Related iPhreaks Freelancing Episodes:

02:52 - What is Work/Life Balance? Is There a Perfect Balance?

08:29 - Family Time

10:10 - Structuring Your Work Week (Prioritization)

16:30 - Shortening Hours to Maintain Sanity and Maximize Productivity

22:06 - Just Say NO

Picks

Primus and the Chocolate Factory (Jaim)
VARIDESK (Jaim)
Audible (Chuck)
The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz (Chuck)
Firefight (The Reckoners) by Brandon Sanderson (Chuck)
Going for a run (Chuck)

 

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 101 of the iPhreaks Show. This week on our panel we have Jaim Zuber.

That’s all of the panel today.

I’m Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. I mean, seriously, where are those guys? Slackers.

I think they’ve got news of WWDC.

Oh, there we go. They're buying their tickets and we’re actually working.

I think Apple announced it’s happening this second. Anyone gets to have Cisco they have to go.

First come, first served.

Go! Go! Go! Yeah. Well, spring break here – or at least in where I live – I don’t know if it’s spring break up in Salt Lake where Andrew lives, so they're either doing stuff with family, kids.

They're all in Florida.

Yeah. Boy, that would be some nice work-life balance, right? We thought we’d talk today about work-life balance. We’re talking about freelancing twice, and people seem to like that; I’m getting some good feedback, but it’s something that I think people struggle with. What do you think when you think work-life balance, Jaim?

So as a developer, I just turn caffeine into code and don’t really sleep. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, exactly.

Ok. So, how do we balance that?

I think it’s a cup of coffee on one side and a cup of Coca Cola on the other side.

Perfect. Ok. So you have your balance.

Yeah, evens out, right? It’s funny because I talk to people and they talk about work-life balance like there's some magic formula, right? There's the home life, and if I spend just the right amount of time there and just the right amount of time at work, and just the right amount of time on my hobbies and I squeeze in a little bit of open-source work, then I’ve got a good work-life balance. And church, and whatever other social commitments I have kind of happen on the side.

And I just – I don’t buy into that way of thinking and I would feel horrible about myself if I did because I never really see it work out that way. Even when I was a full-time employee, I mean there was always this give and take, and ebb and flow with it. And sometimes we’d be super busy at work and sometimes things would be kind of slow and reasonable and so I get a lot of time home with my family, and I think that gets a little more pronounced now that I’m doing freelance and building products and stuff. But, I don’t know.

Do you think that there is that perfect balance that happens on the perfect the weeks out of the year - that you spend the right amount of time with family and friends and right amount of doing work, or do you think it’s more of an art than a science?

Definitely. For each person, it’s going to be different. If you want work-life balance, you want to work x amount of hours a week and that’s it, there are job that you can have that will let you do that. Are you going to be interested in those jobs? Maybe. Maybe not.

50] which occasionally takes little extra hours. But not always, and there’s ways you can manage that, but you do have to – you take care of your people – your family, kids. I don’t have kids, but I need to spend time with my family and make sure I’m taking care of that too.

Yeah. It’s the same for me. I mean, sometimes work has to be more important. And sometimes, we go on vacations as a family and that’s what the majority of my time is. And it just depends. It depends a lot on circumstances. It depends – yeah, I think mostly it comes down to your priorities and I think you hit that right on the head.

Yeah. I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t have to work crazy hours. I work – I’m billing 30 hours, and that’s a full-time for me. Maybe 35, I’ll schedule that. And that allows me to do important busy things I have to do, but also allows me to take time off and do other things, including doing nothing, which is what people forget is a very valuable part of work-life balance – to do something that’s not productive, that you just enjoy it and just sit.

Yeah, I’m good at nothing, or at least that what I was told.

That's right [chuckles].

But yeah, I totally agree. And sometimes, it’s a matter of I’ll talk to my brother and it’ll be, ‘Hey, let’s go’ – we do all kinds of stuff, but – ‘let’s go golfing, or let’s go shooting or something’, and so we’ll make lots of holes and paper [chuckles] and the thing we put on the other end of the shooting range or we’ll go hit around a golf. A lot of times, that’s important as getting the work done, because it’s kind of low-key and not a lot of stress or mental tension and we just get out there and do our thing.

