sacha chua living an awesome life

Sunday:

My head was buzzing from a good weekend of learning how to program on a new platform, so I set aside some time to reflect and clear it. This is what I had started to write:

Programming is addictive. It distracts me in a way that few other
pursuits do. I dream about code. I doodle ideas. I get lost in
development. Every free hour is a choice between spending it
programming or doing something else, and it’s hard to resist that urge
for flow – that immersive, transcendental experience of engagement and
success.

Flow messes me up. In the flow of programming, I forget the joy and
ease of other activities. I feel myself resisting the need to surface
from flow in order to take care of household chores or work on other
projects. Just another test, just another function, just another
little success. When I reluctantly slip away, the ghost of it hovers
there, a background process that takes up memory and processing time,
interrupts me with ideas and invitations, and makes it hard for me be
mindful and focused on other things.

I know I’m lucky to be passionate about something like this, so it
seems wasteful to think of setting bounds. But my thinking feels
disjointed, hyperlinked, broken down into small functions – a little
the kind of unraveling I feel when I haven’t had the chance to
properly write and reflect—

Then W- said, “How would you like to help clean up the yard?”

So I did. While W- changed his tires and J- raked the leaves, I tidied up what remained of this year’s garden. Then I came back to the kitchen and roasted four turkey drumsticks, helped pack 11 lunch portions, made turkey pot pie filling, and prepared onigiri for next week’s snacks. It was productive, social, and good. I remembered that weekends are good for preparing for the future, and I felt even better.

There’s something interesting about that thought, and I want to explore it further. Maybe if I experiment with setting aside blocks of time, I’ll get a better balance instead of mostly going by what I feel most like doing. There is an inertia to enjoyment. The more I focus on one thing, the harder it is to return to others. While a life focused on programming – and perhaps writing as well – is probably going to be just as awesome, I’d like to pick up a few other interests as well: cooking, drawing, sewing… Even speaking and making presentations tend to go on the backburner when I have a program in mind, which results in stress down the road.

For those other interests, I need to invest time doing things that are less fun than programming in order to get to the point where I might have as much fun doing that as I have writing code.

Improving my ability to switch is likely to pay off in terms of better quality of life, lower stress, and richer combinations of complementary skills.

Here are some ways I’m thinking of experimenting with that:

Limit programming to 4-hour blocks at a time, with rest breaks throughout. Do something non-computer-related for at least an hour between programming sessions. By getting better at resuming where I left off, I’ll be able to let go with more confidence.

Schedule a block of recreational programming time on my calendar. That way, I know I’m going to be able to try things out at least once during the week, so it’ll be easier for me to resist the urge to swap chores for programming. I can keep a TODO list of things to work on, which will help me use that time more effectively.

Schedule other interests/tasks on my calendar as needed. It’s just like homework. If I’ve got a presentation or an idea planned for a certain date, I might do better by setting aside specific times to work on it. I might also use sprints or the Pomodoro technique to make it easier to focus.

Beef up my weekly review, and ruthlessly trim my task list. I’ve been postponing items that weren’t particularly important. I’d like to move each of my open projects forward at least a little each week, and the weekly review is a good time to catch that. If I do my weekly review on Friday or Saturday, I can use Sunday for focused, planned work, or target things for mornings as well. If I run into something I still don’t want to do, time to think about whether I want to scratch that off my list.

Hmm…

Work and life. I want to write about this in the context of family, because two of my friends recently reflected on work-life integration:

It’s also been fascinating and edifying to see how… life
fits into all of this. See, the thing about work/life balance is that
it’s really easy if your life is work; you’ve only got one thing to
balance, so by default, blam, you’re done. Watching Heidi blend her
teaching and work, scholarship and family, kids and research, home and
school – you’re a mom and you’re a professor and you’re the same
person and you blend those lives and don’t compartmentalize them…
… it’s been a revelation to see both sides at the same time, and to
realize they’re not really “sides,” but… that it’s possible to blend
them, you don’t have to partition one from the other quite so firmly.

…
I know what I don’t want. I’ve seen my female family members at home,
and I don’t want that work-life balance; what I’ve seen is that either
you have no work (I love my work! I want a career! I want to teach!)
or the equally unpalatable-to-me alternative of having your work is
dictated by someone who’s not you (taking a job because your family
demands it rather than actually choosing to work in that way in that
time; giving up a personal career at a company in order to help with
your husband’s business, that sort of thing). I know it’s possible! I
just don’t know how it’s possible! It’s hard to see and hear and find
stories of how people come to find that sort of balance, what it looks
like, what it feels like. And I’m too shy to ask people about this
most of the time – and earlier on, when I didn’t know these things
were possible, I didn’t even know that I could ask.

