work/life balance

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:

Moggy wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:I use work as a means to do all my GRcade posting. If they block the site again (as it was for about 3 years straight) i'm strawberry floated.

I work from home and use my phone to post. The corporate overlords will never catch me now.

That is the pro strat I employ on the rare occasion I do get to work from home. Feel like a king every time.

My office shares a building with another company so I use the other company's WiFi to access GR on my phone

Zilnad wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:

Moggy wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:I use work as a means to do all my GRcade posting. If they block the site again (as it was for about 3 years straight) i'm strawberry floated.

I work from home and use my phone to post. The corporate overlords will never catch me now.

That is the pro strat I employ on the rare occasion I do get to work from home. Feel like a king every time.

My office shares a building with another company so I use the other company's WiFi to access GR on my phone

Now that is a pro strat

I realized a few years ago that there was zero point in going above and beyond.

I've been unemployed for 6 months since moving here. It just didn't work out. It's been a weird experience. Even if I didn't find work fulfilling, you miss feeling actually useful for something. But I'm fine after a bit of blip.

We are heading back to the UK next month and I have something already lined up when I get back. So while I know I will strawberry floating hate being back on the grind, I'm looking forward to earning again.

I'm pretty lucky with my job, I don't need to work my hours to get everything done. I rarely start before 9am or work past 5pm and usually take 1-1.5 hour lunchbreaks when I'm WFH (3 days a week normally) to work out. I tend to get loads done when I'm in the office for 2 days and take it easy at home.

I probably should start looking for a new job next year from a career progression perspective-i could do with more varied experience at this level if I'm ever going to make it to the next (which would be Finance Director). It's hard to motivate myself to do so though when I have such a good deal! Especially when I have a young family-if we have another baby the flexibility of this job would be a godsend.

Zilnad wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:

Moggy wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:I use work as a means to do all my GRcade posting. If they block the site again (as it was for about 3 years straight) i'm strawberry floated.

I work from home and use my phone to post. The corporate overlords will never catch me now.

That is the pro strat I employ on the rare occasion I do get to work from home. Feel like a king every time.

My office shares a building with another company so I use the other company's WiFi to access GR on my phone

Beautiful.

Damn, Tomous, only one step below director. That was a humble brag if I ever saw one. I work in finance too so hire me when you're running things, please.

Zilnad wrote:Damn, Tomous, only one step below director. That was a humble brag if I ever saw one. I work in finance too so hire me when you're running things, please.

He would, but the company next door vetoed it over fears of their wifi being overloaded.

It does sound as though a lot of us are similar. I worked extremely hard consulting until last year when I had to quit with burnout/strawberry floating hating it.

Was offered a role with absolutely incredible money shortly afterwards but turned it down in favour of earning half that, in a job I thought I'd actually enjoy. Haven't regretted it for a second.

10 years ago I worked for 36 hours straight to meet an impossible deadline for the startup I worked in because the boss insisted it would be the making of us.

Now I work for a big corp and hold my gooseberry fools in until I’m on the clock.

I like my job and do consider it part of my identity so it spills into my home life quite a lot, but I don't mind that much. It can be very weird and all-consuming in a bad way for gooseberry fool pay (e.g. I had ten months where I spent less than 48 hours a week in my own home while earning about £17K) but as long as that's not all the time it seems okay. At the moment it's not like that, but it likely will be again in the future. But I love it so it's just about inching towards being able to pick and choose a bit more, steer away from major infrastructure projects, etc.

I used to work really hard but just ended up being given more responsibility for no extra money. I also realised that I was basically training new starters who would then end up in management positions while always being overlooked for those roles. I then did the bare minimum. I'm no longer really sure what I'm going to do after university but job satisfaction will rate higher than something with loads of responsibility.

Moggy wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:I use work as a means to do all my GRcade posting. If they block the site again (as it was for about 3 years straight) i'm strawberry floated.

I work from home and use my phone to post. The corporate overlords will never catch me now.

I work from home and use my own PC where I know there's no company monitoring software at all and do whatever the hell I want.

I've done the opposite to the people in OP's link.

In my twenties I worked a slightly above entry level admin job to fund my life, eventually gaining a couple of minor promotions and taking on a modicum of responsibility. I got a decent promotion to a different part of the business when I was 29, before losing interest after a few years and deciding to retrain in project management.

Now I'm in a job I love with its fair share of accountability. The freedoms of WFH 4 or 5 days a week allow me to chip in with housework and spend time with the kids whenever I have a spare 5-10 minutes.

The trade off is I typically end up working an extra hour or so in the evening a couple of days a week to keep on top of everything but to me it's a worthwhile trade-off.

Rocsteady wrote:It does sound as though a lot of us are similar. I worked extremely hard consulting until last year when I had to quit with burnout/strawberry floating hating it.

Was offered a role with absolutely incredible money shortly afterwards but turned it down in favour of earning half that, in a job I thought I'd actually enjoy. Haven't regretted it for a second.

