Work Life Balance

April 2, 2022

While I feel like I temporarily had a good work/life balance going on… things now feel a bit out of alignment. Off balance, you could say.

I’m finding myself working later into the evenings, during the week. A thing I realized: when we don’t have plans to do house work, and the evening is a bit “free”… I end up working late.

I think this has always been a bit of a struggle, particularly with work being a fully remote thing for me. There’s no clear delineation between the end of the work day and the start of my own personal time/evening. And that line remains ambiguous unless I set up specific definitions for the start/end.

For a while, I think things felt more balanced. Liz and I both had some late nights towards the end of last year… and had some recovery time with the hoildays.

I feel like I had a small stretch where I did a good job, ending the day closer to 5PM. And lately, not so much. The thing of it is… there’s no direct or overt pressure coming from work. This is all from an internal/personal source. It’s a voice that keeps saying “You haven’t done enough.” And it’s difficult to ignore.

More than anything else, I think it’s this voice I need to lessen. I feel very proud of my work ethic, as it’s something that’s been instilled in me by my parents. And to me, a strong work ethic is the hallmark of a good American. There’s a lot of pride there.

But the only way that voice gets quieted is if I ignore it. Stopping the day at a reasonable hour is a tough thing, particularly over these last few pandemic years. I think I’ve always struggled with my day job and my work defining my sense of self. And even as a remote worker, that blurry definition has returned.

Ultimately, no one else is really going to be able to help with this work/life balance. It needs to be me, and I need to be the one to turn off the monitor, walk away from the desk.

Maybe the trick is to have something else to turn to, some other sense of self-worth/definition. Maybe I need to get back to personal projects.

[photo via Joshua Earle]