Mel Chua

and feminism:

However I don’t really talk about what I mean by feminist because 1)
it doesn’t come up and 2) it’s not really something I think about a
lot. When it does, what often seems to come up is the unfairness of
women being penalized for motherhood, and as someone who doesn’t want
to have children, I’m not always sure I agree. If a woman chooses to
take a year off work and I don’t, it seems fair that I should be a
year ahead in my career. If I’m willing to travel, and relocate for my
job, and have fewer other aspects of my life to prioritize, it’s
clearly easier for me to advance.

Cate Huston

So here’s what I’m coming to understand:

It is possible for women to combine satisfying workplace accomplishments with family, community, and individual happiness. In some organizations, it’s even normal.

I’m lucky to be at IBM, where I’m surrounded by role models with all sorts of life experiences: single, in a relationship, raising young kids, raising school-age kids, empty-nesters, people who had chosen not to have kids at all; people who’ve returned to the workforce after raising their children; women whose spouses focused on child-rearing; couples who shared child-rearing responsibilities equally… Wow.

Seeing people actually live out their lives has gone a long way towards helping me accept the possibilities. There was a point in my life that I was afraid that relationships would distract me from the work I wanted to do. Now I’m married to someone who helps and inspires me do more than I had dreamed of doing. The sneak preview of parenting I get along the way shows me that it’s challenging, but not impossible, and it would help me grow, too.

So, feminism. It’s not about making everyone the same, or invalidating other people’s choices. A person who has made significant sacrifices for their career – moved a lot? took on additional challenges involving lots of extra work? – will understandably be at an advantage. That’s okay.

*It’s about the availability of choices,* so that people can build careers that fit them. Flexible schedules, off-ramps and on-ramps help people adjust their workload so that it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing. Parental leaves help redress another imbalance: fathers should be able to spend time with their children too.

*It’s about valuing more kinds of work and more kinds of choices,* not just working long hours or sacrificing everything for the company.

It’s about calling out and reducing discrimination against people who’ve made different life choices. It’s about recognizing and correcting systemic disadvantages. It will be hard to work the biases out of our society. Women whose bios include parenting are described more negatively, while men actually get a benefit. I was listening to a Harvard Business podcast about advice for women returning to the workforce. The podcast described how some organizations have a “project watch” – a taskforce that occasionally reviews projects assigned to people on flexible workloads in on-ramp initiatives in order to make sure that the projects give people a reasonable chance of success. Not impossibly hard, but also not mindnumbingly easy. Neither type of project helps people grow their careers, and it’s important for people to be able to grow.

Even the way we talk about it reveals biases. I don’t think women “opt out of the workforce” – or worse, “flee the workforce”, as I’ve seen described. I think people sometimes choose the sanity of focusing on one major project at a time. I don’t think giving up on family life is a prerequisite for career success. I see examples of people who have made things work. I don’t think child-rearing is necessarily insular and limited. You can learn widely-useful things and transferrable skills along the way.

When the statistics and news stories get me down, I remind myself:

Some societies and organizations are better than others. I’m lucky to have grown up with strong role models, both male and female. I’m lucky to live in a society where sexism is discouraged. I’m lucky to be in an organization that offers many options. I’m lucky to be surrounded by people who have made things work.

It’s not about the theoretical best. This is something I had to come to terms with years ago. If you worry too much about living up to your “full potential”, you’ll never be happy – particularly if you let other people define your full potential for you. It’s okay if I don’t become a super-popular nomadic entrepreneur or executive with a gazillion patents. (I find travel stressful, actually, so that would rule out the nomadic part anyway.) It doesn’t matter if other people are promoted faster, if they earn more, or if they become more famous. What matters is that I build a life that fits me, and I share what I’m learning along the way so that other people can build even better lives.

I don’t have to make all the life decisions now. A lot of this depends on things I don’t know yet. From all accounts, a baby’s first year is hectic, so people might as well plan to take a year off. After that, people make all sorts of choices. Being in a good financial and social position helps, as does keeping professional skills and networks up to date (always a good idea anyway).

We don’t have to solve all the problems in this life. I would love to wave a magic wand and create an equitable society (tada!), but it’s okay to help inch forward and work on not sliding back. We can grow a little bit at a time. Some of the little things I’m doing to nudge us forward are to always refer to it as “parental leave” instead of “maternity leave”, because work-life integration makes sense for men, too; to write without the assumption that it’s always going to be the woman staying home and raising kids; and to reflect on our biases about presenteeism, choices, and other things.

