9/2/6 Episode 362: Work/Life Balance

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of the parking lot! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So today’s topic is something that was suggested to be by my blog, my Blogatog. So someone suggested that I talk about work/life balance. And I thought that was a very interesting topic. So I’m going to talk about that today.

So let me set this up I guess—so one of the things about my job is it’s a pretty intense job. I have a lot of responsibilities, I have a lot of balls in the air, I have a lot of things I’ve gotta focus on, I have a lot of things I’m responsible for.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a family. I have a family of five. You know. I’m—I have two equal parts of my life that are both busy and intense, and I love them both, but they both require a lot of time and energy, and so the question of the day is, how exactly do you balance that? How do you make sure that your work/life balance is in order? So today I’m going to talk all about that.

To start with, I’m going to make a quote, which—something I believe a lot in, which is, priorities are not priorities unless you prioritize them. So one of the themes I’ll talk about today is, a lot of having the proper balance is understanding what matters to you, and then acting in such a way that your behavior reflects the things you say that matter to you. That’s a big part of today, so we’ll get back to this theme quite a bit. But a lot of what I’m going to talk about today is how to think about what matters and then act in accordance to that. You know. That the things you say matter, you have to make matter.

Okay. So here’s how I’m going to start today. What I want you to do is an exercise. You can actually—you can turn off this and turn it back on if you want. But here’s the exercise. You need to make two lists. One list is every single thing you’re responsible for at work. Every responsibility. Everything you have to do at work. Everything.

Okay. The second list you have to make is everything that you do at home. Not just things you’re responsible—these lists are not just things you’re responsible for, but things you do. Everything you do at work, everything you do away from work. When I say life, I mean life outside of work.

So you need to make two lists. And the idea here is, you want exhaustive lists. Lists that list everything you do. Everything. Okay? And take some time. You want to make these lists as thorough as you can. Make the list such that they list everything you do.

Okay. Once you do that, that’s step one. Step two is, then take that list and prioritize it. And what that means is, put it in an order to say, what matters most? What matters second most? What matters third most? Now, this is not an easy task. I mean, the first task, writing everything down is more of a memory thing. But the second part, prioritizing, is pretty hard. Because how do you figure out what’s more important?

Now, when you’re doing your work priorities, keep in mind that I’s not just what you personally prioritize, but also, hey, you have a boss, you have responsibilities. You know. It’s the priorities of what—all the things that matter together. Not just your own personal priorities but as far as what needs to be done.

For life, more personal. What matters for you personally? What personally matters to you? And the idea is, you want to make a list that really reflects what you have to care about in the order you need to care about it. And the reason that I want you to make a list is, it is hard to—essentially, here is the trick to making a list. Is take two items. And say, “Of these two items, which is more important?” And then put that above—so let’s say A and B. A is more important than B. Okay, now A comes first, B comes second. Now take a third item. Take Item C. And say, okay. C and A. Which is more important? If C is more important than A, then you’re going to list these CAB. If A is more important than C, now ask the question which is more important, C or B. And then you end up with either ACB or ABC.

The idea is, you want—the easiest way to prioritize something is not to look at everything, but two t things. That’s the easiest way for people to understand a priority. That people are best at judging when they’re judging two things against each other.

And what you will find is, if you actually do what I say, make a list and then balance everything and prioritize it using the system of just keep putting things against each other of which comes first, you will eventually make a list. Okay.

Here’s why this is important. So let’s get into why I’m having you do this in the first place. One of the things about having proper balance is two major things. One is, is proper allocation of your resources. Of knowing what resources you have available and how you can allocate them. Because a lot of the problems of misbalance is improper allocation of resources.

The other thing is overall balance between work and life. How much time gets allocated towards work, and how much time gets allocated toward the rest of your life? A lot of work/life balance has to do with those things, of properly understanding resources and overall balance. So we’re going to talk about that today.

