Work-Life Balance (Premium)

“I don’t understand why you don’t just live on a lake somewhere,” my father once observed.

There’s a lot more to that statement than is immediately obvious, but without getting into the differences between me and my father, let’s just leave it at this: He was referring to the fact that my wife and I both work from home, and have for many years. (Decades, in my case.) Meaning, we could live anywhere.

Which is technically true. But only in isolation. We also have children, and they have lives, friends, activities, traditions and expectations, and other things that tie them to the place we do live. And we would never uproot our children for something so selfish. (And I have no desire to live on a lake, per se. The details don’t matter.)

The thing is, I do occasionally wish I was somewhere else. And my wife and I do talk, fairly frequently, about what life might look like when the kids are grown up. That day is approaching—Mark is almost a year into college and Kelly is a high school freshman—but the future is unclear. I used to peg the year 2020 as some kind of transition point, a time when maybe we could consider moving. But that’s when Kelly graduates from high school, so there’s really another four years or more to go, as we want to make sure the kids have a home base during college at the very least. And once you get four or more years past that, the discussion gets more complicated, less real.

But we do what we can do. And for us, that has meant spending time in other places each year. We typically do a home swap each summer, almost always in Europe, and I have a vague goal of spending at least a month in Europe each year. This isn’t as expensive as it maybe sounds, though of course airline tickets reached absurd levels in recent years before calming down again. But it’s fair to say, too, that this isn’t something many of my kids’ friends’ families do either.

Without getting too far into the decision-making process there, these trips have a few basic goals: To satisfy the need/want my wife and I have to travel and experience other cultures. And to imbue our children with a broader understanding of the world than we had as kids, to make them understand that diversity and differences are not just normal, but should be accepted and even celebrated. I don’t care if they’re ever grateful for these opportunities, per se. But I do care that they’re not ignorant.

Put another way, these trips are about balance. If I don’t travel enough, I start to get itchy. And if I travel too much, conversely, I get overwhelmed. The recent trip to Germany was perfect for me on a number of levels—I’d never been to Hanover or Berlin, for example—but it was even more necessary because I was on the brink of traveling to Africa a month earlier when Brad got sick and we had to cancel the trip. That created a weird, unfulfilled hole for me.

Looked at broadly, I think of any given year as a series of trips, and as the dead time between those trips. I enjoy both, to be honest. And as much as I love to travel, I enjoy the seasons here too. It’s just gotta be balanced.

This is true of the day-to-day as well, and maybe that’s more important. In my earliest days of working at home in the mid-1990’s, I had to adapt to the weirdness of, well, being home, where distractions like TV and home-based work (laundry, whatever) abound. But I’ve learned a number of things over two-plus decades. Home-based work can be more honest, if you will, than sitting in an office for 8 hours each day, where you may be pressured to pretend you’re always busy. And as a writer, in particular, I know that sometimes it flows, and sometimes it doesn’t, and that it’s OK to walk away from the computer—even better to actually go for a walk—when the words don’t come easily.

But work-life balance still escapes me. Like many things—decluttering, for example, or scanning old photos and videos to digital formats—this is an ongoing effort. It’s not something that happens all at once, but the goal is to make progress, if only from time to time. To keep pushing forward.

I budget time each morning for what I call “deep work,” where I hope to get a solid three hours of distraction-free writing done. I also spend time every day learning something new. That includes language learning, via Duolingo and other apps. And it includes technical learning, which in recent days has involved Visual Studio, C##, and Xamarin, and online e-learning resources. Sometimes I just play video games. I actually find that a round of Call of Duty, or whatever, can nicely clear my mind. In fact, I turn phrases around in my head until they feel right, and I’ll just drop the controller and start writing again when it gets there. Try that in an office.

I also try—usually unsuccessfully—to work exercise into my routine. I do play basketball each week for about three-quarters of the year, but beyond that, I’ve pretty much just been walking when possible. Given the low-carb/keto diet I’ve been on for the past four months, I don’t actually “need” to workout in the sense that doing so doesn’t help with weight loss in the slightest, but I do feel the need to do something physical if only to achieve a basic level of activity. That remains a struggle.

Before I went on this diet, I joked that my Fitbit provided achievements for activity, while the Untappd app provided achievements for drinking beer, and that between the two I find balance. These days, I don’t drink beer—thanks, diet—but I have found an interesting, and sometimes humorous new sense of balance between two daily trackers: My Fitbit Alta, as before, and Grammarly, which tracks my writing.

As a writer, I find Grammarly particularly interesting, and if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I will occasionally tweet my weekly recap from the service. According to Grammarly, I’m good for 40,000 words in a normal week, though I will point out that I actually write a lot more than that: My book work, for example, is never counted. (Grammarly is a Chrome plug-in, so it only measures text I write, or paste into, WordPress.)

Fitbit measures many things, but the only metric I care about is steps. According to what is probably dubious science, we’re supposed to walk about 10,000 steps a day. And that should be easily achievable, working at home as I do. But I rarely hit that mark unless I’m traveling, especially in the winter. (I can hit 10,000 steps in one night of basketball, most weeks, however.)

When I returned home from Germany, I got some interesting results from both Grammarly and Fitbit. My writing that week was down dramatically—just 22,000 words or so—but that made sense since I took a few days off. (Which I rarely do.) But my steps were up dramatically, too, Fitbit told me: I walked 85,304 steps that week, about 19,000 on my best day (around Berlin), and I hit a total of 41 miles (!) of walking.

After being home a week, I was amused to see two emails arrive, from Grammarly and Fitbit, respectively, right next to each other in my inbox. As you might expect, my writing had bounced back nicely, and I hit over 46,000 words. But my activity level (supposedly) nosedived, thanks in part to the fact that several days of stats hadn’t synced. Adjusting the numbers after a sync, it looks like I walked just 34,000 steps(ish), less than half what I was doing when I was out in the world.

(The email, which included only one synced day, claimed I had walked “39 miles less” than I had the previous week, triggering this work-life introspection.)

Put simply, when I’m home, I write a lot but I am not very active. When I’m away, I write less, but I’m more active. In this case, it was sort of extreme: My activity doubled and my writing halved when I was away. Surely—surely—there is a happy middle ground. That is the goal. And that is what I think of as work-life balance. Which, again, is something I have not achieved.