My Personal Approach to Balance
27 October 2024 ‧ 7 min read
Recently, there has been another surge of discussions around the “right” approach to work/life balance in tech companies. Personally, I think these discussions are moot: I don’t think there is one right approach for how to achieve work/life balance. Not just do different people have different needs and preferences, but these needs also change over time.
In this article, I want to share what I have learned over time about work/life balance, and also how I think about the topic as a leader and manager.
Before I dive in, though, I want to share some fundamental beliefs that I have about the topic. Firstly, all things being equal, having a strong work ethic and spending time outside of “work” honing your craft will always be beneficial. I know that not everyone has the same time, ability, and energy to put in more hours, whether it’s inside or outside of their job. However, it is obvious to me that someone who invests more time and energy into getting better at what they do will get better more quickly. Developing tech products is a craft, and like all crafts, practice makes perfect, there is simply no way around that.
Personally, I feel very lucky to be working in an industry and topics that I am so interested in that I happily spend some of my free time learning more about them. I know that is a privilege, both in terms of the work that I do and that I have some free time to invest in these things. I am cognizant of the fact that the same isn’t true for everyone, and that makes me even more thankful—I still believe it is right for me to use this to my benefit.
My last belief is that hard work can be rewarding under the right circumstances. If you are working with a great team on a mission you believe in and you are making progress quickly, it can feel magical. While there is the old adage “work smarter, not harder”, the reality is that a team that works smarter and harder runs circles around the team that is only working smarter. Some of the best work of my career was done under such circumstances. Of course, not everyone has the ability to put in long hours at all times. Again, I am not saying that this should be the norm, but that sometimes, these kinds of projects can offer big opportunities for satisfaction and personal and professional growth.
Now, with that out of the way, I want to share my own story and how I came to understand that there isn’t the one right approach to work/life balance.
I studied Computer Science, and when I started, I was immediately engrossed with all the possibilities. I had done some coding before, but I had definitely hit my limits in terms of the size and ambition level of the projects that I was able to take on before I started university. Once I had the tools to build larger projects, that’s what I did – in addition to studying full time, I also started a couple of small startups and had a part-time job. I was definitely very busy—but it didn’t feel like work, and I was also young and had boundless energy. I definitely didn’t think about balance at all during those times, I just did what was fun.
This changed when I started my first full time job. After school, I went into management consulting—I wanted to learn more about business, and consulting seemed like a good opportunity to do that, while also working on interesting projects with capable colleagues. Management consulting is well known for the long work hours—basically, between Monday morning and Friday evening, there is only work. I usually flew out to a client early on Monday and returned late on Thursday, and then spent Friday in my employer’s office. During this time, I enforced a strict boundary between work and life. When I was working, I was working, and when I was off, I was off. On the weekend, I left my work BlackBerry (those were the days) at home, and I made a point to not respond to emails over the weekend. Over the five years that I was in consulting, I managed to stick to this without a fault.
The consulting business model is still very exhausting and I was on the brink of burnout a few times, and I do not recommend this practice as a sustainable one to anyone—in fact, at this point in my life where I don't have the boundless energy and limited responsibilities of a twenty-something, I don't think I would be able to cope with that lifestyle anymore. At least as a more junior consultant, when I took vacation in between projects I was always able to completely disconnect—if you just wrapped up a project, you don’t miss anything that happens while you are gone, and you come back to a new project and a fresh start.
In any case, I happily touted this approach as the “right approach” to achieving some semblance of work/life balance under these conditions. My view only started changing when I became a project manager managing a team of several junior consultants. One of my junior consultants insisted that she wanted to do some work over the weekend, and I tried to push back, telling her to be more protective of her time so she doesn't burn out. This went back and forth a couple of times and I grew increasingly frustrated.