Definitely. It’s like, ‘why do you work?’ Part of why I work is just to be challenged to do interesting things and fun things and learn and create things. But a lot of it is to, well, be able to enjoy the rest of your life. It’s easy to get into the trap where you work. That’s what you do and maybe in a company that benefits from that and for [inaudible 6:54] in the company just kind of works. They build the company which – I [inaudible 6:58] company. I've been in startups where I worked ton of hours. And I learned a lot from it, but that’s ten years ago. I’m a little bit older now and I’m like, ‘ok, I’ve learned those lessons and I’m not willing to do that anymore, but I don’t regret doing it at the time.

Yeah. And I don’t want to give the impression that I spend a lot of time goofing off because I work a

lot. I probably work 60 or so hour-weeks. Because I’m doing the podcasts, and then I’m maintaining a couple of clients that I’m doing work for, and then I’m trying to get a few products off the ground so that I can eventually move away from the contract development stuff and I can give more back to the audiences that I feel like contribute to me in so many ways. So that’s kind of what I meant, but I feel like this is a season where I do that, and then once I get these products to the point where they are making enough money to where I can stop consulting, then I have a different balance. So then I can balance at the other way for a while and spend the time with my family, hopefully this summer, because I’ve got little kids. I’ve have a 9-year old, an 8-year old, a 6-year old, and a 4-year old. So I want to go and get time with them and things like that. And so that's kind of part of the focus is that, ok, they're in school most of the day they're somewhere else and so that’s a good time for me to maximize this time now and then when they are free all day for weeks on end, then we can go do fun stuff.

So if you're working 60 or so hours a week, how do you carve time out for the family?

So, in the evening, I try and spend at least a few hours with my wife. And sometimes in the afternoon, I will trade off the evening time with my wife – I make sure that I do that at least a few nights a week, but I’ll trade off some of the evening time to get time after school with the kids. And so I’ll help them with homework or I’ll play with them, or – my 9-year old is really into Lego’s, so we’ll do Lego’s together – things like that.

So, it’s really rather deliberate. I have to kind of plan, ‘ok, where am I at, what am I going to be doing this week, what do I have to get done’, and then I just go ahead and do it. And as long as I’m getting everything done, then I don’t feel bad taking the time off to go and spend the time with my family. But the flipside is that because the podcasts are kind of a cost center for me, they don’t make me a lot of money; most of the time they breakeven, so it’s not horrible.

But it does still take my time and I don’t get compensated for that. So I do have to work a little bit longer to just make sure that we’re paying the bills and have food on the table, and I feel like that’s kind of a baseline of what I have to get done. So I have to work enough, at least, to pay the bills and buy food and all that stuff, pay the insurance. So that’s why I wind up working longer hours. And if that’s where you're at, then that’s what you have to do. I mean, I have to feed my kids, but I try not to go too far beyond that just because I want that time and I think it's important.

The challenge people have is to take on too much work and then they can’t get away from it. They don’t get done, but they think they're going to get done. You went into the same problems?

I used to. I do sometimes now. I mean, I’m human; I don’t always get it right. But the way that I tend to work it now – and there's actually a video out there by John Sonmez – we had him on the show a month or so ago – and he talks about how he plans his week, and I kind of do the same things. So there's a tool out there called KanbanFlow, which is just a Kanban board, if you're familiar with that flavor of Agile Development. And so what I wind up doing is I put all of the stuff that I have to do into my schedule, then so I have columns for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Since today is Wednesday, so it’s got iPhreaks, Adventures in Angular, I had a pairing session that I finished today that I’ve got to move over to the “Done” column, but I’ve got a few other things that I need to get done. And so I’ll put stuff in there. I usually overload the “Today”, whatever today is, and then by Thursday or Friday, I kind of under load those, and I put the stuff that I can put off at the very bottom.

