How to maintain work life balance and sanity in the tech industry

As you collect experience and hopefully get more senior in your position you are at some point undoubtedly going to get to a point where this is something you will need to start thinking about.

I surprisingly often get asked by junior colleagues about how I deal with this, with the implication (At least in my mind) that I seem to have gotten some things right in their eyes so I figured I will try to share some of my insights, tips and tricks in this area.

Work with something you love

This might sound kind of obvious, but also I have found a lot of people don't like what they do. The key here is that you want to work with something that you don't mind doing if you have nothing else going on. The other part of this tip is that when you don't have anything else going on, try to have the discipline to actually work. What this allows you to do is not work when you do have other things you would like to do.

Make sure you also have a boss that realizes that as long as you get your stuff done, it doesn't matter how or when you do it. If this isn't the case for you, start looking for another place to work.

Set boundaries

In my entire life I don't think I have ever worked on a project that had enough time to get everything that we wanted done in the time allotted to do it. With that you have to realize that very few people will tell you to work less, it is up to you to set the boundaries of how much you work. There is also a point of diminishing returns for when the quantity of work put in doesn't actually increase your productive output.

You also shouldn't compare yourself to your colleagues too much, especially when it comes to the quantity of work put in. First of all there have been tons of studies that have concluded that when people estimate how much work they have put in they are usually over estimating it. So when a coworker of your tell you that they have worked 80 hour weeks, take that with a grain of salt. Secondly people might be putting in a lot of time without actually getting a lot of things done. Be the person who works smart instead of hard.

As an example think of the person who works 80 hours a week, week after week, making sure that a system that is unstable stays healthy and when it isn't constantly nurses it back to health. Compare this to the person who instead figures out the few defects in the system that causes it to be unstable and fixes them so the system now runs more or less by itself. Who of these two would you think was most valuable to the team?

Manage distractions

Another aspect of being able to manage your work life balance is to make sure that when you work, you are as productive as possible. In today's world there are so many things that are constantly trying to pull your attention away from what you are supposed to be working on. Especially as you become more senior it will get more important to manage your distractions effectively so that you can actually get things done.

In my own case I have several ways in which people can connect with me and I control obsessively what methods are actually able to notify me immediately instead of me only seeing it when I check them.

• My pager (Piece of software on my phone). This is the only thing that I allow to wake me up if I sleep.
• Phone calls and text messages. This is the only other thing on my phone that is allowed to either vibrate or make a sound. The one exception is that I allow my calendar to make a tiny chirp when I have a meeting. Apart from that my phone is silent.
• Chat applications. I don't let these in any way interrupt me. This includes no visual popups or sounds in any way. They are the first things I check when I take a break from work to see if anybody needs anything from me though.
• Email. It amazes me that almost everybody I know allows mail to both make a sound and show a popup on their computer. For me email is something I check a few times a day and my personal goal is to read emails within no more than a day after it is sent. If you need something faster from me you would need to ping me in another way or just get lucky.

All this comes down to trying to get as many prolonged periods of time that allow you to actually focus on whatever problem you have at hand without being constantly interrupted. When you inevitably drift off and lose focus, then you go and check if anybody needs something from you. Not the other way around where you lose focus because other people need your input (Unless it is really important and time critical).

Don't hoard knowledge

An extension to managing distractions is to do your best to not hoard knowledge. First of all, if you are the only person who knows something then you are guaranteeing that people will need to bug you to figure out how things are working. Secondly, you are by extension implying that you are sure that your coworkers can in no way improve your work. Now, if that is true then I feel sorry for you because that doesn't sound like a fun place to work.

I have met several people that do this more or less unconsciously probably as a safety mechanism to improve job security. This is misguided though because it ensures that as you progress in your career you are guaranteeing that you will be spending more and more of your time maintaining old projects instead of working on new things and leaving the maintenance to other people and I have hardly ever found an engineer that would not prefer to work on new things rather than maintenance.

Also on this topic is to be open for people to come to you and ask questions and your goal should be to explain it well enough that they understand it well enough to be able to answer the same question if somebody else asks it off them.

As an ending thought I have a request for junior people reading this though to try to not ask the same question too many times before you write it down so that you don't have to ask it again (Again, just trying to manage your senior colleagues distractions).

