Venture capitalist Brad Feld has a good post on work life balance. Brad's post has some extra significance for me as this weekend my wife and I had one of my groomsmen and his family over for dinner. As we both have kids, and as both of our families have dual working parents, work life balance was a big topic for the day.
In traditional management consulting (which generally involves lots of travel - some people rent a car more than 200 days in a year), there are some sad, but frequently common tips for managing lifestyle:
- meeting your spouse in the airport as you catch a connecting flight
- buying two copies of kids story books so that you can read your children books over the phone while you are away
- making video tapes of yourself so that your kids could watch the video and remember what you look like and sound like (my kids loved watching me on VHS reading "The Very Hungry Caterpillar")
- flying one's spouse out to the client site for the weekend as opposed to having the management consultant travel back to his/her home town
- getting a health club membership or other for the road (I played night golf before 9/11 and it was OK to bring singleton clubs as carry-on luggage).
Having moved to doing consulting on my own (and performing more fractional management services), I have reached better balance of 1) controlling what jobs keep me in-town and 2) taking on functions that do not require so much travel. I still work tons of hours being involved in small businesses and entrepreneurial settings, but actively trying to reduce the amount of travel has made things much easier.
But I constantly struggle with getting the work life balance right. I'm not sure if one can ever get the balance right.
Although you may never know when the balance is right, you need to do something when you know things are not right. Letting things go is a probably a mistake, especially if you let it go for years. And it is easier to say "no" to something when you can say "yes" to something else. Finding that "yes" in one's personal and professional life has always been ongoing for me.
Update (7/26/05): Venture capitalist Fred Wilson also has a good post on Work Life Balance.
Update (7/26/05): Zoli Erdos shares a relevant chain-mail email he received on work life balance (I've not seen this story before, but it made me smile). Thanks, Zoli!
