work-life balance

Share Life

This is Part 8 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

In January of 2010 I took a private business retreat that quickly turned into a holistic life retreat. One idea that really came to me as I meditated was the idea “Share Life.” It seemed like such an important epiphany that I added it to my personal mission statement:

Simplify Life
Enjoy Life
Purify Life
Share Life

And so this Creating Work/Life Balance series ends not with a 50-tip list for arranging your paper clips or a post on how to increase your productivity 1,000-fold, but a simple reminder to spend time with each other.

Because if you think about it aren’t the best parts of your life – the most glorious moments, the minutes filled with ringing laughter, the deepest experiences, the most special and significant seconds – aren’t they the times when you were together with other people?

Coming to this realization has put things into perspective for me. Now, part of achieving a work-life balance is being able to work little enough so that I have time for the important people in my life. Cause that’s what its all about. Spending time in a tea party with my daughter (even when she’s too young to remember it later!) becomes more important than doing more work for work’s sake. Turning off email to spend quality time in conversation with my wife just make sense. Flexing my schedule to help out a friend in the middle of the day becomes no big deal.

Work is nice and work is great, but let’s remember what’s really important at the end of the day, week, and career. The time spent with people is what we should be working for.

Life with a Capital L

And as a Christian sharing life is more than just hanging out with others. Its sharing the Abundant Life that has been freely shared with me. Its about sharing the Truth and Love that is Life and pouring love into other people as a calling in life.

Whether you life by faith or not, we should all take time to share the life we have with those less fortunate than us – either financially, physically or emotionally. Sharing life is just as much about helping others as it is anything else.

Do this Now:

Go make an appointment right now to hang out with someone (in person) that you should spend time with.

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07/18/11 Comments (0) family, friendships, job, relationships, share life, work, work-life balance

Find a Non-Work-Related Hobby

This is Part 7 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

As a freelance designer I’m immersed in design all day, which works out great because I love design. Hopefully you love your job as well. But sometimes when we love our jobs we tend to want to keep doing them even when we’re not working. So we create hobbies – “personal projects” – that we do for fun oftentimes without getting paid for them. I know many designers, developers, writers and other business owners who spend plenty of unpaid time working on personal projects.

Personal projects are great.

But when they are essentially the same thing you do all day at your job, they don’t really help you become a fuller, more well-rounded person.

And I think that can be a problem.

Being Well-Rounded

Ancient cultures considered you to be a gentleman only if you were well-studied in many areas. Confucious said the “perfect man” is one who “combines the qualities of saint, scholar, and gentleman.” And in the 16th century the Italians said a gentleman needed “attainment in physical (sports and war) intellectual (education, literary and musical accomplishments) and also moral and social mores.” (source)

Being Well Rounded Graphic

Being “well-rounded” will look different for each of us, but the whole point of being well rounded stems from the idea of being round, or being a complete circle. If your entire life is pencil-thin focused on one thing (like your job), then your are not filling out the circle of your life. I think a fuller life is one that is balanced. And that means having a variety of interests, hobbies, influences and experiences.

So, get a hobby. And get one that’s not the same thing as your job. In fact, in my opinion the further away your personal hobby is from your daily job the better. Be more than your job, more than just your profession. Basically, don’t let your work be your life. There are a myriad of new things waiting for you out there – go and explore them! You’ll be better for it.

Do This Now:

Similar to the exercise list, make a list of 3-5 new hobbies you’d like to try or new experiences you’d like to have. Then give yourself a month or two to try out each one.

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05/31/11 Comments (0) confucious, design, hobby, well-rounded, work-life balance

Find an Exercise You Love

This is Part 7 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

running-in-the-redwoods Part of creating the right work/life balance in your life is creating balance in all areas of your life – emotional, spiritual, and physical. This post is just a quick reminder that being physically active is good for you in general, and the best way to be physically active is to find an exercise you love.

There has been immense amounts of research done that proves when people work out regularly they are happier, healthier, less stressed, and have better self-image.* (*And no, I don’t actually have specific sources for this, but everyone knows this is true I think) So why doesn’t everyone just exercise more?

Because for so many people exercising is a horrible experience. But here’s the thing – it doesn’t have to be.

