work / life balance: post panel thoughts

As mentioned previously, I recently co-moderated a panel discussion for New Media BC on the ever-important and relevant topic of "work/life balance." We had a strong group of talented panellists for the discussion, one that was broad and deep, covering a great number of related topics and themes.

The catalyst in for the panel was an article that Eric Karjaluoto wrote entitled "9 to 5 = average" on his blog "ideasonideas." Wil Arndt of Mod 7 read the article and emailed it to a wide number of colleagues, peers, and associates (myself included), all of whom sent him back long-winded and often very insightful emails. Wil was so impressed by the volume and intensity of response, he figured it was worthy of some more discussion. We had lunch, discussed it further, and a panel discussion was born.

I gained a lot of insights into what it takes to put together a good panel and how to best foster and shape discussions in a meaningful manner for your audience. Wil's organization and vision for the event was crucial in it coming together and having some form. Even with 7 bright people in front of an audience, you can wind up going way off target and not really providing the audience with the talk they wanted or came to see. I hope we avoided that... Our audience seemed engaged, asked questions, and appeared to have enjoyed the talk.

One of the downsides of moderating was that I wound up being someone asking the questions instead of answering them! And I felt like I had a sufficient amount of things to say on the matter after spending the time working with Wil to gather questions, look at themes, and consider my own position on the work/life balance equation.

And that's what the rest of this post is about.

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In making the primary theme of the discussion "work/life balance," we strayed a bit from Eric's original thesis, paraphrased here as that unless you are willing to commit a full effort into your profession and career, beyond the regular working hours of 9 to 5, you will be unable to achieve excellence . I recognized this thesis as being related to the "no pain, no gain" philosophy of exercising in some ways.

Wil then turned the thesis around in the form of a question for our panel:

Can you do anything truly excellent, stunning and culturally meaningful without being so passionate about your work that you sacrifice your personal life? Is work/life balance possible? And if so, how do you do it?

One of the major issues we touched on, that's crucial to examining this question properly, wasn't resolved by our panellists: What does being excellent mean? What is good design? What is great design? Who is the judge of that? How do you define and quantify success in your career?

Defining one's criteria for success is an important step in knowing when you're crossed the proverbial finish line. To say that working 9 to 5 doesn't cut it is one thing, by defining what excellence isn't in the negative, but what about the inverse?

With a graphic design/web design bias on the panel, things like recognition of one's peers, awards, and happy clients all came up as measures of success. Definitions of success hinging on aesthetic integrity, delivery of projects on time and on budget, and end-user adoption weren't mentioned, but anyone in the profession of capital-D Design (any creative endeavour of design, software, engineering, architecture, etc) knows that the goalposts are often very different depending on the client, the project, and its constraints. And then there's that internal measure of knowing that you simply nailed it, that you produced something beyond which you thought was possible, you tapped into some talent you didn't know you had, in order to produce an exceptional solution - whether the client recognized it as such or not. I think many of the panellists had this on their mind when they were discussing "good design" but didn't get around to articulating it fully.

Key to Eric's argument was the link of effort to quality. More effort being better, less effort being substandard. In the long term, it is a proven fact that on average those who practice a particular skill, day-in day-out, will have a higher level of proficiency at performing that skill than those that spend less time doing it.

In my spare time, I spend a lot of time racing bicycles on roads, mud, and around wooden tracks. Practice does make perfect in many pursuits. To achieve the top level of the sport pyramid in terms of athlete development, it takes a lot of work. For a sport like competitive road cycling, for example, it often requires 12 to 14 years of constant involvement in the sport (practice, competition, training, conditioning, nutrition, etc.)

It is no surprise that other human pursuits require an equally impressive volume of practice to become "good" or "great" at it. During our discussion, I referenced Ericsson's research paper on 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which posits that the "best in the world," those that exhibit expertise, in a particular field are often characterized by having performed around 2 hrs a day for 10 years of deliberate practice. Talent is important, motivation is key, but repeated focused effort over a long period of time volume is also crucial.

However, as any cyclist will tell you, the concept of duration of effort is different than intensity of effort. I can go for a four hour training ride at low intensity or I can do a 1 hour training session at maximum intensity. The results are very different for both.

You can't help but also mention talent or aptitude in this discussion. Some people are naturally good at performing a task, better even than those who have been practicing it for a long time. I see those people on the bike all the time - they have bigger lungs, higher red blood cell counts, an ability to deal with pain, and an uncanny tactical sense in a bike race. I could probably train full time and never achieve their performance.

No-one said it better than this man, some 400 years ago: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em" - Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 1601

The killer combo is those that are good at something and enjoy it. When skill and motivation are aligned, watch out. When they're not, you get comedic or tragic results: those that aren't good and enjoy their pursuit, that's what hobbies are for. Those that are good and don't enjoy their task, sigh.... they are often the envy of many, a so-called "lost opportunity." If only I had their talent...

And so to beat this extended sports metaphor into the ground a bit further, many people in the audience, a variety of "new media" professionals, appeared to be marathon runners who were doing sprint-intervals every few kilometres of running. And they were tired. And their performance was suffering. Simply put, the pace of their careers was not sustainable.

In cycling, the concept of periodization is critical to success. We get better as athletes by stressing the body repeatedly in a structured manner, then resting. Cycles last in weeks, months, years. Peak performance is only achieved after a significant rest period, following previous periods of intensity and stress.

The theory that you can simply go as hard as you can all the time doesn't make sense in sport. It is not sustainable. It cannot be maintained for a long period of time before performance begins to suffer dramatically and starts going the other way.

Can we apply similar concepts for work? It seems like a natural link to me.