I remember you weighing up that decision on your job offers last year. Glad to hear you made the right decision!

Tomous wrote:

Rocsteady wrote:It does sound as though a lot of us are similar. I worked extremely hard consulting until last year when I had to quit with burnout/strawberry floating hating it.

Was offered a role with absolutely incredible money shortly afterwards but turned it down in favour of earning half that, in a job I thought I'd actually enjoy. Haven't regretted it for a second.

I remember you weighing up that decision on your job offers last year. Glad to hear you made the right decision!

The article focuses on "millennials" where I think there is a great deal of potential for entrepreneurship. But it does require such a massive degree of grit, perseverance and resilience that the (mostly wrong) cliche will be that that is harder to find today. I don't think that's true - it's just vested in the wrong places and with shitty companies and a hegemony where you must "get" work "from" someone. I.e. "just get a job and work hard". That isn't always true or even right, yeah.

After working at one time 4 roles including a 6hr roundtrip commute, I was signed off work a bunch of times and eventually told to resign by my doctor in my mid 20s and I kind of foresaw a pattern that had only a few ways out that wasn't based pretty much on chance, or the economy. Unfortunately I grew up watching this happen as well.
So now I focus on doing just about everything I can to not recreate that life of 40+ years of unsustainable misery that would probably eventually kill me, owing to various complications, disability, genetics and more generally just how my industry (broadly design) works.
But also what tends to happen to people like me who hyperfocus on tasks, and tend to be good at doing multiple quite different sorts of things, and basically doing them too intensively to work in a normal 9-5 pattern. Without somehow managing to both do really high quality work and strawberry float everything up for the management. Part of this is accepting that most employers don't want high quality work, they just want it done so they can pass the baton along and get paid themselves i.e. clock in and out and make bank, as I call it. They're all on the same grind.
I had to basically just leave this completely as it was never going to be rewarded, indeed my compensation and misrepresentation of working rights at the time were a joke.
I went back to working for myself as I did at 14 years old because I wanted to do that kind of work for certain kinds of people (although I quit doing what I originally did - web design), I didn't need to go to someone to give me work, I basically created the demand and the work itself.

While I broadly work because I have to, I do set the standard so nobody can whine if I work too hard, or too long on something, or pursuing qualities they just don't see because they themselves have different values (which was a constant annoyance to the degree of total indifference on my part in other roles, which was the worst thing - I came close enough to just not caring any more which would have meant I lost what motivation I had in the first place before I even had a job). And my clients are really grateful about it and give me amazing reviews which just never happened in a corporate setting. Basically by setting up the value system and selling and thus earning according to those values I can remain true to myself and what I think is important, all I have to do is just find some people that agree with me.

That doesn't mean it's easy as I have plenty of issues with over and under-communicating and finding the right balance, say if write a 500 word consultation you'd think nobody wants to read, but then 70% of clients love it and 20% say nothing and 10% complain its too much, that's really hard to figure out. Again because I set the standard and you then have to decide who to listen to - there's nobody above you making those assessments.

So while work/life balance is generally within my control it swings all over the place because in many sense I have umpteen roles wrapped into the visage of whatever I describe my job as being. And sometimes I don't even realise I'm doing that job, which might be thinking about it in the middle of the night or on the weekend, or talking about it all the time "outside" of work (because the "place of work" is basically my own brain).

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:

Moggy wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:I use work as a means to do all my GRcade posting. If they block the site again (as it was for about 3 years straight) i'm strawberry floated.

I work from home and use my phone to post. The corporate overlords will never catch me now.

That is the pro strat I employ on the rare occasion I do get to work from home. Feel like a king every time.

"I use work as a means to do all my GRcade posting." lol Just think how I feel.

I have one voluntary role and one proprietorship which is also technically a voluntary job. I've done other voluntary jobs too or art related things that kind of fall somewhere in between a portfolio career and a 3rd thing, let's just call that art/music practice if it doesn't sound too wanky.

They often argue with each other, but interacting with a community is important, obviously, as is more generally "showing up" in various spheres related to my work. So I slide off one job I chose for another job or activity I also chose and there is very little I do that isn't in some way if even tangentially related to my overall career path (and you might call that a vocation I suppose). I post on GRcade because I want to, enjoy it and need to but also it would be a strawberry floating joke if I never posted. I don't post out of obligation though, I'm obviously interested in everyone here and topics etc.

Neither really have any compensation in wage terms at present. Nor have any set hours. So yeah.

Maybe art or music etc are one of the last couple of vocations that you could actually consider more than just a job. It's very difficult to impossible to just clock in and out of something like that because so much of it is subconscious background, observational living sort of things. It's practically impossible to have a business idea or a design idea for example and then just force yourself not to think about it until x time for y duration.

Edit: I just remembered I literally have to run my own website blocking software in my workspace as well. It's weirdly paradoxical having to boss-mode yourself but it's also essential because of what I've just described.





Note: I very much dislike social media so Instagram is generally work-related and I only use Facebook for page updates and work-related groups. I also don't post on reddit, I can just wind up there sometimes because of search. Also have to block Wikipedia sometimes for the same reason.

