Recent Thoughts on Work Life Balance

Bryson McIver - July 14th, 2020

I recently took my first long vacation (1 week) from work since I started just over a year ago and taking the time off and seeing how I felt definitely made me rethink work life balance again. Despite being salaried and having my hours uncounted and uncared about, with us working on the just get your work done mentality, I tried to limit myself to 40 hours a week (although most weeks were hitting 50) to achieve some balance. I initially felt like this was enough and would give me balance. Even when projects would bog me down and I wouldn't want to do anything after work or would be consumed in thought even though I was off my clock, I didn't really consider that into my work life balance. A result of projects draining my mental at work was that I hadn't worked on any of my personal projects for a couple months.

Over vacation I was able to let go of everything at work and get back that mental fortitude I was missing. Just a couple days in I was wanting to work on personal projects again, but once I was home to work on them I got pretty demotivated. Once I was home, I realized that I didn't want to start a project because I was worried about returning to work and losing the motivation once I was bogged down again. I needed to think of work life balance as more than just the time I was actually working, but needed to include the actual mental state that work was leaving me in and finding a way to detach further and recover at the end of each day. For me it is really difficult to not get emotionally attached because I do care about all the work I'm doing and delivering quality, so when my code isn't done I just want to push it further naturally.

I hope I can improve over time, talk with others how they manage more than just the time at work and share more thoughts like these with others in their first job.