The end of cavities

Scientists have discovered a molecule that when kept in your mouth for 60 seconds will keep your teeth cavity proof for hours. Specifically the molecule kills Streptococcus Mutans and can be added to pretty much any dental product or even candy.

The product still needs FDA approval but once that is hopefully achieved dental care can be changed forever for the better and we will hopefully all be able to keep the teeth we have.

Maybe organic food isn't better for you

If you are like me and have generally assumed that organic food is better for you then we might have all been falling for the marketing. A recent big meta study in the Annals of Internal Medicine examined 17 different studies into the health benefits between eating organic and "normal" food and found no statistically significant changes based on the source of the food.

I'll probably still keep eating the organic food since I just kind of prefer to keep my pesticide and animal growth hormone intake to a minimum regardless of health implications. If all you care about is your health though then at least for now it seems that there are probably other changes to your lifestyle that have a bigger impact on your health. Did you know for instance that regularly flossing your teeth increases your average lifespan with over 6 years.

Scientist might have found a cure for Malaria!

In an awesome development researchers at the University of Cape Town might have found a quick and easy cure for Malaria. Malaria is one of the most common causes of death world wide with an estimated 200 million cases in 2010 and around 1 million deaths. As a comparison this is almost as many deaths as from AIDS with the difference that there are few precautions you can take to protect you against the disease.

Current treatments are complicated, long and have many bad side effects. The new treatment is a pill that needs to be taken only once and so far no side effects have been observed. It is scheduled to enter human trials in 2013 and if successful could save millions of lives in the future, many of them children who are extra susceptible to the disease.

First step to gene therapy against aging

According to this article researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre has successfully tested a gene therapy on mice that caused the life span of the mice to increase by up to 24% from a single treatment at adult age. I hope this translates to humans soon enough for me to make use of it.

Eat right, loose weight, without being hungry

As you must know the only way to loose weight is to live with a caloric deficit over a fairly long period of time. Sure you can do some sort of weird fad of the week crazy diet but in the end the only way you will burn off the fat reserves stored in your body is to consume less calories than your body need, no matter how you do it.

That said you don't have to actually go hungry or eat boring food as long as you eat the correct food and here is a long list of food that you can eat almost as much as you want of and still keep your caloric intake low. It's divided by type of food and there is something for everyone in there. For instance low fat popcorn or Kimchi are both delicious and low on calories.

Have you checked your vitamin D level recently?

If you know me you have probably heard me being fairly skeptical about weird dietary supplements like anti oxidants and such. However for about a year and a half I have been taking Vitamin D supplements. It all started with me listening to an episode of Security Now that veered off it's normal trail of talking about computer security and talked about Vitamin D in general and I encourage anybody who is interested to listen to this podcast.

Vitamin D first of all isn't technically a vitamin since the body can produce it internally from cholesterol as long as it has access to sunlight. However, this ability is reliant on pigment and most white people have a shortage of Vitamin D, especially if you life in a place that doesn't have much sun. I live in Southern California, drive a convertible and generally spend quite a lot of time in the sun and I had a pretty severe shortage when I tested myself during my last check-up about a year and a half ago. My doctor suggested I would start eating supplements and I did.

Having low levels of Vitamin D can lead to any number of serious health problems (Source Wikipedia).

• Bone Health
• Cancer
• Multiple sclerosis
• Immune Deficiency

I can just from a personal note say that I have not had a serious cold or flu since I started taking Vitamin D supplements and I usually get sick at least once a year normally (Usually in the early spring). It's also ironic that something that improves by tanning is also good to prevent cancer, but so seem to be the case.

As always with anything medical if you want to test this out, check with your doctor. Too high levels of Vitamin D can also be harmful so take a blood test, my doctor told me that this was just recently added as something they normally test for during a routine check up here in the US, but I would ask about it just to be sure.

Did you think it was dangerous leaving a plastic bottle in your car?

I've heard that leaving a plastic bottle in a hot car was dangerous plenty of time and just found this video explaining that it isn't. The main thesis that came to this conclusion was flawed. The contaminant found in the experiment wasn't even present in the plastic tested but by the time that was discovered the media had already picked it up and run with it so now everybody knows that you shouldn't do this.

Source inFact

Another reason to loose weight

If you need another reason to loose weight a recent article published in Maternal and Child Health Journal seem to indicate that obese women seem to have children that are statistically worse in math and reading tests than other children when adjusted for other factors such as socioeconomics status, parental levels of education etc.