Okay. We’re going to start with the resources. So resources says, okay. There’s certain things—certain resources that I have. I will define a resource as something that is expendable, that there’s not an infinite amount of.

For example, time. Time is a big resource. You only have so much time to do things. And so one of the biggest problems people run into when they get out of balance is, they’re not allocating their time correctly. Another thing is your focus. You know. You can only focus on so much at a certain time. Where does your focus come? I also say focus or attention, those are very similar, but the idea of, what do I have to care about more? What has to be more on my mind? Quality. You know? What is something that needs—I can’t necessarily do my utmost work on everything. I gotta figure out where I need to do the most—where I need to put the quality. Money. This happens more in life than work, but it can happen at work as well. Of understanding the resource of money.

There’s a bunch of different resources. These aren’t all the resources. There’s a lot of different resources. But part of what you want to do is you want to figure out what you care about, so you can start allocating resources.

And here’s what that means is, okay. Let’s say I make my list. Now, the second part is having a sense of balance. So one of the things I’ll say is, roughly you want your work to take around, you know, 40 hours a week. I mean, some people have a little more, fifty hours, sixty hours. You gotta figure out how much time you want to spend toward work. Figure out what is acceptable to you for how much of your life should be work vs. how much should not be work.

That might have to do with the kind of job you have. I mean, you can allocate your time any way you want. What I want you to do is understand how you want to allocate it percentage-wise. Balance-wise. So like, do you want, you know—let’s assume, figure out how much you sleep, for example, and you can actually look at waking hours. Let’s say you get eight hours a night. Eh, most people don’t do that. But let’s say you do, let’s say you smartly get eight hours a night. Look at the rest of the time and say, okay, I have so much time for my work and so much time—how much do I want to allocate to my work? What’s the correct amount?

Now, a lot of work allocation—there’s a minimum set by your work, like your work has some expectation of when you’ll be there. And then there’s some realization of how much time am I spending outside of normal work hours doing work? And that’s something you have to figure out. But a big thing of—the first thing is, you want to figure out how much time do I have for each. What am I allocating for each?

Okay, then, once you figure that out, once you say okay, okay, I want to spend forty hours a week. Fifty hours a week. Whatever. And I’m not judging how much time you want to spend. If you are living a life in which you’re spending eighty percent of your time at work and you’re enjoying it and it makes you happy, hey, more power to you. But a lot of what I’m talking about today, a lot of the balance comes from understanding what matters to you.

Another thing that’s important, by the way, is, once you have your two lists, you also have to understand, between the lists—usually on the top items is where it matters most is, where is your priority on the list itself? Between the lists? Between your work and life lists, there also needs to be priority. What’s the most important thing that you need to spend the time on? You know. Is it a life thing? Is it a work thing? You just need to understand that.

Okay. So now that you have a list, and you have priorities, the next thing you need to understand is—we’re going to start with time, because I think time is the resource that’s most important in today’s topic, which is creating a proper balance.

So what you need to do is, you need to look at all the tasks—so now you should have the list of your work tasks, a work of your life tasks, prioritized in order, and a number of how many hours you expect to do that a week. What is your realistic expectation? Note, by the way, from week to week, I’m not saying there can’t be a little flux, I’m not saying you can’t have a week where you get a few extra work hours in. But I want to understand your default. What do you expect your default to be?

Okay. The next step then is to try to adequately understand how much time things take. How long do you spend doing something? And be aware, people tend to underestimate time. People tend to assume, “Oh, that’ll take me an hour,” when it takes you two hours, or three hours. So one of the things you want to start doing is, start looking at your tasks and figuring out how long your tasks take.

So one of the things I’m going to do today is talk about, like, problems that create imbalance in your work/life—you know, things that cause problem in work/life balance. Number one is that you misallocate things. So when you’re trying to figure out your time, you need to look at all the resources at work and say, okay, how much time each of those things take? Same at home. How much time do each of the things take?