There are an endless variety of ways to get your blood pumping and your body moving. You need to find a way to workout that you enjoy. You need to find what works for you! Only then will you be willing, and even excited, to exercise consistently.

In his great free ebook, Sustainable Fitness, Blair McHaney writes,

You need to feel like there is more to the exercise than just the exercise. You want to be able to look forward to this as much as possible. Here we are looking for two things – fun and peace of mind.

For me the answer is running. I love to run. If I’m ever feeling stressed out after a long day of work a few miles on the trail will unknot all the tightness in my shoulders. Running is a meditation, an escape, a peaceful solitude.

My wife thought I was crazy – how could anyone actually enjoy exercising? She had tried running and working out at the gym and thought of working out only as a negative thing. Then she found swimming. Now she can’t wait to get to the lap pool, and has even cut out other activities she doesn’t enjoy as much so she can have time to swim.

It doesn’t matter what it is – just find the exercise that you love and do it!

Take it Outside

If possible, take your exercise outside. Doing what you love only gets better when you are in nature as well.

When you find the exercise you love you get to reap the rewards of fitness: being happier, healthier, having more energy and being less stressed.

Do this now:

If you already know of an exercise you love commit to doing it 3 times next week. If you don’t have an exercise you love – make a list of 3 you’d like to try and give each one a shot over the next 3 weeks.

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05/17/11 Comments (0) ebook, exercise, outside, running, sustainable fitness, sweat, swimming, work-life balance

Reduce Screen Time

This is Part 6 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

Reduce Screen Time Finding time away from work used to be about “unplugging.” No more. Now we have numerous ways we can be literally “unplugged” while still be hooked into the stream of information, media and ideas that compromise our current internet and media. Now something pulls us in more than the plug – the ubiquitous screen. You probably don’t even realize how much time you spend in front of a screen, and that’s a problem.

The Ever-Present Screen

Screens are all around us and they follow us through every part of our day. Many people wake up to a screen – whether it be their cell phone or a tv. Morning shows dominate many pre-work routines. At work more and more of us are spending all day at a desk – staring at a great big screen. And even if its not at a desk laptops make it easy to take our work screens anywhere. For some of us staring at a screen is about all we do at work.

photo by Mitch

Once we’re done with work, we want to relax unwind. Enter the screen. TVs are on all the time in some houses, and everyone can relate to just wanting to veg in front of TV or a movie. Video games are more interactive but require even more attention on the screen. As ereaders take off in the marketplace even reading a good book is becoming dominated by a screen.

This isn’t to mention the ever-present screen in our pockets – our cell phones that force us to look at a screen to do anything on it. And look at it we do – checking our phone tens or even hundreds of times a day.

I think you’re getting the point, and you may be able to think of even more screens you use that I haven’t mentioned. The screen is everywhere.

Be Conscious

Now, this post might be coming off so far as anti-technology, anti-screen. That’s not how I mean it. All these screens I mentioned have good reasons for being in our life – that’s why we put them there in the first place!

I think the problem comes when we don’t realize how much time we spend in front of screens. Screens are an awesome conduit into something else. But we need to realize that as we engage them we are unengaging (to some degree) that which is really around us.

This whole thought comes from very personal experience. When I first thought about screen time and how much of my day is spent in front of one screen or another I was staggered. I still don’t have all the answers for what to do about screen time, but just being aware has made me more conscious as I choose what to do with my time.

Engage in Real Life

An important part of this work/life balance discussion is about taking control of our decisions to make our lives the best they can be. Realizing how much time you spend screened-in is just another piece in that decision-making process. You are limiting yourself in that decision if your immediate reaction to free time is to move to a screen. You can choose to get away from the screen for a time and engage in real life happening around you with real people.

Give your eyes and your brain a chance to relax. Give your mind something different. Spend time in real, personal relationships with people you can reach out and touch. Go outside, engage with nature. Do something active and physical. There are thousands of things that don’t involve a screen. Want to spend time doing something else besides watching a screen? The choice is yours.

Do This Now:

This can be a tough realization to have. First of all just spend the next week being conscious of your screen time. How you choose to change that time in the next week is up to you.

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05/10/11 Comments (2) cell phones, computers, screen time, screens, tv, video games, work-life balance

Slow Down

This is Part 5 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

You move fast.