This notion of over-stress and recovery, over-stress and recovery, also fits in nicely with the concept of Flow, a much written about idea that says we achieve personal peak performance moments in our life when our skills meet the challenge of the task at hand, head-on. If the challenge is too great, our skill too little, we experience anxiety. The challenge too little, our skill too good, we experience boredom and frustration. The sweet spot is a challenge just slightly better than our skill. We have to stretch for it, growing as we do.


So how does all of this come back to a healthy career? Well, arguably, if you want to be the "best" designer in the world, you're probably going to have a helluva time achieving that, because as far as I can tell, there's no Design Olympics that I'm aware of. The nice thing about sport opposed to work is that it's structured to shape and guide these peak performances. You can say you're the best at something and prove it by having the fastest time, the gold medal, the world champion title. It's totally quantifiable in many sport disciplines. Our profession doesn't have that and it's probably a good thing.

And you thought judging figure skating was contentious and controversial...

Is the pinnacle of performance in sport "healthy" anyhow? Not really. In fact, top-level performance athletes are well beyond the verge of being unhealthy most of the time. They are high performance, but they are not healthy.

So perhaps work/life balance is bullshit then? Certainly this author seemed to think so.

If you want to be really, really good at a skill (ie: world class), you're going to have to commit your life to it. So how good is "good enough" for you? What are you willing to put into it? Where do you draw the line? What are your goals?

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One of the most valuable aspects of the discussion was that it started a dialogue about professional values and ethics. In working all hours of the day and night in search of personal and professional excellence, there's a direct impact on the rest of the market, the expectations of clients, and the morale of one's staff. While complaining about clients not appreciating or paying for good design in one breath, we managed to talk about putting in long hours, paying one's dues and financially devaluing our work on the other. We appear to be our own worst enemy in this regard. And when we do get faster or better at doing something, we simply move forward in doing more work, not less. There is no reward for efficiency, other than increased volume. The 2001 Massey Lecture from Janice Gross Stein entitled "The Cult of Efficiency" focuses on this paradox, with the questions of "efficient at what? and for what purpose?" as key questions at the heart of her book.


Another important issue raised was the difference in whether someone puts in the extra effort out of their own motivation or whether that all-nighter is an institutionalized expectation. Doing it because you want to is one thing; doing it because if you don't, you're fired, is another. Robert Ouimet, formerly of a large institution laden with its own culture, values, and expectations raised that important point. How these moments materialize and the conditions under which these heroics are required was another key point. Often, it's all thanks to bad project management: planning, communication with clients, and client expectations and the lack thereof. We do it to ourselves again.

The political ramifications of these personal work decisions was best demonstrated by Jer Thorpe, our "freelancer" on the panel, who had cast-off from the Rat Race and whose motto was "work as little as possible." I'm glad Jer was on the panel, as it was probably one of the most controversial comments that anyone made (work lots to be good isn't really all that controversial after all). Here is a person who had completely redefined his success criteria. If he wasn't done by 3:00 pm on his work project, catching a hockey game or a concert, then it wasn't a good day.

I saw a twinkle in my panellists eyes as they imagined themselves as footloose and fancy free as the young Mr Thorpe. And in the ensuing email discussion post-panel (the dialogue didn't stop at 7:00 PM that night), some pondered a new mode of work where we could all be free agents, coming together for projects, doing only what we wanted, and disbanding as required, pursuing our leisure as rigorously as our professions in the meantime.

I think there's larger consequences to this and as project-based freelancers / contractors / professional service firms, these thoughts and desires reveal a very interesting bias about our collective perception of the nature of work. A bias, I think, that would make the heads explode of a great number of people in the current workforce. This "new capitalism" of free agents and flexible work has simultaneously utopian and distopian qualities for me as while it sounds appealing, I've also heard it used by neo-cons for the removal and disbanding of social systems (everyone just does their own thing and is responsible for themselves, right?). Richard Sennett's book, the Corrosion of Character tackles this and other issues associated with the political and personal impact of flexible workforces, lack of corporate responsibility for employees, and the "everyone for themselves" attitude that goes along with it.

Perhaps we should have had someone from organized labour on the panel. That might have provided everyone with a different perspective.

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All in all, my experience over the past 11 years with OpenRoad have been pretty fantastic when it comes to this whole area. We're a 9 to 5 office. Or a 7:30 to 4:30 office, depending if you're one of the early risers... We had a period in the late 90's when we burned the midnight oil, put in some big hours, and felt the burn as a result. And at the end of it all, work was still there the next day, waiting for us. As staff got older, started having families and their priorities began to shift, so too did our measures of success. The fact that the office is empty at 6:00 every day is something we've been pretty proud of for the last 7 years now.

I've been able to accomplish a lot in my athletic and volunteer endeavours, which have brought great meaning to my life on so many different levels. I was able to do this because of the nature of my work.

And importantly, we don't believe the quality of our work is compromised by this. We are proud of our work, our staff work on challenging projects, our clients are happy, and we're profitable on our projects. That's our measures of what being excellent is about. It seems simple, but in reality, it's the hardest thing you can do. Those three goals are always in competition, tugging and pulling at each other. And it's something you're never done with, trying to keep the whole thing in equilibrium.

Personally, I am constantly seeking a state of flow, one where my skills are challenged by new and slightly more difficult tasks. Am I in balance, have I figured out the right mix of all aspects of my life? Far from it. The pendulum will continue to swing as my mood and disposition change, my priorities are re-sorted, and I continue to ask myself on a regular ongoing basis, "What is the life worth living?"

My only advice on the whole thing: just be sure you never stop asking yourself that question and make sure the scope and focus of your life is larger than your career.