Eventually I realized I was wrong, though: the project was in the junior consultant's home town, so in contrast to the rest of the team, she wasn't staying in a hotel with nothing else to do but work during the week. Instead, she went home to her fiancé every night and it was much better for her, work/life balance wise, to spend some time with him during the week and make up for that with a bit of work on the weekend (again, I’m not saying that is a sustainable work environment for most people, but if you're joining a consulting company, you know that that’s what you sign up for). This revelation made me realize that different people have quite different needs when it comes to balance, and you can't propose one solution for every one.
How the needs and preferences can differ became even clearer to me a few years later, when I had long left consulting, after my first child was born. For a while, this meant a mad dash to the office in the morning, working on the train to minimize wasted time during the commute, and a mad dash back in the afternoon to be home for dinner and bedtime. This was a particularly difficult time since my son was sleeping very badly in the first year, so I wasn’t sleeping enough either.
When my second son was born, thanks to the generous German parental leave system, I planned to take a year off to not have to prioritize between work and family in these precious first months; also I wanted to enable my wife to return to work after she had spent a lot of time at home with two kids that were born less than two years apart. During that year off, COVID struck and I decided to quit my job and stay home even longer, doing some freelance consulting, where I was able to work a few hours flexibly for comparatively good remuneration.
I finally rejoined the workforce full time when I joined RevenueCat, and part of the reason for that was that RevenueCat works fully remote and asynchronous, which gives me a lot of flexibility with my time. This allows me to work in the mornings, spend the afternoons with my kids, and works some more at night when the kids are asleep. I also have a much more blurred boundary between work and life than back in those consulting days—I am hardly ever “fully off”, I check and respond to messages on the weekends and sometimes also on holidays. However, I think the current setup allows me to spend more quality time with my family than if I was working a 9-5 office job where I would realistically spend only a couple of hours a day with the kids.
My current approach is almost completely opposite to what I believed to be the “right” approach to work/life balance in the beginning of my career. I don’t pretend that I get it completely right – I definitely sometimes get distracted by work things when I am spending time with my family. Could I find a job that allows me even more free time with the family, and that doesn’t come with the unpredictability and stress of a startup? Probably. However, I love my work and find it extremely rewarding. And on the whole, I am quite happy with the balance that I have achieved.
Here are some lessons that I have learned and areas that I am working on, then.
The most important piece of advice is finding what works for you to prevent stress and burnout, and finding a company / environment / manager that supports that. This also requires being explicit about it. If you don’t say what you need to find the right balance, then it is hard for the environment to respect that.
Secondly, if possible, seek to work on a topic that is aligned with your interests – the more motivated you are to work on something, the less likely it will lead to burning out even if you are spending more hours on it.
The bigger area for me to work on, then, is in my role as a manager. As a manager, I have several responsibilities: Of course, I need to take care of myself so I don't burn out, just like any employee should.
In addition, I also have to create an environment in which people feel they are allowed to take care of themselves. This requires a few things: I need to ask people how they are doing with respect to their work-life balance and what their needs are to achieve good balance, and try to enable that. I also need to role model self-care behavior to not set implicit expectations that people aren't allowed to take care of themselves. In addition, I need to work on creating an environment (and hiring process) that allows for people with varying balance needs – eg. in terms of the business cadences and meetings that are set up.
I will freely admit that I am still working on these aspects – in particular, since I know I have the tendency to overdo it with work - I have a strong sense of duty which means I sometimes prioritize work over wellbeing and other aspects. Even if not explicitly making unreasonable requests of others, the role-modeling aspect can then sometimes lead to the perception that it is expected to not have a proper balance. For example, if I as a manager respond to messages immediately around the clock, it can set the expectation that everyone is supposed do that (even if I didn’t mean to).
My summary is that work/life balance is a hard topic. I like to work hard on things that I enjoy, and I also like the flexibility to spend time with my family. As a manager, I think I will be the most successful if I enable my team to also work hard on things they enjoy, while being able to find balance in whatever way works best for them. I’m working on it.