Admit it. Much of the time, maybe most of the time, you hit the floor running and don’t get a break till you climb into bed at night. Its a problem so many of us are facing more and more in modern times.

Leo Babauta puts it this way in his book Focus,

We live in curious times. It’s called the Age of Information, but in another light it can be called the Age of Distraction. … never have the distractions been so voluminous, so overwhelming, so intense, so persistent as they are now. … More and more, we are connected, we are up to our necks in the stream of information, we are in the crossfire of the battle for our attention, and we are engaged in a harrying blur of multitasking activity.

But now a reversal has begun. You’ve seen it in plenty of other places before this blog post – a cultural movement to slow down, turn off the noise and live more freely. Here’s a look at some ways to live a better life by slowing down and doing less:

Don’t Do. Just Be.

In our current American culture there is so much emphasis on Getting Things Done. We make todo lists for every part of our life and there are thousands of books and videos telling us how to be more productive. Built into our modern worldview is the idea that we are only worthwhile if we are accomplishing something.

Break that thought habit. You don’t need to be constantly doing. Take some time to stop doing and start being. Relax and be yourself. Think quietly. Reflect. Breathe. Look at the stars. Sip tea by yourself while the sun rises. Pet a sleeping animal. Just sit and be.

Kill the Need to Know Instantly

In the past it took awhile to hear about things that had happened. You may not read about events until days, weeks or even months later. As our technology has advanced the time it takes for us to find out about things has significantly decreased until now there are an endless amount of ways for you to know what’s going on as it happens.

People used to survive without that instant knowledge. You still can.

You don’t need to know everything that happens the second that it happens. Try turning off whatever it is that’s constantly bombarding you with the immediate and the now and the urgent. The less you are being invaded with what is happening elsewhere the more you can focus on what is happening where you are. The point is not to see how long you can go without the stream of information, but to kill the need to know everything instantly.

Urgent is Poison

This need for doing things immediately is often worst in your job. You see it stamped across papers and blaring its little “!!!” at you in your inbox. Its called Urgent. And its poison. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37Signals put it this way in their book Rework:

Most things just don’t warrant that kind of hysteria. If a task doesn’t get done this very instant, nobody is going to die. Nobody’s going to lose their job. It won’t cost the company a ton of money. What it will do is create artificial stress, which leads to burnout and worse.

Relax a little. Slow things down. Enjoy being without doing.

Do This Now:

Try this. Find 5 full minutes to lay on the floor quietly and do nothing but breath and clear your mind of thoughts. 5 full minutes. I think you’ll find 2 things: 1. It will be harder than you think and 2. Afterwards you will feel even better than you would have thought.

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04/26/11 Comments (2) focus, leo babauta, productivity, rework, stress, time management, twitter, urgent, work-life balance

Separate Work and Life

This is Part 4 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

Putting in 12-hour days. Constantly being stressed about work. Not being able to sleep because you’re thinking about your job. Not spending quality time with your loved ones because you’re always at the office…

No one wants to live like this. Working non-stop is not a life anyone aspires to. The problem is that kind of life can be an easy trap to fall into if you don’t have clear boundaries between your work and the rest of your life.

separate work & life When you separate work and life and focus on them individually you get better focus, attention and results in each. Not only that, but people deserve a separation between you work and your life.

Customers & Clients

Your clients/customers/employer are paying you for your time, and they deserve to get what they pay for. If you are constantly letting yourself be distracted from your job by making dinner, chatting with friends, or working on your kids Halloween costume you are doing your clients/customers/employer a disservice. Actually, you’re cheating them of what they rightfully paid for.

Clients deserve to have your full attention on their project while you’re on the clock. If you work from home it helps to have a separate, specific space for work. When you’re there you’re at work and shouldn’t be disturbed. But its the same wherever you work. While you are getting paid focus on giving value to the people paying you.

Family

focus on the family Your family and friends deserve for you to pay attention to them while you are with them too. Continuing to work (so easy to do now with smart phones, laptops and tablets) even while physically present doesn’t fly. It devalues the relationships of the people you’re with. When you’re with your family they deserve all of your thoughts and attention. This is a lesson Henry learned the hard way when his daughter essentially called him “Daddy Who Seems To Be Here But Actually Isn’t”.

