Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #362 - Work/Life Balance

Episode Date: September 2, 2016

Mark talks about balancing work with the rest of your life.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is something that was suggested to me by my blog, by Bogatog. So someone suggested that I talk about work-life balance. I thought that was a very interesting topic. So I'm going to talk about that today. So let me set this up, I guess. So one of the things about my job is it's a pretty intense job. I have a lot of responsibilities. I have a lot of balls in the air. I have a lot of things I got to focus on.

I have a lot of things I'm responsible for. Meanwhile, I got a family. I have a family of five. You know, I have two equal parts of my life that are both busy and intense, and I love them both, but they both require a lot of time and energy. And so the question of the day is, how exactly do you balance that? How do you make sure that your work-life balance is in order? So today, I'm going to talk all about that.

Okay, so to start with, I'm going to make a quote, which is something I believe a lot in, which is, priorities are not priorities unless you prioritize them. So one of the themes I'll talk about today is a lot of having the proper balance is understanding what matters to you and then acting in such a way that your behavior reflects the things you say that matter to you. That's a big part of today. So we'll get back to this theme quite a bit. But a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is how to figure out what matters and then act in accordance to that.

You know, that the things that you say matter, you have to make matter. Okay, so here's what I'm going to start today. What I want you to do is an exercise. You can actually, you can turn off this and turn it back on if you want, but here's the exercise. You need to make two lists. One list is every single thing you're responsible for at work. Every responsibility. Everything you have to do at work. Everything. Okay, the second list you have to make is everything that you do at home. Not just things you're responsible.

These lists are not just things you're responsible for, but things you do. Everything you do at work, everything you do away from work. When I say life, I mean life outside of work. So you need to make two lists. And the idea here is you want exhaustive lists. Lists that list everything you do. Everything. Okay? And take some time. You want to make these lists as thorough as you can. Make the list such that they list

everything you do. Okay, once you do that, that's step one. Step two is then take that list and prioritize it. What that means is put it in an order to say, what matters most? What matters second most? What matters third most? Now, this is not an easy task. I mean, the first task, writing everything down is more of a memory thing.

But the second part, prioritizing is pretty hard. Because how do you figure out what's more important? Now, when you're doing your work priorities, keep in mind, that it's not just what you personally prioritize, but also, hey, you have a boss, you have responsibilities. You know, it's the priorities of all the things that matter together,

not just your own personal priorities, but as far as what needs to be done. For life, more personal. What matters for you personally? What personally matters to you? And the idea is you want to make a list that really reflects what you have to care about in the order you need to care about it. And the reason that I want you to make a list is it is hard to, essentially, here's the trick to making a list, is take two items and say, of these two items, which is more important? And then put that above until, you know, let's say A and B. A is

more important than B. Okay, well, now A comes first, B comes second. Now take a third item. Take item C and say, okay, C and A, which is more important? If C is more important than A, then your list is C, A, B. If A is more important than C, now ask the question, which is important, C or B? And you end up with either A, C, B, or A, B, C. The idea is, you want to, the easiest way to prioritize something is not to look at everything, but two things. That's the easiest way for people to understand a priority.

The people are best at judging when they're judging two things against each other. And what you will find is, if you actually do what I say, make a list, and then balance everything and prioritize it, using the system of just keep putting things against each other, of which comes first, you will eventually make a list. Okay, here's why this is important.

So let's get into why I'm having you do this in the first place. One of the things about having proper balance is two major things. One is proper allocation of your resources, of knowing what resources you have available and how you can allocate them because a lot of the problems of misbalance is improper allocation of resources. The other thing is overall balance between work and life, how much time gets allocated to our work and how much time gets allocated for the rest of your life. A lot of work-life balance has to do with those things of properly understanding resources and overall balance. So we're going to talk about

that today. Okay, we're going to start with the resources. So resources says, okay, there are certain things, certain resources that I have. I will define a resource as something that is expendable, that there's not an infinite amount of. For example, time. Time is a big resource. You only have so much time to do things. And so one of the biggest problems people run into when they get out of balance is they're not allocating their time correctly. Another thing is your focus. You can only focus on so much at a certain time.