Now, be aware, your goal is not necessarily—especially in life. Your work goal, you can—you shouldn’t allocate 100% of anything, Because you need to give yourself some flex time, because A. like I said, things you estimate won’t happen, B. things you don’t plan for will happen.

So one of the things that you want to do in general is, I say eighty percent is a decent—like, you want to sort of allocate up to 80% so that you have a little bit of flex time to understand what you need to do. That if you book yourself up at 100% and then a problem arises, well, you’ve got in trouble because you haven’t sort of built in anything to the idea that things will arise and things will happen.

Okay. So, we’ll start—let’s start with work. Take work, figure out how long each of the things you’re saying takes. What does it actually take to do the things you’re doing? You know. And then one of the things that you need to do—and part of this is your responsibility, part of this might also be your manager if you have a manager—one of the things to remember about a manager is, a manager is there as a means to help you. Yes, help your business, they obviously have some obligation to the business. But they also have obligation to you as an employee.

And so one of the things you need to figure out is, as you’re looking to figure out, are you overscheduled? You know, do you have too much to do at work? Use your manager as a resource. It is your manager’s job to make sure that you’re properly being used and that you’re not being overallocated. And if you are, you need to talk with them. Now, maybe your manager’s the one that’s overallocating you, that’s a separate issue, but in most cases, what you want to do is figure out what you’re doing, how much it takes, and once again. The priority of what you need to do. And look at the time allocation.

One of the biggest problems I find with people and work—and I find with myself and work is, it is very easy to just overcommit. In fact, one of the things about working at Wizards which makes things particularly difficult, is Wizards is a very fun job. A lot of the tasks that come to you are very fun tasks. In fact, one of the—when you see a new employee at Wizards in R&D, the same thing tends to happen, which is they get there, they’re excited, they’re excited to be working at Wizards R&D, it’s a pretty cool job, you know, you’re working on games, obviously, if you’re in R&D you love games, that’s why you ended up in R&D of a game company, and so what happens is, all these projects come along that sound really cool. Do you want to make this cool game? Do you want to make that cool game? Do you want to do this cool thing? And it is very easy to just take assignments because the assignments sound like fun. And then what happens is, you get to the point where you’re like, just, you’re overworked. You’re like, okay, I can’t handle all this. I’ve said yes to too many things.

So this is what I call the tummyache phenomenon to be careful of, which is, let’s imagine you go to a store and they have just sweets. Really delicious, wonderful sweets. They have the best donuts you’ve ever had and the sweetest ice cream you’ve ever tasted, and the best candy, and just, you know, bakeries, and all sorts of—everything you possibly could imagine. The best desserts ever. And they say to you, “It’s all free! You can have whatever you want!”

Well the problem you’re going to run into is the tummyache problem. Right? Is, you’re going to go, “Oh, well I have to have—oh, that donut. Ooh, this donut’s so good and this ice cream’s so good and this bakery this and that,” and like, what happens is, you can’t eat everything. Even though you want to eat many things and they’re all good and you enjoy them, that you end up with a tummyache. That if you eat too much, your body just goes, “Ohh, I can’t handle that.” And work can be the same way.

Now, be aware, sometimes at work—I mean, I’m talking about Wizards, where like—it is a fun problem to have when you have too many things you’re excited to do and you overwork yourself. Sometimes the phenomenon of overworking yourself is not, “Oh, I’m so excited by everything,” sometimes it’s, “I have to do things I don’t even want to do but I gotta do them.”

And when you’re prioritizing work, make sure you understand, it’s not necessarily what you want to do but what needs to get done. When I talk about priorities, especially for work, I mean, what are the priorities of not just you but the people you report to, meaning what work needs to get done that you’re expected to do?

And one of the things to understand is, I’m just saying, make sure that you figure out, of what you need to do, that you prioritize what needs to get done. And what you will find is, if you have an excess, if you’ve done the math and say, okay, I have so many hours, I’m trying to book at 80%, I book all these hours and I look at what I have to do, and I look at how much time allocation I have, if it doesn’t line up, you have a couple issues.