Likewise, even being mentally distracted by work can really hinder your experience of life. Practice being present in relationships (your spouse will thank you), conversations and even menial activities. Zone in on who you’re with and what you’re doing.

You

Know who else it helps when you separate work and life? You.

You deserve to not be working all the time, you deserve to have a life too. If you constantly have work thoughts fluttering in the back of your head while living the rest of your life – doing activities you enjoy – you are robbing those experiences of their full richness. Even if you love your job, be more than your job! Be a fuller, richer person who doesn’t always have to be thinking about one thing. Take a break, get away, relax! You can’t fully do that if you’re work-brain is always on.

Do This Now:

Tonight, spend an entire evening with your family. No work calls, emails, tweets – nothing related to your job. If you need to, schedule it with your boss or your clients – let them know you’ll be unavailable. Completely focus on your family, your friends and yourself.

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04/19/11 Comments (0) clients, family, stress, time, time management, vacation, work, work-life balance

Guard Your Time

This is Part 2 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

Now that you know what you want in life and you’ve set your priorities based on that, its time to start making changes that will get you to that life. As I mentioned in my last post, one of your greatest resources is your time. More often than not its a resource that we too easily let slip away and then wonder where it went.

Numerous distractions, “important” projects and mindless activities can quietly suck away our time, time that we could be using to create the work-life balance we want. Focus on removing these little things that are stealing your time and you’ll have more to spend where you want – on things that help you reach your goals and priorities in life. Guard your time, protect, and value it as the resource it truly is.

Look at where your time is going

The first step to good time management is to realize where you are currently spending your time. You probably don’t realize the amount of time that you’re spending on certain things – it may be water-cooler talk at the office, constantly checking your farm on Farmville, or even just mindlessly basking in the glow of your TV every night.

There are a variety of ways to actually see where you spend your time. When you are on your computer (a place where we all waste massive amounts of our day) you can use a time-tracker like RescueTime, which can also block distractions to help you focus on your current task. But if you are really struggling with needing more time I would recommend tracking where you spend all your time every day. At the end of every hour record what you’ve been doing for that hour. There are a plethora of generic time-tracker apps out there, pick one that works best for you – or just use a pencil and paper! Is this a boring and anal-retentive exercise? You bet. But I guarantee at the end of the week you’ll be surprised to see where all your time went!

Learn to Say No

After you’ve seen where you’re spending your time the next step in guarding your time is learning to say “No” to the things you don’t want to spend your time on. A lot of time is wasted at work in inefficient things like pointless meetings, and you may need to talk to your boss about this. Timothy Ferriss has some great points about saying No at the office in chapter 7 of his controversial book, The 4-Hour Work Week.

Learning to say no may involve you choosing to discipline yourself enough to turn off a video game and go exercise. It could even involve you saying no to activities you enjoy or organizations whose goals you agree with. But if you are drowning in commitments you need to review your priorities and not say yes to everything. Leo at ZenHabits offers some practical help on how to say No.

The choice is always yours. Learn to say No.

Set boundaries

Too often the reason we say Yes to too many things is because we think we can do more than we can. And we all know the feeling of stretching ourselves too thin. The first step in not doing this is to know your limits. I wrote about this important concept (and how marathoner Ryan Hall used it) in my post at Graphic Design Blender: Creating a Healthy Work-Life Balance as a Freelance Designer. The idea is simple in theory but can be hard to implement – know your limits on how much time you can give to other people and activities, give yourself some padding, and then set your boundaries there and don’t let anything else in.

Overall guarding your time is an integral part of creating work/life balance. The better you get at it the more you choose how your life will be balanced.

Do This Now:

Right now look at your least important, most disliked, or biggest time commitment and drop it. Call or email those that need to know right now and tell them you’re done. There you go! A quick, bloodless step to getting more time to create the work/life balance you want!

