Making work fit into my life...
...rather than the other way around (and why I logged onto my work laptop this weekend)
It’s been a busier few weeks at work, which has really forced me to be thoughtful about boundaries.
I logged onto my work computer this weekend.
I generally treat weekends as sacred and never, ever touch my work laptop. However, this weekend, I broke that rule for what I deemed a good reason. As I’ve transitioned back into full-time work from my adult gap year, I’ve often felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of life admin and “adulting” that I need to do. Over the past few months, I’ve set aside time on the weekend to sit down and get through the bulk of it at once. This weekend, I had this huge backlog of life admin to do and a lot of it involved planning out the next few weeks. I realized as I started to get into my personal calendar that there was a lot of interdependency with my work schedule.
I’m very fortunate that my work schedule is somewhat flexible – I choose which days to go into the office and I have some control over the specific hours that I work each day. (I work with a lot of folks on the west coast so I can opt to start/end my day later when I want more overlap with them.)
As I looked to the week ahead, I realized a few things:
My work meetings were all over the place and I had very little focus time
I had in-person meetings scattered across three days when I was ideally hoping to go in for only two days
I had evening commitments that presumed I was going to be in the office on certain days but I wasn’t actually sure if they’d line up
As such, I broke the golden rule and pulled out my work computer, using a precious weekend hour to fix up my work calendar alongside my personal one. I grouped my in-person meetings into two days and consolidated my meetings more generally to give myself more focus time. I aligned my in-office days to my evening commitments and shuffled around some locations.
The real learning for me this weekend was that:
It’s not always evil to open a work laptop on the weekend, as long as it’s for a good reason…
I need to be purposeful in how I use my time both at work and outside of work, and there’s some degree of alignment that’s necessary to make sure I’m not losing time to silly logistics. Commuting doesn’t take that long but if I optimize on the margins, particularly with respect to evening commitments, I can get back a few hours each week.
At the same time, I’m also trying to internalize that time spent on work should be finite.
I imagine that this was easier back in the day when work was always in-person and most people had clear notions of when they’d arrive at work and when they’d leave. However, when I worked fully in-person at the beginning of my career, I was raised on the idea that work was not finite. The narrative was something to the effect of: Management consulting is an elite career path and with that comes the sacrifice of a predictable work schedule. Work comes first and you shouldn’t count on being free in the evenings. (But at least we got weekends, while investment bankers didn’t even get those!) No one around me made dinner or evening plans on weekdays and the idea of pursuing an extracurricular or hobby outside of work that involved a recurring weeknight commitment was absolutely unfathomable.
In my time working at a startup, I started to grasp that I could set my own timelines at work, as long as I accounted for the right level of urgency for each respective topic. However, that still implied some degree of unbounded availability for work. As I’ve transitioned into working at a much larger company, I’ve noticed that highly successful people focus a lot on prioritizing. They’ve all got a lot going on, but they’re very comfortable identifying the trade-offs they need to make so that the total amount of work they’re doing stays fixed. When more important things come up, they get done, but generally not at the expense of that person’s time outside of work – rather, at the expense of another lower priority item that gets bumped.
It still makes me uneasy when I have to shift timelines or things fall behind schedule at work, but I’ve learned slowly that this is almost entirely in my hands. When there are priorities with unchangeable deadlines, the ones with more flexibility have to give. And I’m gradually internalizing that this is not a sign of weakness. It’s something that I’m allowed to do – and in fact, something that’s healthy for me as I build a good life around my work.
Overall reflections
It’s possible that these are super basic learnings, but they have been surprisingly hard to fully grasp. A lot of it is unlearning certain deeply held beliefs about what makes me a good employee and this unlearning has to happen in tandem with building more confidence that I’m valuable and doing a good job at work. It’s definitely an ever-evolving approach and perhaps one that becomes easier over time – especially with tenure at work and more inflexible demands outside of work (e.g. having a pet or kids that are relying on you to be somewhere at a specific time).
Is there anything that’s worked for you, or also been particularly challenging? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!