Category Archives: Work Life Balance

Your Business is No Excuse for Being an A**hole

Advice, Reflections, Work Life Balance, , , ,

To be honest, I thought it was a joke; irony, perhaps, or sarcasm. But no, to my surprise, I clicked on Love Your Business More Than Your Family, a column on entrepreneur.com, and he’s serious. Author George Cloutier says:

Your cell phone is for keeping in touch with clients and sales managers in the field, not for taking calls from your spouse throughout the day about what groceries to pick up on the way home. Cutting out early to take your kids to baseball practice three times a week, or picking up your Aunt Tilly or Uncle Ned from the airport, are unacceptable interruptions to success.

You can keep doing these things and waste dozens of hours each week. Or you can focus on the financial future of your business and work all day, every day. You are the only person responsible for fixing your business and making it better, and that isn’t going to happen while you take 14 personal phone calls a day and attend local Cub Scout meetings three-times a week.

That is extremely bad advice. I have absolutely nothing against George Cloutier. I’m even a fellow columnist on the same entrepreneur.com site, where I do a column on business planning. But sheesh, how can I read that, and not write about it? What would Bob Sutton (author of the book on business a**holes) say about this?

How wrong is George’s advice? Well, there’s no way to list all that’s wrong with it, but here at least is just a brief start on that list:

  1. It’s bad for your life. And business is to serve life, not life to serve business. Make no mistake about it; if you choose to “work all day, every day” do it purposely and knowingly, recognizing that you’re sacrificing your life for a business. Stay single and alone. Don’t ever have kids.
  2. It’s bad for your business too. You don’t manage a business, manage a team, make decisions, and get through the long hard days without balancing your life. People eventually blow up when they try.
  3. OK there are exceptions, but what if you aren’t one of them? What if you sacrifice everything and you don’t end up like Richard Branson, water skiing in the Caribbean with a naked model? Some totally obsessed people end up wealthy and happy; but obsession doesn’t create the success, and most of them are just lonely and full of regrets.

Am I exaggerating here? I should add that I’m not just quoting him out of context. He means it. He starts with an obsolete tale of an obsolete business school professor from about 40 years ago telling married students to give up because they couldn’t be married and successful. Here’s what he says about that:

He told them that a family would get in the way of their success, so there wasn’t much point in them taking his course. In the end he let them stay, of course, but he wasn’t kidding. That was his way of making an important point: If you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to love your business more than anything else–even your family.

And he finishes with this conclusion:

Often you will feel tremendous pressure to take time away from your business to devote to family matters. But in the end, the best thing you can do for them is to create the legacy of a business that is thriving and financially sound. When you’re retired, wealthy, and able to spend Valentine’s Day and other special occasions with your kids and grandkids at your winter home in Hilton Head, you’ll be glad you devoted so much of your time to your first love: your business.

Don’t believe him. I do hope that George is in Hilton Head with kids and grandkids. But if you or I follow his advice, we wouldn’t have anything at all to do on Valentine’s Day. Neither our kids nor our grandkids will be spending time with us. They’ll be with our ex-spouse and probably the step-parent who actually raised them. Skip the occasions, the practices, the parenting, and plan on being alone. And, unless you’re very unusual, regretting it. To paraphrase a line from Hello Dolly: “and on those cold winter nights, Horace, you can snuggle up to your cash register. It’s a little lumpy, but it rings.”

Life is way too short to lose to business. Bring business and life together, mind your balance, and be successful at both. That’s what entrepreneurship is really for.

(Image credit: by Loren Javier via Flickr cc)

Research Agrees: Time is the Scarcest Resource.

Advice, Reflections, Work Life Balance, ,

I was going to do another strategy piece this morning, in keeping with the time for planning theme I’d thought I was doing for this week. But no. We can do business strategy next year. Instead, for this last work day of this long and less-than-stellar year, let’s please enjoy, now, this excellent new research about the psychology of putting off enjoyment.

I’ve said it several times on this blog, usually in the context of work-life balance: time is the scarcest resource. This research looks into that tendency we all have to save the miles, or the gift certificates, or the vacation days, or the best wine, in “a widespread form of procrastination” that’s about putting off the good times, not the bad. “The strange impulse to put off until tomorrow what could be enjoyed today.”