So today, I have to setup a page, I have to do some work for the Charter School school board that I

am a member of, which is the school that my kids go to. And so I've got to do a little bit of work there – it’s all volunteer work – and then I’ve got a meet-up tonight, so I know that I’m going to that

And then tomorrow, I've got to get full text search done, and some analytics added to the application for my client. I've got a website I've got a move off of a server, because I’ve been moving – I have three websites left over on Linode and I've been moving everything over to the Digital Ocean, so I've got one site to move over there. I've got a little search page that I've been putting together that I need to finish up, I just – provide resources to people who are interested in Rails. And then I've got a few videos to record. So that’s my plan for tomorrow.

And then Friday; Friday’s going to be a little bit weird because I’m not sure yet if – and this is the nice thing about some of this is that I’m not sure yet if I have to drive back down to my in-laws or not – and they live an hour and half away – to pick up a car so I have a reliable car to drive down to Las Vegas next week for MicroConf. So if not, then – so I put stuff on Friday that I can push off to next week. And that’s kind of the way I work it, and so the important stuff gets pushed to the front and the rest of the stuff, it just sits further down the list.

So I kind of treat it like a regular backlog for Agile Development, and I just handle the stuff that’s important or urgent. And if it’s urgent, then I just make sure that I mark it so that it’s like ‘I got to get this done this week. Or I’ve got to get it done today’, and that way I can just –. As long as I get those things done and I'm getting enough of the other stuff done that’s – if you’ve read Seven Habits for Highly Effective People, it’s a Quadrant Two stuff, the stuff that’s important but not urgent. And if I’m getting enough of that stuff done, then it’s not critical.

I don’t ever get to the point where I’m completely overwhelmed by the stuff that I have to get done right away. And sometimes that stuff piles up, but for the most part now it really doesn’t, and the reason is because I’m diligent about making sure that I get the important stuff done.

That makes sense. I think you’ve hit on one thing that – it’s very important to have your priorities in line when you get the ground running for that day. If you have to make enough money, put food on the table, make sure that happens. You can’t keep putting that off. Unhappy clients – that’s no good, but also this is your time for other things. It’s going to beat up and you can do something else. You can miss a meet-up. But overall, you want to bring them up, getting out there and talking to people, the same as I am. But it is important to just go on your day with the plan. Because if it’s the stuff that has to get done, and if it’s the first task, do it first.

You get up or something that you can fit in between different things, do it then. But have that mental model because there are certain things that will take up your day without you thinking about it. You get stuck on a problem, there's some bug you can’t figure out, framework doesn’t work right, that can eat up your time. And if you're sacrificing that – the really important things – to solve that problem, that’s where you get into trouble, that’s where you get behind and that’s where you may have solved the problem but you put the rest of the things you need to do on the backlog, which doesn’t work.

Yeah. The way John does his is he does the same kind of thing, and I try to plan things up on Friday for next week. So I’ll be moving stuff out of my backlog into my schedule for the next week. But the thing that he does is he stacks all that stuff up and then his goal is to work it pomodoros every day. So that comes up to about four hours of work, work, work that he does, and then if he has time for other things then he’ll do it, and if not then he won’t. So sometimes, he’ll put things on the backlog and he won’t get everything done that he scheduled for the week, but he knows that he was consistent in doing the work and that those pomodoros were highly focused, well-targeted sections of time, and so he knows that he did enough.

Definitely. I think that the trap people get into is they think through hours at a problem. ‘Oh, I've got five hours to work on this thing’. And if you’re not focused – you're on Twitter or you're doing something else – then you're not getting anything done. And if you're not getting anything done, you might as well be on a couch, hang out with your spouse, hang out with your dog, your pet, whatever you want to do. If you're not being productive, might as well use that time to do nothing, which is much more valuable than sitting at your computer trying to get stuff done and not getting it done.

I think the pomodoro technique is great for that, especially for times when I had a full-time client. When I was working for 40 hours a week and try to do something on the side, I get some time after dinner to maybe do some work and if I couldn’t get through a pomodoro, I’ll just stop because I wasn’t doing any problems. I’m probably just writing bugs, not writing codes, and I could be resting, which definitely helps. It helps if you're taking time off, taking a little down time, you can hit those pomodoros and be focused and get a lot more done.