Where does your focus come? I also say focus or attention. Those are very similar. But the idea of what do I have to care about more? What has to be more on my mind? Quality. What is something that needs, I can't necessarily do my utmost work on everything. I got to figure out where I need to do the most, where I need to put the quality. Money. This happens more in life than work, but it can happen in work as well, of understanding the resource of money. There's a bunch of different resources.

These aren't all the resources. There's a lot of different resources. But part of what you want to do is you want to figure out what you care about so you can start allocating resources. And here's what that means is, okay, let's say I make my list. Now, the second part is having a sense of balance. So one of the things I'll say is, roughly, you want your work to take around, you know, 40 hours a week. I mean, some people have a little more, 50 hours, 60 hours. You got to figure out what, how much time you want to spend toward work. Figure

out what is acceptable for you for how much of your life should be work versus how much time you want to spend toward work. Figure out what is acceptable for you for how much of your life should be work versus how much should not be work. That might have to do with the kind of job you have. I mean, you can allocate your time any way you want. What I want you to do is understand how you want to allocate it, percentage-wise, balance-wise. So, like, do you want, you know,

let's assume, figure how much you sleep, for example. And you can actually look at waking hours. Let's say you get eight hours a night. Most people don't do that. But let's say you do. Let's say you smartly get eight hours a night. Look at the rest of the time and say, okay, I have so much time for my work and so much time. How much do I want to allocate to my work?

What's the correct amount? Now, a lot of work allocation, there's a minimum set by your work. Like your work has some expectation of when you'll be there. And then there's some realization of how much time am I spending outside of normal work hours doing work. And that's something you have to figure out. But a big thing of the first thing is you want to figure out how much time do I have for each? What am I allocating for each? Okay, then once you figure that out, once you say, okay, okay, I want to spend 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week, whatever.

I'm not judging how much time you want to spend. If you are living a life in which you're spending 80% of your time at work and you're enjoying it, it makes you happy, hey, more power to you. But a lot of what I'm talking about today, a lot of the balance comes from understanding what matters to you. Another thing that's important, by the way, is once you have your two lists, you also have to understand between the lists. Usually on the top items is where it matters most is where's your priority on the list itself? Between the lists. Between your work and life list, there also needs to be a priority. What's the most important thing that you need to spend the time on?

Is it a life thing? Is it a work thing? You just need to understand that. Okay, so now that you have a list and you have priorities, the next thing you need to understand is you need... We're going to start with time, because I think time is the resource that's most important in today's topic, which is creating a proper balance. So what you need to do is you need to look at all the tasks. So now you should have a list

of your work tasks, a list of your life tasks, prioritize in order, and a number of how many hours you expect to do that a week. What is your realistic expectation? Note, by the way, from week to week, I'm not saying there can't be a little flux. I'm not saying you can't have a week where you get a few extra work hours in. But I want to understand your default. What do you expect your default to be? Okay. The next step then is to try to adequately understand how much time things take.

How long do you spend doing something? And be aware, people tend to underestimate time. People tend to assume, oh, that will take me an hour when it takes you two hours or three hours. So one of the things you want to start doing is start looking at your tasks and figuring out how long your tasks take. So one of the things I'm going to do today is talk about problems that create an imbalance in your work-life, things that cause problems in your work-life balance. Number one is that you misallocate things. So when you're trying to figure out your time,

you need to look at all the resources at work and say, okay, how much time do each of those things take? Same with at home. How many times do each of those things take? Now be aware, your goal is not necessarily, especially in life, your work goal, you shouldn't allocate