And here we have this NYTimes.com piece on new research that confirms it. Author John Tierney starts it with this intriguing lead:

For once, social scientists have discovered a flaw in the human psyche that will not be tedious to correct. You may not even need a support group. You could try on your own by starting with this simple New Year’s resolution: Have fun … now!

The core of it is this:

… we’re not accurate in our estimates of “resource slack,” as it is termed by Gal Zauberman and John G. Lynch. These behavioral economists found that when people were asked to anticipate how much extra money and time they would have in the future, they realistically assumed that money would be tight, but they expected free time to magically materialize.

Hence you’re more likely to agree to a commitment next year, like giving a speech, that you would turn down if asked to find time for it in the next month. This produces what researchers call the “Yes … Damn!” effect: when the speech comes due next year, you bitterly discover you’re still as busy as ever.

So enjoy the holiday. Have a Happy New Year.

Holidays Part 2: Having a Life in the Meantime

Reflections, Work Life Balance,

In case you’re wondering, my post here yesterday was also subtitled Holidays Part 1. (I did that in invisible ink, so you wouldn’t see it there. But it was.)

For part 2, keeping on with my holiday theme of moving back a bit from business, reflecting on what’s really important in life (even if just for a while, around this time), I’d like to refer back to some earlier posts I’ve done, before 2009, that reflect the same “and having a life in the meantime” theme that’s part of the charter of this blog (see the subtitle there, in the banner?). You may have seen some of my more recent posts in this same motif (which, by the way, seem to bring me a lot of traffic), such as the what business schools don’t teach, or 10 ways to save your life from your business, or 10 lessons learned in 22 years of bootstrapping. These others are from more than a year ago:

(Photo: Jeff Bank/Shutterstock)

Let He Who is WITH Sin Cast the First Blog

Reflections, Work Life Balance, , , ,

This is Monday of the first of two holiday weeks. This is a good time to pull back a bit, reflect on things from a different perspective. It’s really good that our various religions, cultures, and traditions remind us, every once in a while, to slow down and think. Especially this year, which has been a tough one for a lot of us, an especially difficult year for small business, entrepreneurship, economics, health care, and politics.

Let’s pause a bit from normal business. Let’s think about what matters most, whatever that is, for each one of us. And then ask whether the way we spend ourselves – time, effort, stress, dreams – matches what’s most important to us.

One thing I’d like to suggest, is looking for the common denominators we can all agree on. Like compassion. That ought not to be controversial.

I don’t mean to be “preachy” (my daughter’s word). When I get all goody-goody like this, please don’t ask my wife about it. I can be as hypocritical as the next person, but jeez, at least we can remind each other once in a while, no? In this context, I’m really glad the well-known words of wisdom are “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Instead of “let he (or she) who is without sin write blogs.”

Especially during the holidays.

And thank you for reading this blog. I like writing it and I’m grateful that my readership has grown a lot this year. Thanks for linking here, thanks for tweeting here, and thanks especially for your comments.

(Photo credit: Winter in Yosemite Valley, by Peter Weber, via Shutterstock)

10 Tips for Saving Your Life From Your Business

Advice, Back to Fundamentals, Entrepreneurship, Reflections, Work Life Balance, ,

Your business or your life? The nagging question comes up a lot. Recently I saw this startling statement:

Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family.

That was in this post by Jason Cohen on VentureBeat. He’s serious. He quotes Mark Cuban and one other successful entrepreneur. He says you can’t get it all done otherwise. Build your business first, then build your life. Yeah, right. Like business gets easier at some point? When it grows? Good luck with that.

Logical flaw: for every successful entrepreneur who cites sacrificing health and family as the key to success, there are 10 others who say sacrificing health and family is a tragic mistake. Another logical flaw: millions of people sacrificed health and family and weren’t successful. All their sacrifice did was ruin their lives. Nobody quotes them. They call that survivor bias.