39] at the rate, I tell them ‘well, a lot of developers are talking of working 40 hours, and I’m going to get the same work done in 20 hours, in 30 hours, because I work pretty efficiently. But when I’m working, I am focused’.

I got the pomodoro timer go on as much as I can, and you’ll look over a week, not that much more than some of those maybe working 40 hours in a lower rate and I say ‘well, I’m focused on your problem, and not blowing up my Twitter timeline, because I’m fried’. But it’s something that I've learned to build, coach my clients that this is how I work. My rate is higher than other developers, but I’m focused on your problems when I'm working, and I don’t overbook. And a lot – it comes down to being able to say ‘No’ or saying, ‘Ok, this time it’s not going to happen. I can’t start on your problem for a month’. That was nothing I had to figure out.

Yeah, definitely. So how do you manage getting time with your family or your social groups or other obligations?

Yeah. So as I've mentioned before, full-time if I’m working 30 hours a week, I consider that fulltime. If I'm billing that much – and that’s a lot – to be focused and really doing it, that’s how it goes and the rest of the hours a day, I’ll do some business development, talk with essential clients, maybe hold a meeting or something, but that leaves me parts of the day so I can go for a run, go for a bike ride, spend time with my wife, go for a walk, something like that.

Just shortening the hours give me more hours a day to do the rest of your things that you want to do. Monday was opening day in baseball, I took time off, I copped out and I watched the baseball game to watch the twins. So taking down your hours allows me to do that, which works for me.

I have to say that watching baseball for me is a quick way to get into a nap.

[Chuckles] Here we go.

But yeah, of course, that always then – if I say something like that in front of my dad, then he starts bashing soccer and then we get in all kinds of antics.

Oh yes, the generation all divide.

Yeah. But I totally get it. And some people would be all upset, ‘you wasted your time watching baseball’. But again, I mean, it’s that recreation that I think we all need to recharge, and I love the idea of getting out and running or biking or whatever. I tend to do that in the morning.

I mean, last night I didn’t get in until midnight because I was helping my mom move a bunch of furniture, but if I'm not getting to bed at one o’clock and going to sleep at two o’clock, I’ll get up early and go for a run, or I’ll get up early and I’ll write blog posts or prep for podcasts or things like that. But that physical activity is so – I mean, that's probably the best way for me to recharge.

Sometimes I pop in an audio book, sometimes I listen to podcasts, sometimes I just turn it all off and I just go for a run. And just being able to let the mind relax, get a little blood flow – there’s all kinds of science about why it’s good for you – but ultimately, I mean, there's just – I can’t explain it, but I always feel way better when I come back from a run.

Definitely. If I don’t work out for a couple of days, I feel like [crosstalk 19:48] when I’m working. When I was 25, I didn’t feel it at all. I could do whatever I wanted and it wouldn’t matter, but I’m not 25 anymore.

You're 26, right?

I’m 26 and a half. I’m outside of 40 at this point, but just doing that and it’s one of things – your production and production capital is not part of the Seven Habits where I’m not making money if I’m exercising but that helps me focus more on when actually am billing and doing development work.

So it’s just part of the things that keep yourself healthy and eating good food, getting enough rest, getting exercise. Those things help me focus when I’m actually trying to do work.

Yeah. I don’t know if exercise is directly called out in Seven Habits, but I think it does fall under some of the areas that he tells you to focus in. And I mean, the way that you feel, the way you feel about yourself, emotionally, but also the way you feel physically, it’s a big deal. And you can get a whole lot more done if you feel good. So I’m totally with you on that.

Another thing that you brought up – it’s like completely healthy and normal and positive to do nothing. Sit on the couch or go for a long bike ride. I think we forget that our subconscious is always working. How many times that we’ve solved our problems we’ve been working with like for a day in the shower the next morning. That happens to me all the time. So you sit back and do nothing and let your subconscious go to work.

Relax and that’s really where I've gotten a lot of clarity and just directions that – ‘what should I do for my career, which should I be doing on the next year’, and those types of things become more clear when you're not doing anything, like for a long bike ride. My brain is doing that much. I’m just keeping myself upright and not hitting things, and the rest of it is just thinking and I can get clarity, so it’s definitely valuable to step back, turn off the devices and allow yourself to do nothing. Especially in the last five years, we’ve made it possible to completely fill your brain with junk at any moment of the day.