So number one could be, if you truly believe you have too much to do, you need to go talk to your manager—like, you need to see who you need to see, probably your manager, to say, look. I have too much to do.

And that part of it is, it is very easy to take on responsibilities because either A. you know you’re good at the responsibility, or B. nobody else is taking on the responsibility, or C. it’s just something you’ve always done, it’s just some kind of routine or something. And that one of the reasons to make priorities and list them in order is to say, okay. While I need to do A, B, and C, ehh, okay, I gotta do E and I gotta do E and I gotta do F, but, okay, once I get to G, I’ve run out of time. I’ve allocated all my time. Okay. What am I doing with H, I, and J?

So first off, understand the value of using your coworkers at work. One of the things I found long ago is that it is very easy to just want to do things yourself. You understand what you do, you know you like your own work, it is very easy to just say, “It’s easier to do it myself.”

But one of the things about proper time allocation is making use of the resources available. Well, one of the resources available to you at work is coworkers. You know. And that one of the things I have found is, when I do my job, I try to find places where—I always ask myself, am I the best person to be doing the thing I’m doing? Is there somebody else that could do something just as well as I could do it?

Because one of the things you’re trying to do is figure out where can you maximize what you do. Where are you most effective? And if I find somebody else that can do the thing I’m doing at equal or better, maybe they should be doing it. You know. Especially if I’m overworked.

Like—and I’ll tell you a little story. So this is a good example where I’ve managed to turn a resource issue into a long-term gain. So the problem was, I run sets. In fact, I’ve been consecutively leading sets since like Shadowmoor, so a long time. Years and years and years and years. But that’s one of the things. I’m Head Designer, one of my jobs is to lead a lot of sets.

But one of the things when you lead a set is you have to manage the file. Because we make a lot of cards, there’s a database, you know, somebody has to keep everything up do date. Because when you—I always talk about iteration and playtesting, you know, the file—the database has to be kept up to date because you’re constantly using it, you’re working on it, you’re changing things.

Upkeeping a file is a lot of work. It’s just a lot of busy work. And my problem was, I was getting—I just had too much to do, so I looked at my schedule, and I said, okay. What am I doing that somebody else could do? That, you know, some things, like really, I’m going to do them better than anybody else, I should be doing those, but some things other people could do.

And so what I did is, I took somebody on my team, and I said to them, okay. What I’m going to do is I’m going to put you in charge of managing the file. I’m going to have you make all the changes in the file. And what also happened is, when you make changes in the file—about 90% of file management is literally just keeping up with the changes and making the changes, but about 10% is adapting the file when you make changes. Because sometimes when you change one card, it requires you to change some other cards. And so there’s a little bit beyond—it’s not just record-keeping. There’s some actual design that comes to keeping a file.

So what I did is I took a member of my design team, someone that hadn’t run their own design team yet, and said to them, “I’m going to put you in charge of the file.” And then I kept my eye on them, but I really let them do it. And what I found was, which was interesting is, it ended up being a really good learning opportunity.

Because if you’ve never led a design before, one of the things you first have to understand is the dynamic of how it works. How does—what kind of changes happen? Well, you know the best way to understand changes in a file, in a design? Is manage it.

And so what I found was, what started as a more managerial thing just to free up some of my time ended up becoming a really valuable teaching tool. So much so that other people have started to make use of it because it’s a really good way to take somebody that’s less experienced in a way that’s sort of more controlled, because when you’re managing the file you’re not making key decisions. You know. The person leading the file, usually me, I’m making the decisions. They’re not deciding necessarily what to put in the file. But as they put things in the file, they have the ability to massage things and change things, and oh, well this goes to three mana, we have two many three manas, let me change something else.

And it allows them to sort of, in a much more controlled setting, make some changes and start understand what kind of things need to get done. And it’s a good example where I took something where I was trying to manage my own resources, and in doing it I really found a new way to use something that was valuable.

