We're sharing some of the insights from our internal MD blog, where we are given the opportunity each week to Ask Skipp Anything, posing any budding or burning questions they've got for Partners in Performance's Managing Director. Read on for Skipp's thoughts on work/life balance...
This is an important topic, although I don't acknowledge the framing of the question. To me it implies there is ‘work’ and then this other thing called ‘life’, and that all the good stuff is in the ‘life’ category and ‘work’ is something you do until you can free up time for ‘life’. I don’t see it that way. We spend a lot of our time at work so I want something I can do that is fun. And for me that is a matter of knowing what I love to do and what gives me energy, monitoring when things get too far away from that and then working out how to get them back on track.
It turns out for me that these things are:
I know that if I fill my life up with these things, I'll have huge energy and enthusiasm and won't feel tired. But if these things don't get ticked in a day – or worse, two days in a row – I'll start to feel edgy or irritable. My subconscious knows that things aren't right.
If for example, my work hours get too long in a day and I don’t get to chat with my family, friends and a few people at work, or get to the gym, then I start to feel stressed. I've been doing this for decades now, so I work hard to prevent this from happening. I can also spot the ‘why am I feeling stressed’ a lot earlier and can fix it, because I know what I need to do to get back in balance.
If you haven’t worked out what your list of ‘things that make me happy/give me energy’ are, I’d thoroughly recommend it because in my experience small changes to ‘what is in’ your life make a big difference. Knowing really helps you spot when life is out of balance and allows you to take it back to the root case of what is missing, compared to those things that give you energy.
So, to wrap this up, I'm happy to say that my current life is close to my ideal life (unless someone will give me an eighth day a week, in which case I will happily take it).