100% of anything because you need to give yourself some flex time because A, like I said, things you will estimate won't happen. B, things you don't plan for will happen. So one of the things that you want to do in general is I say 80% is a decent, like you want to sort of allocate up to 80%

so that you have a little bit of flex time to understand what you need to do. That if you book yourself up at 100% and then a problem arises, well, you got in trouble because you haven't sort of built in anything to the idea that things will arise and things will happen. Okay, so let's start with work. Take work, figure out how long each of the things you're saying takes. What does it actually take to do the things you're doing? And then one of the things that you need to do, and part of this

is your responsibility, part of this might be also your manager, if you have a manager. One of the things to remember about a manager is a manager is there as a means to help you. Yes, help your business. They obviously have some obligation to the business, but they also have an obligation to you as an employee. And so one that you need to figure out is as you're're looking to figure out, are you overscheduled? You know, do you have too much to do at work? Use your manager as a resource.

It is your manager's job to make sure that you're properly being used and that you're not being over-allocated. And if you are, you need to talk with them. Now, maybe your manager's the one over-allocating you. That's a separate issue. But in most cases, what you want to do is figure out what you're doing, how much it takes, and once again, the priority of what you need to do, and look at the time allocation. One of the biggest problems I find with people and work, and I find with myself with work, is it is very easy to just overcommit.

In fact, one of the things about working at Wizards, which makes things particularly difficult, is Wizards is a very fun job. A lot of the tasks that come to you are very fun tasks. In fact, when you see a new employee at Wizards at R&D, the same thing tends to happen, which is they get there, they're excited, they're excited to be working at Wizards R&D. It's a pretty cool job. You're working on games. Obviously, if you're in R&D, you love games. That's why you ended up in R&D of a game company.

And so what happens is all these projects come along that sound really cool. Do you want to make this cool game? Do you want to make a cool game?

Do you want to do this cool thing? And it is very easy to just take assignments because assignments sound like fun. And then what happens is you get to the point

where you're overworked. You're like, okay, I can't handle all this. I've said yes to too many things. So this is what I call the tummy ache phenomenon to be careful of, which is, let's imagine you go to a store and they have just sweets.

Really delicious, wonderful sweets. They have the best donuts you've ever had and the sweetest ice cream you've ever tasted, and the best candy, and just, you know, bakeries, and all sorts of, everything you possibly could imagine. The best desserts ever. And they say to you, it's all free. You can have whatever you want. Well, the problem you're going to run into is the tummy ache problem, right? Is, you're going to go, oh, I have to, oh, that donut, oh, this donut's so good

and this ice cream's so good and this bakery, this and that. Like, what happens is you can't eat everything. Even though you want to eat many things and they're all good

and you enjoy them, that you end up with the tummy ache. That if you eat too much, your body just goes, oh, I can't handle that. And work can be the same way. Now, be aware, sometimes in work,

I mean, I'm talking about wizards, where it is a fun problem to have when you have too many things you're excited to do and you overwork yourself. Sometimes the phenomenon of overworking yourself is not, oh, I'm so excited about everything. Sometimes it's, I have to do things I don't even want to do, but I've got to do them.

And when you're prioritizing work, make sure sure you understand not necessarily what you want to do but what needs to get done I talk about priorities especially for work I mean what are the priorities of not just you but the people you report to meaning what work needs to get done that you're expected to do and one of the things to understand is I'm just saying make sure that you figure out of what you need to do that you prioritize what needs to get done and what you'll find is if you haven't accessed if you've done the math and say okay I have so many hours

I'm trying to book at 80% I book all these hours and I look at what I have to do and I look at how much time allocation I have if it doesn't line up you have have a couple issues. So number one could be if you truly believe you have too much to do, you need to go talk to your manager. You need to see who you need to see, probably your manager, to say, look, I have too much to do. And that part of it is

it is very easy to take on responsibilities because either A, you know you're good at the responsibility or B, nobody else is taking on the responsibility or C, it's just something you've always done in some kind of routine or something. And that one of the reasons to make priorities and list them in order is to say, okay, well, I need to do A, B, and C.