So don’t underestimate the power of your coworkers. Your coworkers—think of them—I mean, this is very true for Magic, but work is collaborative. That the people at your work, you are working with. And one of the things you want to do is you want to figure out how you as a group can do the best work you can do. And so if you find yourself overallocated, look and see if there’s other people who might be of use to you. That they—like I said, part of managing your resources is understanding what your resources are. And your coworker is one of those resources.

In general, what I’m trying to say here is, if you understand how much time you have allocated for work, and you can manage and figure out what you’re doing, the biggest thing you need to do at work is get the correct amount of workload. You know. Figure out what you can handle, work with your manager to help figure that out, and then make sure you’re staying in that and you’re not what I call redlining. That you’re not—people like to be very—“Oh, I can do it. I can handle it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Toss it on, I can take that.” And people are very much—it’s very easy to just go, “Oh, yeah, I can take another project, sure. Sure.” You know. And that before you know it, you’re just overwhelmed with things.

And like I said. Be aware. Part of the problem with allocating in general is people not realizing the full extent of what they have and how much time the things will take. And as you spend more time on your job and get a better sense of it, getting a proper workload so that you’re working the right amount of things that fit the time you have is very key.

And part of that is learning to get realistic time expectations. That as you do projects, especially as, you know, you do them more than once, you want to get a real sense of what time they take and how long they are. And if you think that you’ve allocated more than you have proper resources, look, talk to your manager. Figure out what’s going on, find other people maybe that can help you offload some of that, and get the right amount of workload.

Okay. Another thing is what I will refer to as biorhythms. Project biorhythms. It’s very easy when you think of a project to want to think about it in its average. “Oh, well every week on average this project will take three weeks.” I mean not three weeks, three hours. But what you will find is that projects have a rhythm to them, what I’ll call a biorhythm, or a rhythm I guess. They’re not alive. And the idea is that they’re not always the same.

So for example, when I’m designing a set, I talk about the iterative process. I have meetings where we figure out what we need to change, we make changes, and then we playtest. And what happens is, playtesting takes less sort of overall work hours than changing things. And so one of the things you have to understand is, weeks in which you’re just playtesting often can take less time than weeks in which you’re changing things.

And what I’m saying is, if you average three hours a week, that doesn’t mean every week is exactly three hours. It might mean that some weeks are five hours and some weeks are one hour. So that is the rhythm, that’s the biorhythm of the project.

And that one of the things you need to understand is, you need to understand the different rhythms of the different projects you have, because another way to get overworked is, I have all my projects average at three hours a week. Except, there’s some weeks where I’m twiddling my thumbs because I don’t have enough to do, and there’s other weeks where I’m overwhelmed because I’ve hit the high level of it.

And that one of the things you want to do is make sure that you understand the rhythms of your projects and map them out so the busy time for one project might be the light time for the other. That you don’t—you have to be careful not to sort of allocate the right time on average, but not allocate the right time in reality because having—let’s say for example you have forty hour weeks. Having twenty hours a week one [week] and sixty hours the next isn’t proper. You know. Not only do you have to allocate overall, you allocate week by week and part of that is understanding the rhythms of the things you’re doing.

The other resource I want to talk about is focus and quality. There is this idea that every task needs the same resources. You know. “Oh, well I want to do everything to the best of my ability. I want to give everything my total focus.”

And here’s the problem. You can’t focus on everything at once. You don’t have the ability to put the same level of quality to everything. You need to prioritize, like that you need to look at your priority list and say, “Okay. What are the things that I need to be at the top of my game? What are the things that I need to be doing the best absolute work I can do?”

But there’s some other things you’re like, “You know what? Good enough is all this project needs.” You know. I’m doing something, this is not…” you know, understand where and what you do needs to be your absolute best work and, once again, the reason I’m saying—I’m not saying do bad work, I’m saying understand the quality of work that’s necessary to accomplish what you need to accomplish.

