Work-life balance#
One time I had lunch with a few executives from a fairly large tech company [1]. At one point, one of the executives had asked me something along the lines of: “So imagine we’re on the brink of a discovery/innovation and you need to work late. Are you willing to work overtime without any pay if you’re close?”
Looking back, this may have been a slight red flag, but in the moment I had responded with some noncommittal answer leaning towards “no,” which if I read the room correctly, may have been the wrong answer. Those guys seemed to be looking for students who would give it their all and work long hours, which isn’t bad if that’s what you want. But I think the pursuit of “great things,” especially in a startup environment, can start to blur the lines with your health and life, and therein lies our issues with work-life balance [2].
With the world being so technology centric, it’s so easy to just write one more line of code on your laptop when you’re at home, or do more coding, more thinking, more engineering. If you’re getting Teams or Slack notifications on your phone, you’ll probably keep on thinking about your work too. This “blurring of the lines” is, in my opinion, why so many people struggle to make compromises between their work and life, which causes stress and burnout.
One thing I realized that adults and older people (at least older than the college age) do well is set boundaries. They’re not afraid to ‘be judged’ and say no to going to a party and go sleep or take care of themselves instead. They’re not afraid to say ‘no thanks, I don’t want to stay late today.’ If you’re a college-age person reading this, I think that’s a great skill to learn.
Building boundaries means setting up things in your life like exercise time, time to eat, and time for friends, that are non-negotiables as you work. That way, you’ve got the foundations to be healthy while still working.
Burnout#
I’m by no means a health expert. I’m not even sure if I’ve officially had burnout before, but there have been two times in school where I think I’ve felt it [3]: I felt numb. I listen to music at least a few hours of every day, and no music would sound good anymore; it almost irritated me. Interactions with people seemed less interesting and meaningful, and I didn’t even feel stressed, because I just felt so numb to everything.
Regardless of whether or not that was burnout or not, and regardless of the fact that burnout may manifest differently in people: life is a lot better when you don’t feel incredibly numb or hopeless.
So, you just need to draw a line. Build some boundaries. Find ways to make your life yours: play sports, play an instrument, see friends, see loved ones, et cetera, outside of work. When you’re working, you can push if you’re excited about something, but if you find yourself pushing over a prolonged period of time (> 1 week), maybe reconsider the arrangement.
The entire next section speaks about how to say no and build boundaries in your life. This is also key in avoiding burnout and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. And, for the record: I don’t like the expression “maintaining a healthy work-life balance.” It seems like a love like ghosts [4] situation: everybody talks but nobody knows. Or, everybody talks but seems to disregard their own advice and do their own thing.
The best thing you can do is to find what works for you; stress is a normal part of life, but if you become incapacitated or depressed over it, you need to change something, and hopefully quickly. The good news is that there are so many options for help - do a quick Google search or talk to someone you trust.