And okay, I got to do D and I got to do E and I got to do F. But okay, once I get a G, I've run out of time. I've allocated all my time. Okay, what am I doing with H, I, and C, and okay, I got to do D, and I got to do E, and I got to do F, but okay, once I get a G, I've run out of time. I've allocated all my time. Okay, what am I doing with H, I, and J? So first off, understand the value of using your co-workers and work. One of the things I found long ago is that it is very easy to just want to do things yourself. You understand what you do. You know you like your own work. It is very easy to just say, it's easier to do it myself.

But one of the things about proper time allocation is making use of the resources available. But one of the resources available to you at work is coworkers. And one of the things I have found is when I do my job, I try to find places where I always ask myself, am I the best person to be doing the thing I'm doing? Is there somebody else that could do something just as well as I can do it? Because one of the things you're trying to do is figure out where can you maximize what you do? Where are you most effective? And if I find there's somebody else that can do the thing I'm doing at equal or better, maybe they should be doing it.

You know, especially if I'm overworked. Like, and I'll tell you a little story. So this is a good example where I've managed to turn a resource issue into a long-term gain. So the problem was I run sets. In fact, I've been consecutively leading sets since, like, Shadowmores. A long time. Years and years and years and years. But that's one of the things.

I'm a head designer. One of my jobs is to lead a lot of sets. But one of the things when you lead a set is you have to manage the file because we make a lot of cards. There's a database. You know, somebody has to keep everything up to date because when you, I always talk about iteration and playtesting, you know, the file, the database has to be kept up to date because you're constantly using it. You're working on it, you're changing things. Upkeeping a file is a lot of work.

It's just a lot of busy work. My problem was I just had too much to do. So I looked at my schedule and I said, okay, what am I doing that somebody else could do? That, you know, some things, like, really, I'm going to do them better than anybody else. I should be doing those. But some things other people could do. And so what I did is I took somebody on my team and I said to them, okay, what I'm going

to do is I'm going to put you in charge of managing the file. I'm going to have you make all the changes in the file. And what also happened is when you make changes in the file, about 90% of file management is just literally keeping up with the changes and making the changes. But about 10% is adapting the file when you make changes in the file, about 90% of file management is just literally keeping up with the changes and making the changes. But about 10% is adapting the file when you make changes. Because sometimes when you change one card, it requires you to change some other cards. And so there's a little bit beyond, it's not just record keeping. There's some actual design that comes to keeping a file.

So what I did is I took a member of my design team, somebody who hadn't run their own design team yet, and said to them, I'm going to put you in charge of the file. And then I kept my eye on them, but I really let them do it. And what I found was, which was interesting, is it ended up being a really good learning opportunity. Because if you've never led a design before, one of the things you first have to understand is the dynamic of how it works. How does, what kind of changes happen? Well, you know, the best way to understand the changes in a file and in a design is manage it. And so what I found was what started as a more managerial thing just to help free up some of my time ended up becoming a really valuable teaching tool. So much so that, you know, other people have

started to make use of it because it's a really good way to take somebody with less experience and in a way that's sort of more controlled because when you're managing the file, you're not making key decisions. The person leading the file, usually me, I'm making decisions. They're not deciding necessarily what to put in the file,

but as they put things in the file, they have the ability to massage things and change things and, oh, well, this goes to three mana. We have too many three manas. Let me change something else. And it allows them to sort of in a much more controlled setting make some changes and start understanding what kind of things need to get done and it's a good example where I took something where I was trying to manage my own resources

and in doing it I really found some a new way to use something that was valuable so don't underestimate the power of your coworkers. Your coworkers, think of them, I mean this is very true for magic, but work is collaborative. The people at your work you are working with. And one of the things you want to do is you want to figure out

how you as a group can do the best work you can do. And so if you find yourself over allocated, look and see if there's other people who might be of use to you. Like I said, part of managing your resources is understanding what your resources are. And your co-worker is one of those resources. In general, what I'm trying to say here is, if you understand how much time you've allocated for work,

and you can manage and figure out what you're doing, the biggest thing you need to do at work is get the correct amount of workload. You know, figure out what you can handle, work with your manager to help figure that out, and then make sure that you're staying in that and you're not what I call redlining. That you're not, there is this, people like to be very, oh, I can do it, I can handle it, yeah, yeah, yeah, toss it on, I can take it. I can handle it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Toss it on. I can take that.