Because one of the things that happens is, people—one of the ways people burn themselves out is they put too—they sort of assume, like, “I have to always have total focus and total quality,” and they’re always revved at 100. You know, they’re always going at the highest level. You can’t function that way all the time. You have to—you can’t be at your top level constantly, you’ll stress yourself out.

And your stress level’s another thing you have to keep track of, which is, you need to figure out, you need to work in downtime. Both at work and at home, you need to have times in which you’re not at the highest level. You need to sort of understand that just as your projects have a biorhythm, you have a biorhythm. That you can’t sort of max yourself out all the time, you will burn yourself out. And so you need to figure out where really you want to stress and do your strongest and where, you know, there’s—some areas get to be good enough. Some areas get to be, “You know what? This needs to get done, but this doesn’t need to get done at the absolute highest quality possible. That’s not what this project needs.” You know. Sometimes you have things that are important, but they’re just—they’re rote, and you don’t need to spend the extra mental energy on them. You want to figure out where those things are. You know.

Money and finances are another area especially where you gotta figure out where you put them. And when you get into life that’s a little bit more important. But anyway, as I talk about work, figure out. Allocate your time, your attention, your focus, your quality, figure out where those things need to go. Figure out which projects need the most time, which ones need the less. And, when you run out of space, when you don’t have any more time, you’ve gotta get rid of some projects. That overcommitting is one of the biggest reasons that people get off-balance between work and life. Is they overcommit in one area.

Okay. So I spent a lot of time talking about work. Let’s talk about life. Let’s talk about the non-work part. Okay. So one of the big truisms I believe about life in general is, attendance matters. That one of the things, for example—so when I first started working at Wizards, you know, back in 1995, I was 28, and here’s how my workday used to work. I would wake up, I would go to work, I would work work work work work work work work work,  work work work work work work work, to the early hours of the morning, and then I would go home and go to bed and continue.

Now, you know, we used to go out to all—all my meals were eaten out, and we’d play some games, ad I mean, there was some downtimes within that. But pretty much, I was focused on work. I was just—that’s what I did. And I didn’t at the time have much other life. I didn’t have a balance really because I didn’t have anything else there yet.

But what happened was, eventually, I met my wife Lora. She worked at Wizards, I met her at Wizards, at first we were friends, and then eventually we started dating, and then we got married, and then we had a kid, and then we had two more kids because I had twins. And what happened is, as I got more committed toward my life, toward my wife, toward my marriage and my family, I allocated more and more time.

For example, when I first got to Wizards I used to travel all the time. All the time. And then, I started dating Lora and I traveled a little bit less. And then Lora and I got married and I traveled even less than that. And then I had my first child, I had Rachel and I traveled even less than that. And then when Adam and Sarah came along, I’m like, “Okay. I’m seriously—I gotta…” you know, so I reduced my travel to two times a year.

So the idea was that once I—you know—as I had more and more responsibilities, I realized I needed to spend more and more time allocated to my family. I needed to understand what I was doing. And like I said, when you’re talking about your balance between work and life, figure out what’s important. When I was younger and I didn’t have a lot of sort of external things and most of my downtime was playing games with my coworkers, that’s okay. I could allocate a lot of time at work. You know. I could allocate a lot of time on travel for business because that’s what I was doing.

And I was enjoying it, you know, it’s fine to allocate more time for work if that is where you’re getting your enjoyment from. But the key to having balance is understanding—so here’s another resource, happiness. What makes you happy? Where do you derive pleasure from? And you have to make sure—I mean, ideally I want you to have a work in which the work is happy for you and you get some happiness from it, and that’s why I (???) dream jobs and doing things you love, not everybody gets to do that, I understand that.

But make sure you understand the idea of where the downtimes are, and that—first off, attendance matters, meaning you need to be there for things. Like, one of the things I learned of having kids and having a family is, it doesn’t matter the importance of something in a vacuum. Like, any one individual softball game my child is playing in, you know, if I miss one softball game, will that matter? In the big things, maybe not. But it does in the sense that one of the ways that people realize you are there for them is you are there. That if I want to be there for my family I can’t just miss the softball games, I can’t miss the plays, I can’t miss the elementary school graduations.

