Work-Life Balance: Strategy for 9-5 Software Engineers!

Two years ago, I faced some challenges with achieving a work-life balance after moving to a platform team. Despite not being explicitly expected of me, I assumed responsibility for completing tasks and accepting every request. I was going nowhere and I eventually had to implement a set of stringent guidelines to ensure I could finish my work by 5 p.m. While not foolproof, it has proven to be effective for the most part. Now it's time for you to break free from the cycle and take control of your life. My name is Gaurav and today we will talk about my secret to keeping a work-life balance with a full-time 9-5 job. Just for your information, I won't bore you with suggesting a good morning routine or how to focus during the day. I won't even throw a time management matrix in your face, which a lot of other people do. Well, it never worked for me. If it works for you, great. Chapter 1. Let's quickly understand what a 9-5 job is. When we talk about a 9-5 job, we are not necessarily talking about a strict 9-5 work schedule. It could be any set of hours as long as it's a traditional full-time job. In fact, with remote work becoming more common, some people are opting for non-traditional schedules. However, the key characteristic of a 9-5 job is that it's a work you do for someone else. Whether you love it or hate it, you are not the direct stakeholder in the business you work for. This can impact your ability to make decisions and can also create challenges in achieving work-life balance. Working for someone else means you have to adhere to their schedule, their priorities, and their expectations, which can make it harder to find time for your own personal life. That's why it's important to understand what a 9-5 job really means and how it can impact your work-life balance. Chapter 2. Let's see why sticking to a 9-5 or a work schedule is so important. Let's explore three reasons. First, you need to earn a living. Unless you are super rich, you likely rely on your job to pay for your basic needs like housing, food, and healthcare. But money isn't everything, right? Regardless of how rich you are, you need a purpose. A job can give you a sense of accomplishment and contribute to your sense of identity and self-worth. A 9-5 job can also provide structure and balance in your life. It can help you establish a routine and create boundaries between work and leisure time, which is important for your mental and physical health. This routine thing is often overlooked by a lot of people. 9-5 kind of forces you into a routine and now that you have a routine, you can piggyback or tag along other stuff like exercising, entertainment, gaming, if you will, or just get a new hobby. Chapter 3. When can a bad work-life balance be okay? It's important to consider whether working beyond 9-5 is truly beneficial for you. If you don't have a purpose beyond your 9-5 job, working extra hours may be the right thing to do. In fact, there's something called the work paradox that suggests that while people may feel skilled and challenged while at work, they may feel bored and unfulfilled outside of work if they don't have any meaningful activities or hobbies to engage in. But they still want to work less and engage more in leisure. The idea is supported by a study conducted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow. The study was conducted only over a hundred men and women working full-time at a variety of occupations for around a week. Since the sample size is small, it may not actually reflect the right trend, but the result is quite reasonable. I'd also like to mention this really nice quote from the book. Blessed is he who has found his work, let him ask no other blessedness. By Sigmund Freud. And that's where we come to this thought of loving your job. If you love your job, then maybe it's fine to just go beyond the 9-5 and be at it for as long as you can do it. So far, we have seen two conflicting views on work-life balance, which effectively means you kinda need to define your own balance for yourself. Which brings us to chapter 4, my 9-5 work-life balance. I think I might have cracked it for myself at least. It seems to be working pretty well for the last two years. And here's what I did. I spent some time overthinking and observing, why do I overwork? Where is that urge coming from? So I used to get back from work at around 5pm. But apparently before leaving, I was mostly already working on something very involving. Either an incomplete code or code review, exploring a very involving bug, maybe just writing some documentation or replying to an email. Because of this sense of incompleteness, as I call it, I would just maybe go for another hour or two to make sure I get done with this so that I can make a new start or basically jump to something new tomorrow. The important task here was to get rid of that feeling of, whatever, incompleteness. The next thing I did was to plan. Trust me, when you have a lot of things to do, things start to tumble, unless you have some kind of round-robin algorithm to resolve it. A round-robin algorithm is a simple way to manage tasks by cycling over them in a fixed order. I did three things. First, creating a personal planner with quarterly, weekly and daily queues. Second, strictly stopping the work right at least 20 minutes before ending my work. Then third, updating the progress of the current task in the planner. Well, the crux of this framework is to stop the work at 4 or 4.30pm, which in your case would be around 30 minutes before the finish line for that day. Make a hard stop, stop it, and update the progress of the task that you're working on right now in your planner. Next morning, when you are creating your plan for that day, put that task as the first task for that daily queue. Now the progress that you have uploaded last evening will help you to pick it up exactly where you left it from. This super simple thing has done wonders for me. It had a few downsides, but I see these as bright sides. My weekly and daily planning is much better and more concrete now. It makes it easier for me to say no more often. My fun time at the office has reduced because I know there is no escape hatch to work more once I get back home. Because I have so much of detail in my daily planner talk, it helps me to use the same stuff for my performance evaluation later on. And I think we have enough of a framework for today. We will get back with even more details in some other video. 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