Here are some tips from another draft of this post:

Laying the groundwork

• Save money and build a good nest egg. One of the insights I picked up from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” is the freedom you get from having your own assets.
• Build your skills and your passions so that you can make what you need doing what you love.
• Find or build the support structures you might need: relationships, company culture, skills…
• Cultivate relationships with supportive people.
• Go deeper. Question the assumptions. Create unexpected value.

Norman Lear would add to this that the goal isn’t worth arriving at unless you enjoy the journey. “You have to look at success, incrementally,” he said. “It takes too long to get to any major success…. If one can look at life as being successful on a moment-by-moment basis, one might find that most of it is successful. And take the bow inside for it. When we wait for the big bow, it’s a lousy bargain. They don’t come but once in too a long time. ” (p.51)

No leader sets out to be a leader. People set out to live their lives, expressing themselves fully. When that expression is of value, they become leaders.

So the point is not to become a leader. The point is to become yourself, to use yourself completely — all your skills, gifts, and energies — in order to make your vision manifest. (p.111-112)

On Becoming A Leader: Revised Edition Warren Bennis

(Disclosure: The link above is an Amazon affiliate link. That said, I recommend checking out your local library. I got this book from the Toronto Public Library, yay!)

Many people worked long hours and sacrifice other parts of their lives in order to achieve career success. They want the executive title, the high salaries, the decision-making power, and the recognition. I don’t think that kind of career lifestyle is a great fit for me. Instead of sacrificing so much for a big potential payoff, I’d rather focus on living well at each step, and feeling successful in each moment. The core of my work is figuring out who I am, what talents I can bring, and what difference I can make.

What could help you express yourself more fully?

While we were chatting about hobbies, one of my mentors joked about my copious free time.

“My carefully protected free time,” I said, and I realized it was true.

“Free” time is valuable. Limiting my work time forces me to work more effectively and efficiently, while giving me the space to explore things that often turn out to be surprisingly useful.

So much depends on how you approach life. Some people tell me I do a lot. Some people say I have too much time on my hands. I think I’m okay. It’s the same life, the same 24 hours.

I try to be intentional about how I spend time. Life is short. There’s so much to learn and share. I think a lot about time. I care about work-life balance. I limit the overtime I work. I plan what to do with blocks of free time. I think about what I do well and how I can do things even better, which helps me free time and smoothen routines.

I play. I relax. That’s important as well. 

There are more things I’d like to do than I have time to do, but I’m happy because I can spend time on what matters to me. In order to do the rest, I help other people learn as much as they can so that they can help make things happen. That’s the superpower I’m working on.

Consciously choose how you spend time and arrange your life to do so, and you’ll probably be happier with the time you have. We all have different priorities and commitments. Some people have fewer responsibilities, and others have more. It doesn’t matter how much or how little other people do. All that matters is what you do, whether you’re happy with it, and how you can be even happier.

I think that’s the difference between feeling overworked and feeling that you have enough time to breathe.

Making Work Work: New Strategies for Surviving and Thriving at the Office Julie Morgenstern, 2004

Making Work Work

In every industry I consult in, I’ve noticed that the top-tier performers are deeply committed to their work/life balance. They may be working long hours, but they are very thoughtful about their leisure, so that they make excellent use of time away from the office. This is a critical skill—especially if you’re working long hours, because you have fewer hours to play with in the first place.

The most successful workers create a balance that ensures they are energized, refreshed, and renewed every day. Their balancing act isn’t perfect, and it requires constant attention — but they are vigilant about maintaining that balance, because they appreciate the continuity between home and rest, work and productivity.

p21, Julie Morgenstern, Leading Out Loud

p136 to 139 have a great table of tips on how to make meetings more effective, whether you’re the chair or a participant.

The book also contains an excellent chapter on mastering delegation. The suggested tasks focus on face-to-face assistance, but there are many great tips that you can apply to virtual assistance as well.

Lots of great advice. Well worth re-reading as you apply tips.

Over a two-hour Skype conversation, Jason Watson (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia) picked my brain for ideas for a Web 2.0 course. One of the things he mentioned was that reading about gardening, sewing, and all these other non-work interests on my blog reassured him that people didn’t have to spend all their time blogging, bookmarking, or otherwise building a digital presence. You can share things online and do your work and have a life (an awesome one, even!).