Personally, I don’t buy the passion, obsession, sacrifice all for your business philosophy. Success in life can be something different than purely sales, growth, profits, and celebrity as an entrepreneurial success. Not many of us end up as top-ten world-class entrepreneurs, and, for the rest of us, having a life can be way more important. The sacrifice doesn’t cause success. It’s a rationalization. So I’d like to suggest two sets of rules to help you save your life from your business. The first five are fundamental rules. The second set, five more, are suggestions more than rules; different ways to think about things; reminders.

First, the five fundamentals. I consider these practical, realistic, actionable rules that are good for everybody. For the record, four of the five are rules that I’ve lived with for a long time. Two of them thanks go to my wife and not me; and the fifth, the exercise one, I learned the hard way, by not doing it. I promise you that you can live by all five and not have to sacrifice business success for any of them. These will help you keep your balance:

  1. Develop and honor meal times with people you love. For me and my wife, as we built our business, it was about family meals, dinner time, once a day. We made the family dinner a priority. During crunch times, we’d stop, have dinner with our kids, and then go on later (see point 3, below). And you don’t need a marriage and children to make this rule important. Do it your way, not mine. It applies just as well to any relationship that’s important to you.
  2. Schedule vacations long in advance. If you like what you do in your business, you’re always going to have trouble getting away. There will always be a good business reason to not go on vacations. If you’re scheduled long in advance, then the vacation is on the calendar. As you talk to clients, schedule business events, and generally work on the business, your vacation shows up, and you naturally work around it.
  3. Get used to working at home. So you have a lot of work but you tear yourself away, take your dinner time, spend some time in real life, and then later on, when everybody else is watching dumbing and numbing television, you can get back on the computer and catch up with your obsession. That requires good Internet connection and related tools, like online productivity tools, GoToMyPC, and the like.
  4. Don’t obsess; plan. Don’t wander through the rest of life with business thoughts running through your head like a helicopter background noise in your dreams. Take a few deep breaths. To get the business-helicopter-mind out of your head keep the planning realistic. Planning gets a lot of things out of your head and into the plan. When you wake up at night obsessing, go to your planning. Write it down. Relax, and go back to sleep.
  5. Get regular exercise. I’ve been there: It’s so easy to put off exercise because you’re worried about the business. “I have too much to do, I don’t have time for exercise,” you tell yourself, and it becomes a rationalization to dive back into that project or those emails. But there’s a trick to exercise: you get more time back, in productivity, than what you put into the exercise. Seriously: put in 45 minutes 3-4 days a week and you’ll get back an hour of productive time for every half hour you spend. It has to do with sleep, stress, and mental health.

And then, after the fundamentals, five fine touches, embellishments, not-so-universal, but maybe still useful:

  1. Do something you can believe in. It’s not just finding the best business opportunity; it’s finding one you believe in. There’s quality of work as well as quantity, and high quality makes high quantity easier to live with. Make sure that when you take a step back from it, every so often, you can see how what you do made other lives better.
  2. Acknowledge risk. Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose. Understand the risk you take. Talk about it with the other people in your life, so you don’t feel all alone with the risk. Think about the worst case. Learn to live with it.
  3. Don’t clam up. Share carefully. Be able to talk about business problems, safely, with at least one other person in your life. Get out of the let’s solve them mode, and into the let’s just talk about them so creative juices can percolate. People who care about you take silence as being something like walls and barriers. Secrets are stressful. Sharing relieves stress. But be careful, mind the framework and parameters of sharing, people have to know when you don’t want to be told the obvious feedback.
  4. Understand that you make mistakes. Acknowledge your mistakes, analyze them, and them package them up in your mind and store them somewhere out of site, somewhere where you can access them occasionally to help avoid making the same mistakes again, but, on the other hand, where they won’t just drive you crazy.
  5. Tell the truth. Then you don’t have to keep track of which lies you told to which people. It’s hard enough to manage stress without having to manage complex alternate realities.

None of the above guarantees business success, but none of it is really going to get in the way of your success either, and it may help you stay sane in the meantime. Think about this: my wife taught me, early in our 40-year-marriage, that time is the scarcest resource, way scarcer than money. And some day you’re going to turn 60. Unless you die first.

(Image: Kenneth V. Pilon/Shutterstock)

Why I’ll Never Retire

Baby Boomer, True Stories, Work Life Balance, , ,

Ugh, baby boomers, retirement, selling the business … ouch. Strikes me like “lions, tigers, and bears,” in the Wizard of Oz. Scary.