If you're not doing anything in 15 seconds, you're on your phone checking things. It’s easy to do. I do it a lot, but it’s important to realize to step back and do less. Allow yourself to do nothing and realize that it’s actually really positive; it’s not a non-negative of not being lazy.

Yup. One other thing that I want to bring up with the work-life balance thing is just saying no. I

mean, I say no to my kids when I'm recording podcasts, like ‘Hey guys, you can’t be in here’. I say no to clients when it’s family time. I've had clients get upset with me because I didn’t respond to them in the chat room at 10:30 at night, and my answer to that was ‘No. I’m sorry, I don’t do that.

30 at night, I’m either in bed or I’m with my wife, and I’m not going to sit by the keyboard and wait for you to text-chat me’. So, just setting good boundaries and being willing to stick up for them is also really important.

Definitely. Boundaries are huge. Don’t let people take away what’s important to you.

I could tell a story, I mean – the last full-time job I had, we wind up doing this big long death march. And we worked probably 80-hour weeks for like 3 or 4 weeks. And we got a lot of work done, we got the thing that we were putting together and launched. It turned out our customers didn’t really want it – but that was a separate issue – and we got laid off because our customers didn’t want it – and that was also a separate issue – but the people that got laid off were the people who basically were saying, ‘We’re doing this because we care about the company. We’re doing this because you offered us incentives to get it done. And we are never going to do this again’.

And those of us who were setting those boundaries, we eventually did – we were the ones that got laid off – but the thing is we were also the ones who were most likely to be able to find another job. And I think a lot of employers were really looking for people who will come in, take the lead, make sure things are being done right and won’t put up with garbage. And I think it really pays off when you're willing to do that. I mean, in some of the workplaces I worked in, I set those boundaries and I got respect for it. It just turned out that that one place was a little bit different. And there were some other circumstances there.

But I worked in another company; I was the team lead. My boss came to me and basically said, ‘We need to get this work done by the end of the month’, and I just looked at him, looked at the amount of work, and I told him that there was no way it was going to happen. Because it was a ridiculous amount of work, there was no way; even if we had done the death march like that, we couldn’t do it. And so I explained that to him. And I also told him, ‘Look. The way that the precious manager treated these guys, morale was low. I can’t ask them to do it’, and I got way more respect for that.

By setting boundaries and being willing to say, ‘Look, this is not just going to happen’ as opposed to giving in and trying to make it happen. And we would’ve failed at that anyway. So knowing your limitations and being willing to stand up and just say no – and I say no to my clients all the time for the same kinds of things. It really is important; it really pays off. And if you can explain to them as Jaim did, he mentioned earlier that that allows you to do your best work and gives them quality product, then it really makes a big difference.

Yeah. There’s definitely toxic companies out there that’ll just use up every bit of energy you’ll give them. And don’t work for those companies. The smart companies realize that if your team burns out, they're just going to quit. They're going to find new jobs. They don’t have to deal with it.

23] development, you’re very much in demand. You don’t have to deal with this kind of stuff. If you're creating a team, you want people to stick around. People will understand your company, the problems you're trying to solve, and aren’t burned out. Because if you're burned out, you're not going to do good work and you're going to quit.

One of the great life hacks that I did is I went independent; I became a consultant, which I still work alongside with a lot of the people that I worked with before. But this time, if you want me to come on a Saturday, alright, well, we can even that out. You pay me extra and that way, instead of messing with the plumbing, I can call a plumber. And it also helps them think about it. ‘Is it really that valuable that I have them do this by Monday instead of Tuesday or Wednesday?’ So that’s one way.

That worked for me. I didn’t have to deal with the politics and getting into an employment situation where they wanted too much out of me.

Yeah. And it’s not – I mean, I think you're just as prone to this as a consultant as you are as an employee, and I don’t think that one situation is necessarily better than another for everybody. I mean, if you're thinking that one is going to give you more out of the kind of balance you want than the other, then by all means, go after it. If you're not really interested in pursuing full-time employment, or you're not really interested in pursuing a consulting career, then that’s fine too.

