Australians, on average, work too much. Gartner say that this is going to change, and that a 20 hour work week is probable by the year 2015.
Compare this to Tim Ferriss who is currently selling the concept of the four hour work week. He warns against going for your dream job as it can lead to a blurring of the work/life boundary. This is an interesting concept - don’t get too “into” your job or it may swallow you. Here is what Tim had to say about the concept of work/life balance:
I am a strong advocate of work-life separation as opposed to work-life balance. The concept of work-life “balance” is a dangerous one because “balance” is often mistaken to mean blending, where work and personal tasks are alternated in the same environments, or where one activity is expected to provide both work and life. The Blackberry is checked while you wait for dinner in a restaurant, the laptop is cracked while your spouse waits for you in bed, and the passion you loved so dearly for 10 years is now expected to pay the mortgage. This keeps your mind in the office 24/7 and destroys the few activities you cherished for the pure joy of experiencing them. This produces—at best—a state of constant low-grade overwhelm, even if actual workload is low.
I wish I didn’t have any personal experience of what he calls the state of constant low-grade overwhelm, but it describes my life to a T. I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon from a client office where I’m preparing for an interstate flight and a full-day meeting tomorrow. I’ve got some afterwork finished, more to go, and I observed this morning that my “todo” lists for work and blogging are growing at a faster rate than I can successfully undertake the work. The Ferriss solution is to outsource, and this is certainly possible with blogging in the form of guest blogging, and asking for a hand with afterwork. I’m not sure that it is sustainable as a long-term solution though - unless I am in a position to better outsource what is in front of me, or change things such that I can take advantage of $5.00 an hour white paper writers and the like.
What will the currently overworked do if the 20 hour work week ever happens? More to the point, how many of the 60 hour a week crowd will live to see that day?
The following post was originally made on Facibus On Blogging and was the inspiration for this blog:
Darren Rowse gives some good advice for Prebloggers on how much work is involved in Problogging. Prebloggers are would-be Probloggers - people who are interested in finding out how to blog for a living. Darren’s readership must contain a lot of Prebloggers amongst the Probloggers that regularly comment on his posts.
I think that the point of Darren’s post is that Problogging is hard work. He lists the following as typical Prologger tasks:
- Posting Posts
- Researching Posts
- Moderating Spam Comments
- Dealing with Comment Trolls
- Responding to Comments
- Responding to Emails from Readers
- Following what others blogs in the niche write
- Following what mainstream media is writing on the niche
- Commenting on other blogs
- Administering Servers
- Renewing Domain Names
- Marketing/Branding the blog
- Chasing up spam blogs stealing content
- Promoting posts to other relevant bloggers
- Search Engine Optimization
- Blog Design
- Monitoring Blog Stats and Metrics
- Testing monetization strategies
- Administering payments, banking cheques, invoicing advertisers
- Networking with other bloggers via IM or email
There are a lot of Prebloggers that are doing a lot of this stuff (except for banking the cheques) already while holding down a full-time job. So here is the question that I need answered for myself: how do we, as Prebloggers, maintain the work/blog/life balance?
Indulge me for a little while and I’ll take you through a day in my life to provide background to the question. A typical day for me starts at around 5AM. I’m an early riser, and like to get stuff done while the rest of the world is quiet. I’ll spend until 6:30AM or so working on blog setup, blog postings, or ‘afterwork’ (take home work from my day job as a consultant). The afterwork workload varies - some days (and weekends) I do little else in my spare time, other days it might only take 15 minutes - some of it involves a lot of playing with the mediawiki wiki platform, which is a tale for another day. At 6:30 Helen and I start getting ready for work, so that we can be there by 8AM. Depending on what is happening and how I am feeling on the day (at the moment, getting over a cold, I might not be up to much after about 4PM) I’ll leave the client site and either head home or into the company office. There is usually at least one meeting in the company office requiring my presence a week, often two. If I am heading straight home I might get into a bit more work/blogging (up to an hour or so) before getting dinner ready. If I am think my emotional health requires it I will rest or play games on my Nintendo Wii. Helen gets home and we spend some time together discussing our respective days, we eat and watch a little TV or a movie. After that I’m back on the tools for an hour or two before retiring with a book. Some evenings we go out to eat (probably once a week) and maybe a big-screen movie.
In other words, I will spend four hours or more on an average day working on afterwork and blogging apart from client-time work (minimum 7.5 hours per weekday) and liesure time. Where is the balance? How do I find it? It is interesting enough that I’ll probably blog about just that - finding the Work/Blog/Life balance.