I’m 61. It was my choice to change my job more than two years ago, so that now instead of managing my company with 45 employees I’m writing, speaking, blogging, and teaching. And I thank God that I had that choice. The company’s better off with a new management team, and I’m better off with a new job. But I worry about the rest of us. Retirement scares the hell out of me.

One of my closest friends retired two years ago. Now he’s bored out of his mind, looking for things to do, and not happy about it.

I’ve seen some successful retirements: it seems to work when they jump from one thing to another, something they like, something they’ve always wanted to do. Golf and fishing, or the equivalent, are rarely enough.

One variable that I’m sure matters is liking what you do. As my good friend now retired used to talk about it with relish, just 3-4 years ago, it always sounded great to him, but horrible to me. And, no surprise, he was tired of his work, but had nowhere else obvious to go. I was getting tired of the managing, but I did have somewhere I wanted, badly to go: the writing, speaking, etc. I still love the company I started, just not the day-to-day management of it. I liken my new job here to the concept of a safe harbor. It’s different, it’s easily separable from what I did for years, but it’s still the same company, same industry. And it also keeps me away from meddling with the new management, which (I’m pretty sure) is a relief to them.

Apparently I’m not the only one. I just read Steve King’s Greying of the Workforce post on Small Business Labs. Lots of grey-haired folks are staying on longer. And that’s because they want to, not because they have to.

And then there’s this, which turned up last week in Why Retirement is Bad For You, on Forbes.com

Studies show that men who retired from corporate jobs, donned their gold watches and lazed about at a resort lived measurably shorter lives than those who sought productive work (e.g., volunteering for organizations like SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives). In fact, plenty of retirees who traded productive work for sunshine and early-bird dinners dropped dead surprisingly soon after making the transition.

That seems like a variation on the same theme. Those older people in the work force are probably way better off for it, at least if they figure out how to be in jobs they like. Maybe that’s the best answer to an aging population?

5 Ways to Break Up a Bad Office Work Day

Personal Productivity, Work Life Balance, , ,

It’s one of those days. Maybe you have technical problems, or a project that isn’t going well, you couldn’t sleep last night, you’ve run into a writer’s block or thinker’s block or city block. Maybe you just lost a client. Or learned about a powerful new competitor. Or maybe it’s simply just a bad day. It happens.

These are things that help break up a bad day.

1. Clean up the clutter.

Put on some music you like. Throw things out. Find the desk space down at the bottom of all the papers, books, cables, envelopes, and so on. You’ll be amazed at how much better you’ll feel in just a few minutes.

Second prize: clean out your digital clutter. Start with email. Sort into categories (folders or tags) for things you should keep, and archive. Empty the inbox.

Grand prize: take an hour or two. Do both.

2. Do one of those nagging-annoying tasks you’ve been avoiding.

Your business life is full of small annoying tasks you put off. Most of us rationalize that we have other more important, or more urgent, things to do, and we let this go. It’s that list you promised, the research you wanted to do, maybe it’s a call or a letter or email task you’ve been avoiding. Get this one done and you’ll feel better about everything else.

3. Exercise. Take a walk. Or a run.

Break out of your routine. Exercise is funny because of what John Jantsch, the marketing guru, called the math of exercise: the time you take gives you more time later. Particularly when you’re in that droopy slump time. Break it up, get out, come back to it later, fresh.

4. Do something Creative. Draw something. Write a haiku. Or a blog post.

What I mean is do something creative. Seriously, a haiku is a great mood changer: just three lines. Try this search for haiku on Twitter, and you’ll see. And if that’s too much, do whatever you do when you want to break the mood. Or, how about this: write an email to somebody you care about, not about business, just catching up with things.

5. Indulge somebody else.

My point 4 above reminded me: if the first thought is to go get yourself a chocolate and a hug somewhere, indulge yourself. But this is even better: indulge somebody else. Don’t get yourself a candy and a hug, give both to somebody else. Or call your mother or your sister or your spouse. Buy a kid you know a book you think they’d like.