That part of committing to my life is making resources and allocating them. Of saying, “Okay, I’m going to spend enough time.” You know. And that—don’t—it’s very easy to think of it as, “When am I doing the most work?” You know, “When am I doing the most for my family?” But part of being there for your family is not just doing something for them, but it’s literally just being there. In life, attendance is very important.

Also, you have to understand attention. When I say you allocate, it also means—it’s not just a matter of physically being there, it’s being focused there Now, I’m not saying you can never—I mean, obviously I think about my work at time at home, I think about my home at time at work. But when I’m with my family, I try to think about my family, I try to stay focused on my family.

Now, obviously, those that know my social media, like, I have a lot of downtime when I’m doing my parenting and there’s a lot of time where like, one of the kids is doing something and I’m just sitting there waiting for them, and I’ll hop on social media and I’ll answer questions, you know, I’ll find bits and pieces of time where I can do job things where it makes sense, but I don’t ever do that where I’m taking away time from my family.

I want to make sure that when I’m doing family time, you know, when I’m interacting with them, I am spending time with them. And that I want my attention to focus on them. I don’t want, you know, sit at dinner and I’m spending the whole time going, “Oh, I gotta solve this design problem.” You know.

And the other thing I’ve found is that when you allocate your focus, when you know what you’re doing, when—like, it actually makes me more creative not to think about the problem 24/7. Now, I’m sure my subconscious is working on it when I’m not consciously working on it, but you know, sometimes it’s nice, one of the things that helps me solve a problem is, I’ll go off in my life and just think about something else. Stop worrying about the design problem and go, okay, my daughter has homework to do, or I have to, you know, solve some problem with my family, and a lot of times, thinking about that problem, just a different problem completely, will free up my mind and make my mind think differently because I just get in a different mindset. And sometimes I’ll come back to my problem at work, and the fact that I just shifted gears was really valuable to helping solve that problem. That—don’t think of a separation between your work and your life as downside. It has a lot of upside.

The other thing that’s really important is, you have to understand the difference between taking and giving. Which is, what elements of your life take energy from you, what elements of your life give you energy? You know, where do you expend energy, where do you derive energy? And part of your allocation is making sure, especially in your life half, I also think it’s important in your work half, but sometimes you have a little less control over that. But make sure that you want to figure out what gives you energy. I mean, this is true for work—as much as possible make this true for work. I just  know that sometimes you have less control at work. Find the things that give you energy and make sure you allocate enough time for them.

That another way people get into a problem with life/work balance is, they’re just going full throttle all the time, and they do things that expend energy and don’t do the things that give them energy. My analogy here essentially is, look, you can drive your car all over the place, but you’ve gotta stop and get gas once in a while. And if you don’t, eventually you’ll just run out. Your car will stop. And you’ll stop being able to drive anywhere because you won’t have the gas to fill it. Understand what your metaphorical gas is. What is it that drives you? What is it that feeds you?

Hopefully, there’s aspects of your life that do that. For me, a big part of my life is just spending time with my family and being with my family. You know, I—and there’s things that I enjoy, and, you know, hobbies I enjoy, and games and comics and TV and science fiction and things I enjoy that I, you know, can interact with, and that—it helps fill me up. It helps give me some energy. But part of allocating is understanding where you’re expending energy and where you’re gaining energy, because if you only expend energy and don’t gain it, you will just run out of gas. And then that will cause yet another imbalance.

The other big thing about life, and this is a little harsher one but it’s something that I think is important, is you have to understand who are the people in your life, and you also have to—I’ll put it this way. You can prioritize (???) in clumps, if you will. You don’t have to individually prioritize. That seems a little mean. But what you can do is say, okay. Of the people in my life, who are the most important people to me? You know, who’s the number one group? Okay, who’s the secondary group? You know, not the primary group, but the secondary group? Who’s the tertiary group?

