Work Life Harmony & Resistance

We recently did a home refactoring project to make it better fit our family as it exists now with some new requirements (two kids and one work from home Dad more than originally anticipated).

The core idea was to create a completely separate work space for me that could operate independently from the family life while still be near it – sort of like a small guest house. We considered: soundproofing my office, moving it upstairs, shifting some rooms and wall configurations to allow secret access to a bathroom, and building an astronaut helmet for me so that I was in a quieter space and away from our 87 children aka entropy amplifiers.

At the last minute I decided against it – not because of price or effort or how disruptive it would be. I chose to leave my office as it is now because the reality of working from home for this long is that I’m no longer trying to strike a work/home balance or separation but instead a work/home harmony.

All these terms are completely overloaded. In a job interview people always ask about work/home/life “balance” and whether a company supports it. The idea is that if you have balance in your work vs. home life you won’t miss your family’s important events. No last minute weekend work or 90 hours a week expectations. The marker of whether or not you have work/life balance is whether your significant other* sort of hates your boss. In reality the work side typically wins in this “balance” anyway:

Every one of us has learned how to send emails on Sunday night. But how many of us know how to go a movie on Monday afternoon. You’ve unbalanced your life without balancing it with someone else. – Ricardo Semler

The old success model was that the wealthy could completely separate work from home. Subway ride to Manhattan, secretary to manage work errands, home life miles away. Or constant business travel – first class around the world away from home cashing big checks and eating buttery dinners at steakhouses with people you don’t really know.

The new success model is to have work come to you rather than you travel to work. In the most boring scenario you work from home and you are near your family. A more exciting version is that you take your family with you and travel around the world working. An even more exciting version is that you work blind-folded using only an old Android tablet whilst riding a bull as you dodge bullets and manage to install a Java update without ruining your computer as your kids cheer you on from galloping recently-broken wild horses as your wife sprays shotgun fire at your enemies.

I don’t want separation of who I am into different arenas. I want my work life to be an extension of who I am just as my family life is – something to be proud of and work very hard at and fill with humor and love and creativity. I want my kid’s creativity to spill into my work life and my work to be understood by them.  I would love to have a small desk in my office where my kids could do their homework; my ideal coworking space would be me and my family, a $4,000 espresso machine, and a barista that speaks in the voice of Shredder from TMNT.

I don’t have all the answers on how to accomplish the sort of deeply-focused highly organized work that my job requires while in the same house with my kids, but I know that I can’t avoid the problem to solve it.

In The War of Art Pressfield talks about resistance – the idea that any good work will be worked against by outside forces. It’s quite a spiritual idea to some and to others is a physical manifestation of our need to procrastinate on the important things. In any event in my work life I’ve found that the more I gain control over my working parameters the more resistance I face.

Imagine this: the absolute ideal for getting a lot of work done is to have a private island accessible only by your boat that is stocked with food and water and clothes freshly cleaned and dropped daily via helicopter.  Your Internet connection is wicked fast but only allows sites relevant to your work; the temperature is perfect inside and out; your devices do not need charging; your bills are paid, Wild Berry Skittles grow from the ground like weeds, etc.  You are freed from all things but the work.  Any person who has worked alone knows that this scenario would, after a few days or weeks, find us waxing that boat or organizing the driftwood or climbing the palm trees rather than working.  We are not made for these isolation chamber existences and such deep unwavering focus and our minds object and we face resistance.

So we have to build-in and control our resistance. And given the choice between any other distraction and my family I’ll take my family every time.

* Or cat or lizard.