And people very much, it's very easy to just go, oh, yeah, like, I can take another project. Sure, sure, you know. And then before you know it, like, you're just overwhelmed with things. And like I said, be aware. Part of the problem of allocating in general is people not realizing the full extent of what they have and how much time the things will take. And as you spend more time on your job and get a better sense of it, getting a proper workload so that you're working the right amount of things that fit the time you have is very key. And part of that is learning to get realistic time expectations. That as you do projects, especially as you do them more than once,

you want to get a real sense of what time they take and how long they are. And if you think that you've allocated more than you have proper resources, look, talk to your manager, figure out what's going on, find other people maybe that can help you offload some of that, and get the right workload. Okay. Another thing is what I'll refer to as biorhythms,

project biorhythms. It's very easy when you think of a project to want to think about it in its average. Oh, well, every week on average, this project will take three weeks. Not three weeks, three hours. But what you will find is that projects have a rhythm to them, what I'll call biorhythm. Or rhythm, I guess, isn't that alive? And the idea is

that they're not always the same. So, for example, when I'm designing a set, I talk about the iterative process. I have meetings where we figure out what we need to change, we make changes,

and then we playtest. And what happens is playtesting takes less sort of overall work hours than changing things. And so one of the things you have to understand is hours, you know, weeks in which you're just playtesting often can take less time than weeks in which you're changing things. And what I'm saying is if you average three hours a week, that doesn't mean that every week is exactly three hours. It might mean that some weeks are five hours and some weeks are one hour. So that is the rhythm.

That's the biorhythm of the project. And that one thing you have to understand is you need to understand the different rhythms of the different projects you have. Because another way to get overworked is I have all my projects average at three hours a week. Except there's some weeks where I'm twiddling my thumbs because I don't have enough to do. And there's other weeks where I'm overwhelmed because I've hit the high level of it. And that one thing you want to do is make sure that you understand your rhythms of your projects and map them out. So the busy time for one project might be the light time for the other.

That you don't, you have to be careful not to sort of allocate the right time on average, but not allocate the right time on average, but not allocate the right time in reality. Because having, let's say, for example, you have 40 hour weeks, having 20 hours a week, one work and 60 hours the next isn't proper. You know, not only do you have to allocate overall, you allocate week by week. And part of that is understanding the rhythms of the things you're doing. The other thing, the other resource I want to talk about is focus and quality. There is this idea that every task needs the same resources. Oh, well, I want to do everything in the best of my ability. I want to give everything my total

focus. And here's the problem. You can't focus on everything at once. You don't have the ability to put the same level of quality to everything. You need to prioritize, like that you need to look at priority list and say, okay, what are the things that I need to be at the top of my game? What are the things that I need to be doing the best absolute work I can do? But there's some other things you're like, you know what? Good enough is all this project needs. You know, I'm doing something. This is not, you know, understand where and what you do needs to be your absolute best work. And once again, the reason I'm saying, I'm not saying do bad work. I'm saying understand the quality of work that's necessary to accomplish what you need to accomplish.