It's extraordinarily difficult to manage work/life balance as a business owner, especially when there is often nobody else to answer to or for or to step in when things go wrong,for example I've been ill the past few days but have ben working anyway. Sometimes really all you can do is say, "Sorry I'm one person and I got ill, lol" until you can figure out some kind of contingency or replacement. It really is very difficult but not insurmountable.

Green Gecko wrote:Edit: I just remembered I literally have to run my own website blocking software in my workspace as well. It's weirdly paradoxical having to boss-mode yourself but it's also essential because of what I've just described.



...

GG, if you ever wanted to get around your own blocking structures, could you sneak through by going to grcade.com rather than the more usual grcade.co.uk ? It'd be ace if you were able to defeat your own rules! .

im a teacher so work-life balance is so difficult
luckily the job is infinitely rewarding so i dont feel like im wasting my life away
definitely not paid enough though

jawa_ wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:Edit: I just remembered I literally have to run my own website blocking software in my workspace as well. It's weirdly paradoxical having to boss-mode yourself but it's also essential because of what I've just described.



...

GG, if you ever wanted to get around your own blocking structures, could you sneak through by going to grcade.com rather than the more usual grcade.co.uk ? It'd be ace if you were able to defeat your own rules! .

Nope because it permanently redirects to grcade.co.uk and that would get blocked.

That software is literally impossible to disable, it runs numerous (fairly lightweight) processes. For example ending the process will just immediately restart it. Restarting the computer does nothing. I have it set so to disable it I have to enter 100 random ASCII characters in a row perfectly without any mistakes. Once or twice I've had to do that for some reason but generally it gives you enough time to reflect and realise how insane that is and then either stop working, leave, or carry on with whatever it is your supposed to do. Or at least get off the computer - and most jobs these days are tied to a computer a lot of the time.

For about 12 years before that I used SelfControl for OSX which is good.

If it's blocked for a day and you ned to access that website on that device (for some reason, which is rare), you have to get a code from their support. It's hardcore but it does actually work. The thing is you can use something like this for stopping work too, which for a lot of people is even more of a problem.

For example, I sometimes have it set to just completely disable the screen at midnight. It won't become responsive until 5am the following day. Even if you restart the computer. It's like someone saying, get the strawberry float off the computer. I'm nearly always working then. I normally realise if I really want to work all night I can get up at 6am and carry on if I really have to - but do I really have to? Or have I just achieved hyperfocus and I need to figure out how to stop - after all, that task might take days.

I only do this sometimes, for a day or so when I'm critically overloaded with work (rush orders etc) and just can't afford to start writing some random essay for an hour in the middle of things.

I have a laptop I can jump on whatever without the software but that's just a hazard. I don't use my smartphone and my iPad has a limited number of websites added as bookmarks, nothing else will load. That's for super hardcore mode when I unplug the Internet or turn off my work computer completely and only have access to about 20 websites including my work systems and email.

This is just in my workshop/studio, I find it helps a lot to have a separate space (but I'm also terrible at leaving work when work is, well, work is literally up and down some stairs).

Not sure if I mentioned it but I recently found out I have ADHD so at times it's borderline impossible to choose what to focus on (not merely being unable to focus at all, that's not really a thing) or end up doing 100x more of something or a related thing than whatever I am supposed to be doing. It's a real dick. All you can do is set up elaborate systems and environmental changes as your brain is fundamentally borked for seamlessly switching between tasks or otherwise doing one thing at a time (or multiple things at the same time, it depends).

Over time it might be possible to overcome the short circuited dopamine conditioning (let's just say the modern web and technology is not exactly designed to help you), but ADHD is an executive functioning disorder, it's not just about wanting quick satisfaction or an insatiable need for information or shiny things. And it definitely isn't about being lazy. You have to use your rational and logical mind to foresee situations in which focus is difficult or even painful and effectively eliminate choices.

Doesn't always work, I once spent 5 hours unblocking a shredder that was rammed full instead of some letter or whatever it was. The kind of inexplicable nonsense that would easily get you fired, but I guess others would just compensate by working insane hours instead.

While a lot of it is bollocks (attention seeking which doesn't help anyone) watching any kind of videos on ADHD from people actually with a diagnosis will illuminate the kind of crazy gooseberry fool you end up doing all day when you genuinely sat down at some point and decided to do the thing.

Oh ha. Hahahahahahahaha indeed, your mind is figuratively laughing at you. But I have a controversial opinion that distracting yourself with unrelated tasks can actually lead to creative solutions and epiphanies that aren't possible if you are locked in "work mode".

Basically, don't do a boring, unrewarding job or you're just utterly strawberry floated depending on your makeup. Unfortunately most jobs are boring, but so are easy jobs so heck I guess it's up to the individual.

I view work as a means to an end, that end being to spend time with my family and enjoying my life. The hustle culture and corporate grind mentality is horrible and I'm always wary of people who promote it.