Work-life Balance
At a conference this summer (the SCO-SOC Meeting in Saskatoon, SK, Canada!) a friend and fellow R developer pointed out how astonished she was looking at my Git commit history on GitHub.
What she found so surprising was two things: First you can see quite clearly that there are times when I’m on vacation! Second, you can see that I don’t normally work on weekends1.
I definitely feel the crunch sometimes, especially in January through March, but I have been trying hard lately to reduce the number of projects I’m working on, so that I can appreciate the time I’m at work (and when I’m not at work) instead of frantically trying to get things done.
Part of my non-negotiables are taking time off around the holidays and in the summer to travel.
Was this a lot of travel? Yes! Actually an unusual amount for me, but worth it.
But I also think it’s important to set a rule2 of not working weekends or evenings. This means I have time to do other things!
However, I want to point out that we don’t always feel that work-life-balance is an option for us. Sometimes it is available to us, but it’s scary to do it. We worry that we won’t be as productive, or that our colleagues or supervisors may judge us for taking the time off. Or we simply don’t manage to make it a priority.
I work hard to maintain my work-life balance. I’m not always good at it! But I try to make sure I check in with myself a couple of times a year to see how things are going. I like what I do, but I want to make sure I continue to like it (and continue to be productive). And part of that is making sure it doesn’t become the only thing I do.
Sometimes, though, it really isn’t available. But remember that you always deserve it. If you feel that you can’t achieve it now, check in with yourself in a couple of months. What about now? Rinse and repeat. If the answer is always ‘no’, that might be a sign that you need to spend some time thinking about what you do, why work-life balance isn’t available to you, and what you might do to change this.
It was interesting to me to have a friend and colleague point out these patterns. I’ll admit that my first reaction was to almost feel guilty for all my travels, for not working as much as I could. But my follow up feeling was, this is great! This is good that I can show that I take time for myself. Many of my colleagues actively support a culture of work-life balance and I appreciate that a lot.
It makes me happy that my public git activity might contribute to cultivating this attitude as well!