During the pandemic, I believe everyone has been dealing with it is different ways. For me, lines between Work and life blurred. This didn’t happen in a day. It creeped up slowly, it changed 1 day at a time, quite often there were projects which were to be completed and i stretched post office hours to complete them on time. This meant that i slept late woke up groggy and started my day late. This eventually became a vicious cycle. I remember thinking for any new deliverable that “I’ll finish it, i have nights as well”, soon I started pushing my work during the day. Recently i picked a super critical project where, the timelines were already stringent and twice i slept at 4am. I was able to finish that days taks but the consequent days were horrific hell, i couldn’t concentrate on neither my work nor my life, or on anything else.
After weeks working like this, i got burnout, i didn’t want to work, i didn’t want to do anything else. All i wanted to do was either sleep or watch something that kept me away from thinking about work. I realised that this is not sustainable and the work that i enjoyed the most has become the most painful part of my existence. While casually talking to a friend, he mentioned that why don’t you consider this as a problem and think about how will you solve it. This gave me hope and i jumped on this problem to solve it.
How to solve any problem: DMAIC
- Define the Problem: Work life mix not present
- Measure the current baseline: spending ~4-5 hours on an average after office hours
- Analyze to identify the root cause:
Spending 4 hours on an average after office hours
Why?
Work didnt finish during the day
Why?
Didn’t spend time during office hours on the problem statement
Why?
Kept getting distracted by other things on my mind
Why?
Spent a large portion of the day watching youtube which sparked ideas and working on personal stuff
and we have lift off!!!
- Improve, take action to solve the root cause: No youtube during office hours, take a daily goal of finishing 3 most important things
- Control the future processes in order to not degrade back: Accomplish daily goals for 2 weeks then move onto weekly goals for 2 weeks then move onto monthly goals for 2 months (build slowly but steadily)
Things i realised:
- Parkinson’s law:
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion
Inculcate the habit of doing a proper effort estimate, allocate 2 times the amount you think you need to account for any hiccups and complete it during that time (usually we overestimate what we can achieve in a day and underestimate what we can achieve in a year) and finish your work
- Life is not only about work, i was over optimising for work by taking out my time out from other important things, which in the long run will be extremely detrimental to my growth as a person. The Jar experiment is a great reminder to prioritise time for important things in life.
The Jar Experiment
A psychology professor plans to do a thought experiment with his students. He brings is an empty Glass Jar fills all the tennis balls it can take and asks the students
Professor: Students is the Jar full?
Students: Yes professor.
The professor takes out glass marbles and fills that them in the glass jar
P: Is the jar now full?
S: Yes Professor
The professor picks up glass beads and fills it in the glass
P: Is the jar full now?
S: Yes, it is full.
The professor picks up sands and fill it to the brim
P: How about now?
S: Yes professor, nothing can go in the jar now
The professor smiles and pours water into the jar, the sand absorbs all the water. The students have no words after watching this.
The professor then mentions the learning from this.
Our life is like an empty glass jar, tennis balls are the most important things for us like relantionships, work, hobbies. glass marbles are the things which are not as important and so on. If you do not keep the important parts in your jar first, all the not so importnat things like sand, beads will take their place and once they take it.. you will not have enough room to fit tennis balls in a glass full of sand and water.
Remember:
Always keep time for important things is life first, other things will find their space around these important things.
What did you do when you felt stuck like this ?
~P
