started staying cleaner for longer periods of time. You might think it’s a good thing that I’m cleaning up after myself and staying tidy but the effects go far beyond that. Since I’m not a neat freak having a few things on the dining room table doesn’t bother me but the general tidiness that has crept into the place has had a very calming effect. I’m no longer stressed out about having to clean and tidy up when things get a bit messy.
It’s a small effort that I’ve been doing but the effects have spread and the lack of stress when it does get a bit messy are gone. Suddenly I have one less thing that can add to the general stress of the day. It got me thinking what if I was to make a similar small effort in other areas of my life? What would the results be? Being that I’m a bit of a numbers person I decided to do the math. If I were to spend 30 minuets a day on something that I haven’t had time to get to because of the daunting size of the task where would I be in a year? Very quickly 30 minutes a day translates to almost 23 8/hour days. That’s like spending 4.5 work weeks on something. I instantly translated this to spending it on leaning something, if I were to spend 4 weeks at work learning how to manage my money or invest or even buy real estate I would have a basic understanding of the topic. By no stretch of the imagination would I be an expert but I would know what I’m talking about. This is the entire idea that I’ve stumbled upon.
The little things make a huge difference over time, just like compound interest they add up very quickly to a huge amount. Even if that 30 minutes per day was spent at the gym I think the benefits over a year would be staggering. Which makes me questions why I haven’t applied this theory before? Well it’s just so easy to watch TV for half an hour rather than read a book on investing. Now don’t get me wrong there’s nothing with watching TV to relax and chill out after a long day but spending even that extra 30 minutes a day on something that’s important will translate into dramatic results.
This also holds true when it comes to saving money which is what all the investment books say, start setting aside money it’ll make a big difference when you’re ready to retire. Setting aside $25 per week doesn’t amount to much in one month and not a fortune over a year (only $1300) but put that amount over 25 years and you’re all of a sudden looking at a significant number (and this is without any form of interest). For those of you who like to crunch numbers imagine if you were setting aside more since $25/week isn’t a lot of you’re making a decent wage; imagine what it would be if you set aside $100/week over 25 years? Now add interest! That’s the monetary example of what something as simple as 30 minutes a day applied to a task will result in.
If you look at more things from the small point of view and break them down they’re much less daunting and all of a sudden achievable. I think that this little, pardon the pun, discovery is something I’m going to start applying a bit more in my life; I think it’ll produce big results.
Technorati Tags: effort, results, money, impact, personal growth
Posted in Commentary, Productivity | 1 Comment
The CEO Morning Routine
February 1st, 2007
So how much of a difference does your morning routine have when it comes to being productive? Most people will either tell you they are a morning person or they’re not. Personally I was never a morning person but I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that I can function quite well in the morning. I’ve come to this conclusion primarily because of changes in my morning routine that have shown me I can be very productive in the wee hours of the morning.
The reason I’m discussing this topic today is the fact that there was a great article on Yahoo! that discussed the results of a survey of 20 CEOs and executives that described some of the trends that appeared in their morning routine. First off getting up early was a trend as was getting up and attacking work as well as attacking the gym. The part about waking up early and getting going on email wasn’t a surprise at all. Part of being productive at the executive level in my opinion is making sure that your work gets done and that includes the dreaded email. What I found rather amusing is that as I read this article I realized that I too have now started replying to email just after I get up.
Being productive from the first thing in the morning also seems to have something to do with hitting the gym as most of the surveyed executives went early. Now that I have a slightly different schedule I can potentially hit the gym in the morning and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. This article definitely reaffirms in my mind that this is something I should be doing. Regardless the article and the survey it conduced were interesting because for many years I wondered just how senior level people managed to get as much as they had to do done; some of the mystery is now gone.
Getting off to a good start in the morning definitely goes a long way to having a productive day in my opinion.
Technorati Tags: productivity, morning routine
Posted in Commentary, Productivity | No Comments