Because one of the things that happens is people were, one of the ways people burn themselves out is they put too, they sort of assume like I have to always have total focus and total quality and they're always revved at 100. You know, they're always going at the highest level. You can't function that way all the time. You have to, you can't be at your top level constantly. You'll stress yourself out. And your stress level is another thing you've got to keep track track of which is you need to figure out you need to work in

time downtime both at work at home you need to have times in which you're not at the highest level you need to sort of understand that just as your projects have a biorhythm you have a biorhythm that you can't sort of max yourself out all the time you will burn yourself out and so you need to figure out where will you want to stress and do you do your strongest and where you, there's some, some areas get to be good enough. Some areas get to be, you know what, this needs to get done, but this doesn't need to get done to the absolute highest quality possible. That's not what this project needs. You know, sometimes you have things that are, that are important, but they're just, they're rote and you don't

need to spend the extra mental energy on them. You want to figure out where those things are. You know, money and finances are another area, especially where you got to figure out where you put them. And we get into life that's a little bit more important. But anyway, as I talk about work, figure out, allocate your time, your attention, your focus, your quality, figure out where the things need to go, Figure out which projects need the most time, which ones need the less. And when you run out of space, when you don't have any more time, you've got to get rid of some projects.

That overcommitting is one of the biggest reasons that people get off balance between work and life is they overcommit in one area. Okay, so I spent a lot of time talking about work. Let's talk about life. Let's talk about the non-work part. Okay, so one of the big truisms I believe about life in general is attendance matters. That one of the things, for example, so when I first started working at Wizards, you know,

back in 1995, I was 28, and here's how my workday used to work. I would wake up, I would go to work, I would work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work day used to work. I would wake up, I would go to work, I would work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, to the early hours of the morning and then I'd go home and go to bed and continue. Now, you know, we used to go out to all, all my meals were eaten out and we'd play some games and I mean, there was some down times within that but pretty much I was focused on work.

I was just, that's what I did. And I, I didn't at the time have much other life. I didn't have a balance really because I didn't have anything else there yet. But what happened was eventually I met my wife, Laura. She worked at Wizards. I met her at Wizards. At first we were friends and then eventually we started dating and then we got married and then we had a kid and then we had two more kids because I had twins. And what happened is, as I got more committed toward my life, toward my wife, toward my marriage, toward my family, I allocated more and more time. For example, when I first got to Wizards, I used to travel all the time.

All the time. And then I started dating Laura, and I traveled a little bit less. And then Laura and I got married, and I traveled even less than that. And then I had my first child, I had Rachel, and I traveled even less than that. And then I had my first child, I had Rachel, and I traveled even less than that. And then when Adam and Sarah came along, I'm like, okay, I'm seriously, I got, you know, so I reduced my travel to two times a year. So the idea was that once, you know, as I had more and more responsibilities, I realized I needed to spend more and more time allocated to my family.

I needed to understand what I was doing. And like I said, when I'm talking about your balance between work and life, figure out what's important. When I was younger and I didn't have a lot of sort of external things and most of my downtime was playing games with my coworkers, that's okay. I could allocate a lot of time at work. You know, I could allocate a lot of time on travel for business because that's what I was doing. And I was enjoying it. It's fine to allocate more time for work if that is where you're getting your enjoyment from. But the key to having balance is understanding.

So here's another resource, happiness. What makes you happy? Where do you derive pleasure from? And you have to make sure. Ideally, I want you to have a work in which the work is happy for you, and you get some happiness from it, and that's why I allocate dream jobs and doing things you love. Not everybody gets to do that, I understand that. But make sure you understand the idea of where the downtimes are,

and that, first off, attendance matters, meaning you need to be there for things. Like, one of the things I've learned of having kids and having a family is, you know, it doesn't matter the importance of something in a vacuum. Like, any one individual softball game my child is playing in, you know, if I miss one softball game, would that matter? And the big things, maybe not. But it does in the sense that one of the ways that people realize you are there for them is you are there. That if I want to be there for my family,

I can't just miss the softball games. I can't miss the plays. I can't miss the elementary school graduations. That part of committing to my life is making resources and allocating them, of saying, okay, I'm going to spend enough time, you know, and that don't, it's very easy to think of it as when am I doing the most work? When am I doing the most for my family? But part of being there for your family is not just doing something for them, but it's literally just being there. In life, attendance is very important.

