Moving from work-life-balance to work-life-blend

Amidst this current pandemic, one pertinent challenge is demarcating work-life-boundaries, especially when working across multiple time zones and in solitary home confinement. When does the working hour start and end? Chances are when the workday ends late evening there is an excessive amount of mental fatigue preventing from doing anything else in the personal space anymore. Outright prioritizing personal space may, on the other hand, hamper business significantly.

As a possible solution, we may perceive the personal and office work and its related mind-share to be intertwined throughout a given day. Some precursors for designing an effective work-life blend are outlined for individual consideration and incorporation:

1. Compass & Calendar Theory: Learnt from eminent educator Stephen Covey’s “Seven habits of highly effective people”, it is imperative to adopt the compass and calendar concept. In many cases the daily calendar is considered the primary workforce driver. A day may be full of meetings but the net value achievement is still not guaranteed. It is better to rather set the goals (compass) and then effectively split the task over days (calendar). Metaphorically speaking, the compass is the driving lyrics of the song while the calendar is the background music that can be altered for every “remix” necessary.
2. Hormonal Play: Cruising successfully through the daily calendar may trigger a pseudo sense of achievement (dopamine) or a sense of failure and stress (cortisol) on missing the schedules. None of them may actually be reflective of the true level of productivity.
3. The Unconscious Mind: The unconscious mind is usually assumed as the repository for all dark thoughts and unresolved emotions. However, the unconscious mind does have the capacity to process deeper thoughts and intellects and may be active without our conscious knowledge. Example: Try pondering on a given problem for a while, leave it midway and move to some other work. When the same problem is revisited after a while a ready solution may flash in mind. Analyzing the world of the unconscious, our thought process gets transferred to the unconscious where it continues to be worked upon with much higher processing power, even when we perceive being in a “distracted” state. The processed output is readily transferred back to the conscious mind during subsequent invocation.
4. Unnoticed Breaks at Workspace: Apart from lunch, coffee or occasional fire drills or floor meets, there are quite a few subtle unnoticed breaks. Though often criticized as a distraction, these are actually hidden “thermostats” controlling our stress levels. Example: someone stopping by for small talk, air-condition malfunction or internet slowness or an occasional tele-caller on the desk phone persuading to buy a credit card.
5. A Guilty Mind: Answering the home phone or attending the doorbell during designated working hours at times may induce a level of guilt, maybe arising from the tight coupling of the calendar paradigm. We should rather be measured on the quantum and quality of work over a promised period of time and not by the perceived attention level, degree of isolation and confinement within a designated eight hour working day.

As a way forward, we should learn to quantitatively measure the quality of the work. While timeliness should be a metric, it cannot be the only measure to assess the level of productivity. Some individualistic operational thoughts on these lines are:

1. Budget for 12–14 hours work-life-blended day
2. Believe that continuous, undivided attention for several hours is a near impossibility and may be inessential at times
3. Identify work packets that demands full attention. Example: composing a proposal, an important email or a solution design or being the main speaker at a conference. Surely, here there is no scope of time slicing and requires minimum distraction.
4. Identify work packets that may not need dedicated attention: Example: skill refresh webinars, bigger group status calls, capturing pen-and-paper design works (wireframes, architecture elements) into CASE tools, backing up storage devices, performing routine checks on systems otherwise running without disruption and similar others. Such tasks do allow fine time slicing to catch up with some personal spaces such as general small talks, or grocery order placement, or a glance through the Netflix newsletter or the news headlines or stock market performance.
5. Identify work packets which need high attention, but leaves significant chunks of time in between: Example: running a DevOps pipeline or iteratively training a machine learning model or an important meeting moved out by half an hour. These do, in theory, allow to even watch a web series episode, since there is not much which can be alternatively done otherwise.

An alert, flexible and guilt-free mind is needed to allow rapid context switching between work and personal spaces and without compromising on any of the domains. Moreover, this can never be pre-planned. It is rather like a nature photographer who needs to be alert for several hours to capture one special moment. Likewise, we need to be alert to judge each piece of work in real-time — to see if it can be intertwined with some other suitable personal tasks without hampering the overall quality. Personal capacity, judgment, and confidence do play the key element here but it is still a novel perspective and a skill that may be mastered with continual practice.