2015

It's the season for reflecting on the past year, thinking about the New Year and maybe making a few resolutions. This past year was a little different for me in a number of ways. I've just finished a short- term assignment in Singapore with a different kind of project, in a different part of the worId, and with a different way of working. We went to a different church. It was also the year when health issues came to a head and I eventually realised that they were pretty much all linked to stress.

All of this gives me a different perspective moving into 2015 and so hopefully my resolutions have a little more weight this year:

1. Work less - I guess a fancy way to say this is that I need a better work-life balance or that I need to work smarter. ln my case I think I just need to work less in order to redress the balance and be smarter in my work.
2. Exercise more - me and several million others in the world I'm guessing! But my reason isn't to lose weight but, linked to the first resolution, to lower my overall stress levels. Plus I'm not getting any younger!
3. Serve God in community - I recently read a book called Community by Brad House. It re-affirmed to me the importance of small groups in the church but added an emphasis on those groups being invested in the community. I want to be part of a group like that.
4. Finish my PhD - I've done the coursework and written the papers. I just need to pull together my dissertation, defend it and I'm done with my degree at IIT.

And that's it. Four resolutions are plenty! Anyone else have different resolutions this year?

Happy New Year !

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U Shaped Curves and Work-Life Balance

I'm not a sociologist, nor a psychologist. In a different blog I might open up about my opinion on the latter so-called "profession" (hint-hint) but for this blog I wanted to give some thoughts on the former. I have a growing appreciation for sociology and my favorite sociologists are probably not on anyone's list of conventional sociologists... I have a high regard for Robert Lewis and particularly his book Raising a Modern Day Knight in which he addresses the topic of raising healthy young men in the modern world. My other favourite is Malcolm Gladwell.

I recently finished reading David and Goliath in which, typical Gladwell style, he covers a myriad of topics from the London Blitz, to entrepeneurship, to school class size, and tries to tie them all together. His device for doing this was the "inverted-U". The argument goes that life is not linear and that more of something (or less of something if it's a bad thing) is not always better, but that beyond a certain point things stop getting better and actually turn downwards again. On the topic of class size he makes quite a convincing argument that there's an optimum class size somewhere in the high teens to low 20's and that going smaller doesn't work so well.

The concept of U-shaped curves or inverted-U curves resonated with me as it's common to see this in engineering where there's often an optimum point on a curve for all sorts of things... pH for biological systems, lifecycle costs of capital vs operating costs, improvement in my pool game vs number of beers I've had... OK the last one wasn't strictly engineering!

It struck me that the inverted-U could also be applied to work-life balance. It's obvious that if you're a lazy git or a "jobsworth" that does the bare minimum then you're probably not the most productive employee for a firm. What's not so obvious is that if you maximize your effort and try to do so for year after year then you might just burn out and then you're worse off than a lazy git (plus you'll have stress issues and have no life outside of work). Sure, people talk about "working smarter" instead of harder, but they still mean work more overall, I think, or at least it still seems to work out that way. The figure below puts all this into a graph.

 

From a personal perspective I've recently realized that I'm way too far to the right on the curve and have been that way for a couple of years now. My goal for 2015 is to figure out how to dial it back a bit and get into a sensible zone where my life is balanced and I don't burn out. How about you?

 

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