Also, you have to understand attention. but it's literally just being there. In life, attendance is very important. Also, you have to understand attention. When I say you allocate, it also means it's not just a matter of physically being there, it's being focused there. Now, I'm not saying you can never. I mean, obviously, I think about my work time at home. I think about my home time at work. But when I'm with my family, I try to think about my family.

I try to stay focused on my family. Now, obviously, those think about my family. I try to stay focused on my family. Now, obviously, those that know my social media, like, I have a lot of downtime when I'm doing my parenting, and there's a lot of time where, like, one of the kids is doing something, and I'm just sitting there waiting for them, and I'll hop on social media, and I'll answer questions, and I'll find bits and pieces of time where I can do job things where it makes sense, but I don't ever do that where I'm taking away time from my family. I want to make sure that when I'm doing family time, you know, when I'm interacting with them, I'm spending time with them.

And that I want my attention to focus on them. I don't want, you know, sit at dinner and I'm spending the whole time going, oh, I got to solve this design problem, you know. And the other thing I found is that when you allocate your focus when you know what you're doing when like it actually makes me more creative not to think about the problem 24 7 now I'm sure my subconscious is working on it when I'm not consciously working on it but you know sometimes it's nice one thing that helps me solve a problem is I'll go off in my life and just think about something else stop worrying about a design problem and go okay my daughter has homework to

do or I have to you know solve some problems for my family. And a lot of times, thinking about that problem, just a different problem completely, will free up my mind and make my mind think differently because I just did get in a different mindset. And sometimes I'll come back to my problem at work and the fact that I just shifted gears was really valuable to helping solve that problem. That don't think of the separation between your work and your life as downside. It has a lot of upside. The other thing that's really important is you have to understand the difference between taking and giving, which is what elements of your life take energy from you?

What elements of your life give you energy? You know, where do you expend energy? Where do you derive energy? And part of your allocation is making sure, especially in your life half, I also think it's important in your work half, but sometimes you have a little less control over that. But make sure that you want to figure out

what gives you energy. I mean, this is true for work. As much as possible, make this true for work. I just know that sometimes you have less control at work. Find the things that give you energy. I mean, this is true for work. As much as possible, make this true for work. I just know that sometimes you have less control at work. Find the things that give you energy and make sure you allocate enough time for them. Another way people get into problems with life-work balance is they're just going full throttle all the time and they do things that expend energy and don't do the things that give them energy. My analogy here essentially is, look, you can drive your car all over the place, but you've got to stop

and get gas once in a while. And if you don't, eventually you'll just run out. Your car will stop. And you'll stop being able to drive anywhere because you won't have the gas to fill it. Understand what your metaphorical gas is. What is it that drives you? What is it that feeds you? Hopefully there's aspects in your life that do

that. For me, a big part of my life is just spending time with my family and being with my family. And there's things that I enjoy. And there's hobbies I enjoy and games and comics and TV and science fiction and things I enjoy that I can interact with. And that helps fill me up and helps give me some energy. But part of allocating is understanding where you're expending energy and helps give me some energy. But part of allocating is understanding where you're expending energy and where you're gaining energy. Because if you only expend energy and don't gain it, you will just run out of gas. And then that will cause yet another imbalance.

The other big thing about life, and this is a little harsher one, but it's something that I think is important, is you have to understand who are the people in your life, and you also have to, I'll put it this way, you can prioritize these in clumps, if you will. You don't have to individually prioritize them. That seems a little mean. But what you can do is say,

okay, of the people in my life, who are the most important people to me? You know, who's the number one group? Okay, who's the secondary group? You know, not the primary group, but the You know, who's the number one group? Okay, who's the secondary group? You know, not the primary group, but the secondary group. Who's the tertiary group? You know, and you can sort of take the people and figure out, because now the thing is, understanding who matters to you.