Score one for the benefits of work-life balancing, then. Not only do I end up with lots of interesting stories, but I also help people see that these things are doable. =)

The conversation reminded me of how my manager sometimes thinks I must be under-reporting my hours. He occasionally says something like, “But Sacha, what about all the other learning that you do? I know you might feel guilty about writing down all those hours…” To which I often respond, “Err, umm, I actually do have a life.” ;) A quiet, at-home-ish life, but a pretty darn good life nonetheless. (And if this is a career-limiting move, that’s good to know–it’ll mean I’ll find or make opportunities somewhere I and other people can flourish!)

I sometimes spend my evenings and weekends exploring technology. More often, though, I spend those precious concentrated blocks of time on other pursuits: spending time with W- and J-, experimenting with virtual assistance or presentations, working in the garden or on my sewing, inhaling vast quantities of books from the library, preparing the groundwork. Certainly some of these things can benefit my company, but the connection might not be direct or immediate. Besides, I already have so much fun at work–coaching people, developing systems, sharing what I’m learning, influencing people’s behaviors and moods along the way. I like giving myself the freedom to let my thoughts explore all sorts of directions without necessarily focusing on work.

I suspect this has a large part to do with the happiness and energy people find so remarkable. =) And if I could just figure out how to help people try this out, that would be awesome.

Personal finance and work-life balance are surprisingly similar. Many people feel starved for both time and money. They live from paycheque to paycheque and moment to moment, stressed out by what they lack. Their conditions impose limits on them, and they end up without the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities. If you don’t have savings, you’ll find it hard to respond to emergencies or take advantage of a good deal. If you don’t give yourself time, you’ll find it hard to respond to changes or to fully enjoy each moment.

The combination of a healthy emergency fund, long-term savings, and an opportunity fund is tremendously liberating. Time is even more precious. Giving myself the space to explore, learn, to grow, to share, to live–that’s what allows me to enjoy all the other moments, too. It allows me to appreciate the wonderful people I get to share these moments with and the fantastic experiences we have. It allows me to experiment with new tools and new ideas, so I always keep learning.

Work-life balance is a personal thing. For some people, their ideal life might involve a whole lot of work. That’s totally okay, too. If they’re happy, they’re happy!

I don’t know if you can just give this kind of experience to someone else. Many lottery winners commit suicide. Giving people the gift of time doesn’t quite do the thing, either. What questions can I ask and what stories and experiences can I share so that people can explore this?

In today’s Teach Me Teamwork seminar on managing Gen Y, Bea Fields (the author of Millennial Leaders) mentioned that many managers are taken aback by Gen Y’s demands for flextime, telecommuting, and other work-life balance initiatives. Some companies complain about the lack of work ethic in young employees and wonder how much of a circus work needs to be in order to retain and engage Gen Y. Other companies are adapting, exploring results-only work environments and other-than-traditional-office arrangements.

I am really glad that Gen Yers have the chutzpah and the numbers to make workplace flexbility and work-life balance a front-and-center issue. We’ve seen the consequences of other people’s decisions. We’ve seen people work overtime, weekends, and holidays for companies that then laid them off in resource actions or folded because of market circumstances. Many Gen Yers come from separated families where stress from work took its toll. The lesson? Making a living can’t be more important than living a life.

What do Gen Yers want? Here’s what often comes up:

• A focus on results, not just face-time
• The ability to work from home or from anywhere
• The flexibility to work when we’re most effective, whether that’s early in the morning or late at night

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Workplace flexibility and work-life balance weren’t a Gen Y issue in the beginning. This started with working mothers who found themselves pulled between the demands of family and job. Some fathers were interested in this too, but social conventions stopped it from becoming a real issue. Gen Y of both genders care about work-life balance and flexibility, and not just because of family responsibilities.

I read a lot about work-life balance, and I talk to a lot of people who’ve made decisions either way. I’ve heard how focusing on work can become a vicious cycle: if the rest of your life suffers because of your focus on work, then it’s easier to focus on work and harder to build up the rest of your life to the point where you enjoy it again. I don’t mind the occasional crunch. I want a sustainable pace, and life is too short to work at a company that wants to burn me out instead of help me grow.

Initiatives for workplace flexibility and work-life balance are like the curb-cuts that make cities better for people in wheelchairs: they benefit many more people than the original targets. If you’ve ever rolled a stroller or a suitcase along a busy street, you know how great those curb-cuts are. Flextime, telecommuting, results-only work environments, and other initiatives aren’t just about attracting and retaining Gen Y. They also help companies make the most of other people’s talents: Baby Boomers phasing into semi-retirement, Gen Xers starting to raise their own families, and people who work in non-traditional arrangements.

Flexibility and work-life balance: good for everyone.