My wife and I returned back to Kuala Lumpur last weekend, after almost three weeks of being away. Aside from our biannual trip to her home in Austria, we also did a fair of bit traveling around Scandinavia.
I especially like traveling, and I spend time planning these trips to ensure that we both see and experience as much as possible.
After such a connected and intense time together with my wife, the hardest part is to come back home, decouple, and get back to our daily work lives.
Usually for the first few days of being back, we both feel a sense of separation having spent a lot of time with each other, on holiday. While these vacations serve as a break, and offer us tremendous opportunities to learn, most importantly they help me connect quite deeply with my wife.
Many of you who read my column every week put in long hours at work.
It is pretty clear that for you to advance in your professional lives you will need to work between eight and 12 hours a day, for the foreseeable future.
Often, for you, the 60-hour work a week is the absolute minimum.
In my leadership coaching session, people sometimes ask me how to manage being a good spouse, while still succeeding at work, considering the number of hours their work demands.
To be frank, I am still a work in progress in this regard.
But, I understand that the dilemma that most of us face is the conflict between our private life, and the demands of a rigorous work-life.
How do you find balance?
Juggling a professional career as well as being an owner of multiple businesses, and also being a husband, I have had to work out what success actually means to me.
While the delineation of my work-life balance varies from time to time, the hardest part has always been to get my professional and personal needs, aligned.
At some points I have found it impossible to pay enough attention to both facets of my life. And sadly, like many of you, I, too, have opted for the wrong priorities.
My feeling used to be that my work or business life had to take priority, because it paid for my life-style choices.
But as my marriage and my health suffered from the lack of attention, I understood that I had to make changes.
I decided that I would actively seek the balance I need to give to all aspects of my life.
Professionally, I continue to work quite intensely. But I have become more demanding of myself on how I use my time. At work, I became selective of what to do each day, within a given number of hours, without overreaching.
To be successful at this, you must be absolutely honest with yourself.
You must curb laziness, and learn to manage your tendency to procrastinate. Each day, focus on what needs to be done and prioritise. But pay attention to how you can free yourself up within a given time-frame. This way you have more time to share with the people and the things you care about.
I also have some other techniques I use to ensure that I achieve this balance.
My wife and I try to spend about an hour each morning together, before we head off to work. This time is not spent attending to our morning chores. Those things get done earlier. This is time spent hanging out together, talking and connecting over a cup of coffee.
The tough part is to not get drawn to the newspapers or your social media feeds. And if you manage to get this morning connection done effectively, it sets you up nicely for the rest of the day.
The next thing is to create a schedule in your life. As boring and predictable as this may sound, it will be your salvation when trying to balance your work and private lives.
I am fortunate that I work for myself therefore I am not constrained by rigid working hours. However, this also means that I can end up working all day long. So, I work on following a schedule. This includes planning when I reply my emails, or how often I count the “likes” on my social media posts.
And, arguably the most important discipline both my wife and I have cultivated, is to go on “work-free-dates”. This simply means that we go out for a movie, or for a walk, or for a meal, and choose not to discuss work matters at all. But instead, we just focus on being in each other’s company.
When you successfully master the balance of attention between your personal life and your professional or business life; and by placing your personal life on a higher priority, you end up feeling more energised.
Ironically, this in turn, makes you better at your job.