Now, it might be that these people are what gives you energy. It might be people that just, you like who you are when you're with them. It might be people that help you relax. It might be, you know, whatever. Or, you know, it might be people that you love dearly and you want to spend time with. Whatever reason is fine. Understand who it is. Who are the people that give you resources,

that provide happiness, that provide downtime, whatever. Figure out the people that you need. For whatever reason you need them. People need people. That is how we function. And make sure that you need them. And people need people. That is how we function. And make sure that you prioritize them. Not only do you prioritize activities,

you've got to prioritize people. And my story here is, when I got married, we invited a lot of people to the wedding. And what I found was really interesting was, it was a very illuminating thing. Because what we did is, we got married, we called it a destination wedding. We were, it was about an hour, hour and a half away. You had to actually take a ferry. I mean,

it was probably an hour and a half to two hour drive to get to where we were going. So we had a wedding and we made it a little difficult to get to our wedding. Not insanely difficult, but a little bit difficult. And it was very illuminating because it really showed me what people I mattered to. Because the people that I mattered to made it to the wedding. They were like, okay, this is someone who matters to me. What do I need to do? I will do it.

I will get there. And there were some people who were like, oh, yeah, it's far away. Whatever. They gave reasons for not attending. And what I realized was it really made it much clearer in my mind understanding who prioritized me and who didn't. And it was very illuminating. It really said to me that, I mean, to circle back to where I started with this, your priorities are only priorities if you prioritize them. If a person is a priority to

you, but you never spend time with them, I'll let you in on a secret. They're not a priority, you know? And so you need to understand who are the people that matter, and then you need to spend the time with the people. A lot of life balance, a lot of, I mean, I'm almost to work today, so let me wrap this up, but a lot of the key of today, a lot of what I'm saying today is you need to understand, if you want a balance between work and life, you need to, in work and in life, understand what matters to you, what is important to you, what things are important to you, what people are important to you, what actions are important to you, what are the things that you do and people you interact with, you know, and the projects you handle, what are the things that matter to you and mean something to you, Either because they personally enrich you in some way, or they're

important for some, you know, the key to work or whatever. That what are the things that matter that you need to make sure you do, that you spend time with, that you interact with? What are the things that matter? Figure that out. Prioritize them. Figure out your priority. And then, and this, this, this seems like such an easy thing to say, but in fact, it's a hard thing to live. But figure out your priorities and then prioritize them. If somebody matters to you, spend time with them. Like one of the things, for example, is I got a family.

I'm like, family matters to me. And I gave up other things. You know what? I loved traveling. I loved traveling. Going around the world was really awesome. It was really cool. Did it matter to me more than my family?

No, it didn't. So I gave that up so I could spend time with my family because my family was my priority. And it's very hard sometimes. I mean, it's a wonderful life to live where you have to prioritize between things you enjoy and not everybody has that opportunity. But the important thing is knowing what matters. You know, if you have a life where things are hard for you, but there's certain things that give you joy that help make it through, prioritize, understand those things.

You know, if there's people you need or things you need, if there's activities you need or people you need to get through the day, you know, to really make your life something valuable to you, then understand what those things are and figure out how to prioritize them, you know. And another important part of this is part of prioritizing is figuring out what doesn't matter and then not doing it, you know know whether they're activities that somebody else can do or you don't really need to do or things that you're doing out of habit but not out of a need anymore you know there's a lot of reasons why you can pick up things you don't need and that part of a proper balance is not wasting time and energy on things that are not giving you what you

need and that a lot of what I want to do today a lot of the things I'm talking about is figure out your priorities and then prioritize the things that matter and deprioritize the things that don't matter. And that might mean giving things up or not doing things or not interacting with people. You know, you have to figure out where is the things that matter? Where are the things that give you, that make life worth living, that make things special for you, that make your job what you want it to be, that make you happy with who you are. Prioritize those things, do those things. Figure out the things that aren't doing that.

Figure out the things that suck up your time and energy and resources that aren't worth those resources. That's a lot of making balance. It's figuring out what matters and how you can allocate your resources to the things that matter and not to the things that don't matter.

And if you do that, that is how you can have work-life balance. Okay, guys, I'm now in my parking space. We all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.