But at the same time, be thinking about this, because ultimately, the other thing that I've seen is that there's a lot of bleed over between normal life, or the rest of your life, and work. And so if you have a bad day at work and you come home in a bad mood, then in bleeds over. If you're struggling at home, then you're worried about that at work and it bleeds over. And so, this isn't just something that’s like, ‘ok well, I don’t have time to think about this’. It’s something that is going to be an integral part of your career as you move along.

I mean, these are things that you should be thinking about and if you have specific questions about how Jaim and I manage work-life balance or if you want to get some input from some other folks, post a comment and we will follow up and answer your questions.

To wrap up, say no, your phone has an Off button, and doing nothing is good [laughs].

No kidding. Yeah, there have been times where I have been tempted to tell my clients, ‘I’m going camping with my son, and what that means is I’m going up in the mountains and my phone has no service. So if the world catches fire, I will find out when I come back down’.

There we go. It’s good to have clients that respect you too. It’s not just toxic employers. It could be toxic clients that want every little piece you can give them until you burn out and can’t do anything for anyone. That’s what we do; burnout is very common. People think on too much. They don’t realize this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Yeah. I have to say that most of my clients have been really good. And my current clients are really good. But it – [crosstalk 28:19]. Yeah, that’s true. And I guess that’s another thing to consider is that you can talk to other developers at whatever company you're looking at working with, you can set the ground rules if you're onboarding a new client, and just figure out if they really are a fit.

And that’s what I do, and that’s why I don’t have as many of these problems anymore. Sometimes they sneak through and then we wind up saying, ‘you know what, this really isn't going to work out to our mutual benefits’, so then we just end the contract. But yeah, you can evaluate who you're going to work with and who you're going to work for, and then determine if it fits with the kind of lifestyle that you want to live.

Definitely.

Alright. Should we get to some picks?

Let’s do it.

Alright. Do you have some picks for us?

Yeah, I’ve got two picks. So speaking of taking time off, I’m going to a Primus concert tonight. Primus just released an album where they cover the Willy Wonka’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory soundtrack. And it sounds like it might be a little bit odd, and it is odd, but it is also very good. I’m going to take some time off and catch a Primus show. And the album’s pretty good. Check it on Spotify or – weird, buy it on vinyl or something weird.

Second pick, I picked up a standing desk a couple of weeks ago and it’s pretty good. I got it from Varidesk. It sits on top of your existing desk. You just grab some handles, put it up, put it back down; very well built, so there's no installation or anything. It goes on there and it goes up and down. You just put on your desk and then you're done. I got a 48 inch one, so it’ll fit my Thunderbolt monitor, which is pretty big.

One caveat – it does raise your desk level, say 3 or 4 inches, so now I have to find a new chair. So beware of that. My desk itself is actually pretty high, like 29 inches, so it just made my monitor too high, so I need a new chair. But overall, I am pretty happy with it. I can go up and down every half hour or hour or however I want to. But I’m pretty happy with my Varidesk, so that’s my other pick.

Awesome. I’m going to go ahead and pick Audible. This is one of the things that I use to just relax. I listen to audio books. I’m a huge fan of Audible; I love it. One thing that I will point out is they’ve got all kinds of stuff in there.

So right now, I’m listening to – it’s an audio series called The Magic of Thinking Big and I’m really enjoying it. It’s not a fiction thing; it’s actually kind of a seminar on tape and yeah, it has all the cheesy ‘doo doodooo’ between different segments and stuff. But the content’s been really good and I’ve really been enjoying it.

I’ve also been listening to the book Firefight – actually, I just finished it – by Brandon Sanderson that’s part of his Reckoners series. It’s a sci-fi series, and I really like it. I’m really enjoying it. So I guess I’m just going to pick those. And I’m also going to pick going for a run, because that’s what I

do to physically unload.

I’m going for a run right now. And it’s two in the afternoon.

Go! Go! Go! It’s kind of cold out there today here.

I might hit the treadmill. We’ll see. [Laughs]

Cool. Well, that's all we got. So I guess we’ll wrap up and we’ll catch everyone next week.