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04/12/11 Comments (0) boundaries, desktop, no, stress, time, time management, wallpaper, work-life balance

Know What You Want

This is Part 1 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

Does it sometimes feel like you’re running the rat-race full-tilt and yet you don’t even know why you’re doing it? So many of us don’t know what we want out of life, so we just do what everyone else is doing and what anyone else tells us we should be doing. (And I don’t just mean our bosses or our clients, I mean our culture in general.)

know what you want If you don’t know what you are living and working for, you are subject to working for anything and everything. When you live like this every activity has just as significant a demand on you as everything else. There’s no reason not to work late, take on more projects, spend more time doing something you don’t want to do, or be involved in activities you don’t really love.

Until you know what actually do want you can’t start cutting out the things you don’t want.

Its time to reclaim your life, your energy, your time and your thoughts. The first step in achieving a good work/life balance is to figure out what you want from life.

Write it Out

The best way to remember and focus on anything is to write it out. Take some time to dream and brainstorm about what a great life for you looks like. Try to think up 100 things you want to do, be or have. But don’t just think about this stuff – write it down! Making things concrete makes them real and can help you know exactly what you want to move towards. If you are a goal-oriented person, write out some goals whose achievements will carry you closer to what you want from life.

“I Already Know What I Want”

If you have already spent time in the past deciding what you want out of life, good!, you’re a step ahead. But we are often consumed by the overwhelming demands of daily chaos, activities and todos and forget what we’re working towards, what we’re working for. We need reminders to keep us focused on the bigger picture sometimes. Business owners and freelancers are especially susceptible to being overtaken by their work. This is too bad because we are often those who have the most control over being able to make our work fit our life.

If you’re getting caught in the undertow you may need to pause and remember why you are doing what you are doing.

Do This Now:

Take 10 minutes and write down what your Ideal Day would look like. Be as specific as you can starting as you wake up and working through each hour of your day. Remember, this is your ideal day, so dream big. What kind of work would you be doing? With whom? What would your home life look like? What kind of environment would you live in? Now you have something to work towards. Read this Ideal Day monthly or quarterly and start making changes to make every day more like your Ideal Day.

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03/29/11 Comments (1) goals, wallpaper, work-life balance

The 2011 Apt Design Ebook – Creating Work/Life Balance

Creating a healthy work/life balance is something I’m very passionate about – both for myself and for other people (I’ve written about it here and here). Today hundreds of thousands of employees across the world are feeling constantly overworked and stressed about their jobs. At the same time many feel like they don’t have the time and energy to really live the life they want. And its no better for most business-owners, they are usually more stressed than their employees by the constant demands their business puts on them.

This year’s Apt Design Ebook and its accompanying blog series are for anyone feeling like their work and life are out of balance. The series will help you realize what’s important in your life and teach you how to go about reclaiming time and energy for your priorities. You’ll learn how to turn off work so you can spend time living. This is not a tirade against your work or your job – its a call to put things back in balance and stop letting work run your life.

The Ebooks

Last year Apt Design started a tradition of creating a small, well-designed ebook.Last year’s ebook was full of helpful tips and advice from around the internet and was first released just to clients.

This year’s ebook takes a different approach. First of all its available for everyone right from the get go. Here it is. Next, it is full of original content from me – tips and advice on creating a great work/life balance. Thirdly, I felt passionate enough about the ideas from the book that I am writing a series of blog posts about creating work/life balance which will be published here on my blog for the next 9 weeks.

So, go ahead and grab a copy of the ebook and then read these posts which flesh out each idea:

Lastly I am also offering this content as a presentation. I recently gave this talk to a group of fellow freelancers on a retreat in Sayulita, Mexico and would love to give the presentation to a group for you as well. Contact me to make arrangements.

03/23/11 Comments (5) business, ebook, exercise, free ebook, priorities, stress, work-life balance, working from home

Overtime Guest Blog on Zen Family Habits

Zenhabits.net is one of my favorite blogs, and its sister site zenfamilyhabits.net is a great resource for healthy, positive, simple, loving families. Today I have a guest post published on zenfamilyhabits.net entitled How to Make Overtime Work for You.
zenfamilyhabits guest post
Most of us will experience working overtime at some point in our lives. My post shows you how setting the right boundaries, creating the right environment, and having the right attitude can keep overtime from having a negative impact on you and your families life.

Please head on over to zenfamilyhabits.net to read the entire post!

03/23/11 Comments (0) guest post, overtime, stress, work-life balance, zen family habits, zen habits