There’s research I saw in the New York Times that shows spending money on somebody else is more likely to buy happiness than spending it on yourself. Here’s a quote:

“These experimental results,” the researchers conclude, “provide direct support for our causal argument that spending money on others promotes happiness more than spending money on oneself.”

So, seriously, have a good day.

(Note: I posted this on Huffington Post yesterday. I’m reposting here because this is my main blog.)

Compassion Should Be Universal

Business Ethics, Current Affairs, Work Life Balance, ,

I’ve posted about the Charter for Compassion before. In this post about a year ago, I said:

Do you want to help solve one of the world’s great problems? This has to be as important as clean energy: religious fundamentalism turning into violence and hatred. The darker side of humanity seems at its worst when powered by misguided religious fervor.

“Misguided” is the active word there. All major religions have some variation on what I learned as the golden rule — do unto others as you would have others do unto you– at their core. Despite that, some religiously oriented groups preach violence and hatred.

And now it’s just about a year later, and I stand by those words. And that organization, the Charter for Compassion, is now organizing a second annual global event, for Nov. 12.

Can we think about compassion for just a moment? Compassion is caring for other people. It’s very easy to translate into a business context if you just think about caring for customers, employees, vendors, and owners. There’s no down side. Right? I’ve called it empathy on occasion and posted here and here on this blog about how empathy can help a business.

And of course it’s even more obvious that compassion is essential to happiness, good relationships, mental health, and the survival of the human race. Right?

Why then does it feel oddly out of place to be writing about compassion here, as if I’m getting too “touchy-feely” or something like that? That’s weird, isn’t it? Is there anyplace where compassion isn’t a good thing?

The two-minute video here is very eloquent. And if you don’t see it in this site, there are links below to take you to the source.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6774085&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION TRAILER from TED Prize on Vimeo.

Compassion isn’t liberal or conservative, or Western or Eastern, or about one particular god or many gods. It’s not a code word for something else. It’s the human condition. I hope.  Here’s more from the site:

There is an urgent need for a new focus on compassion.
Bringing together voices from all cultures and religions, the Charter seeks to remind the world we already share the core principles of compassion.
On November 12, thousands of people across the globe will listen together.
Participate and engage with the Charter now at charterforcompassion.org

Choose Your Own World View. Pick One.

Advice, Work Life Balance, ,

Sometime around the middle of last week I published the following quote from Walt Disney:

A man should never neglect his family for business

Somebody who read that quote followed up by asking me:

Yes, it’s possible, but you need to apply common sense too, no?

That comment started me thinking. And I ended up drawing the diagram here and wondering whether there aren’t two competing worlds we live in or choose between.

I posed the three factors you can see in the diagram:

  1. The people you care about
  2. Work you like
  3. Business success

And that led me to a the key question: Do the three factors pull away from the center, and away from each other; or do they push towards the center, and work better together.

So which of these is your world?

1. The Glass Half Empty

If all three of these main factors here pull you away from the others, you live in a sad world. In that case,  time with people you care about takes you away from business. And work you like makes you less successful. The underlying world view is full of hard roads, long work weeks, managing by criticizing and threats, racing rats racing, and climbing corporate ladders. In this world, nice guys finish last.

  • The more attention you give to people you care about, the less you have work you like and business success.
  • The more attention given to work you like, the less of you is available for your people, and the less business success.
  • The more attention focused on business success, the less you can give to people you care about and the work you like.

2. The Glass Half Full

On the other hand, what if you live in a world in which all three factors pull towards the center?  Focus on work you like, and you do more, achieve more, become more successful, all of which makes you happy and giving more of yourself to the people you care about.

Is that your world?

The easiest argument to make is that business success and work that you like go together. Do what you love, love what you do, be more likely to succeed. Building a business around doing what you love is hardly a novel idea.

It’s harder to argue that focusing on people you care about (you could call that family if you like, but it’s not necessary) generates work you like and business success. I think this is where we have to bring in the compromise, just as my friend suggested above. Find ways to compromise to maintain balance between work and the rest of life.

Conclusion

Is either one of these worlds real? They both are. It’s up to you.

(Photo credit: PeterPolak/Shutterstock) (Drawing/diagram is my own)