You know, and you can sort of the take the people and figure out—because another thing is, understanding who matters to you—now, it might be that these people are what gives you energy. It might be people that just, you like who you are when you’re with them. It might be people that help you relax. You know, whatever, or—it might be people that you love dearly and you want to spend time with.

Whatever reason, that’s fine, understand who it is, who are the people that give you resources, that provide happiness, that provide downtime, whatever, figure out the people that you need. For whatever reason you need them, and people need people, that is how we function. And make sure that you prioritize them. Not only do you prioritize activities, you gotta prioritize people.

And my story here is, when I got married, we invited a lot of people to the wedding. And what I thought was really interesting was, it was a very illuminating thing. Because what we did is, we got married, we called it a destination wedding. We were—it was about an hour, an hour and a half away. You had to actually take a ferry, I mean, it was probably an hour and a half to two hour drive to get to where we were going.

So we had a wedding and we made it a little difficult to get to our wedding. Not insanely difficult, but a little bit difficult. And it was very illuminating, because it really showed me what people I mattered to. Because the people I mattered to made it to the wedding. They’re like, “Okay, this is someone that matters to me, what do I need to do, I will do it and I will get there.”

And there are some people that are like, “Oh, yeah, it’s far away.” Whatever. They gave reasons for not attending. And what I realized was, it really made it much clearer in my mind, understanding who prioritized me and who didn’t.

And it was very illuminating, it really said to me that—I mean, to circle back to where I started with this, your priorities are only priorities if you prioritize them. If a person is a priority to you, but you never spend time with them? I’ll let you in on a secret. They’re not a priority. You know. And so you need to understand, who are the people that matter, and then you need to spend the time with the people.

A lot of life balance, a lot of—I mean, I’m almost to work today, so let me wrap this up, but a lot of the key of today, a lot of what I’m saying today is, you need to understand. If you want to balance between work and life, you need to in work and in life, understand what matters to you. What is important to you? What things are important to you, what people are important to you, what actions are important to you?

What are the things that you do and people you interact with, you know, and the projects you handle, what are the things that matter to you and mean something to you? Either because they personally enrich you in some way, or they’re important for some—you know, the key to work or whatever.  What are the things that matter, that you need to make sure you do, that you spend time with, that you interact with, what are the things that matter?

Figure that out. Prioritize them. Figure out your priority. And then, and this seems like such an easy thing to say, but in fact it’s a hard thing to live. But figure out your priorities, and then prioritize them. If somebody matters to you, spend time with them.

Like, one of the things for example is I’ve got a family, I’m like, family matters to me, and I gave up other things. You know what? I loved traveling. I loved traveling. Going around the world is really awesome. It was really cool. Did it matter to me more than my family? No, it didn’t, so I gave that up so I could spend time with my family because my family was my priority.

And it’s very hard sometimes—I mean, it’s a wonderful life to live where you have to prioritize between things you enjoy, and not everybody has that opportunity. But the important thing is, knowing what matters. You know. If you have a life where things are hard for you, but there’s certain things that give you joy, that help make it through, prioritize them. Understand those things. You know. If there’s people you need or things you need, if there’s activities you need or people you need to get through the day, you know, to really make your life something valuable to you, then understand what those things are. And figure out how to prioritize them. You know.

And another important part of this is, part of prioritizing is figuring out what doesn’t matter, and then not doing it. You know. Whether they’re activities that somebody else can do or you don’t really need to do or things you’re doing out of habit but not out of a need anymore, you know, there’s a lot of reasons why you can pick up things you don’t need.

And that part of a proper balance is not wasting time and energy on things that are not giving you what you need. And that a lot of what I want to do today, a lot of the things I’m talking about is, figure out your priorities and then prioritize the things that matter and deprioritize the things that don’t matter. And that might mean giving things up or not doing things or not interacting with people. You know.

You have to figure out, where is the things that matter, where are the things that make life worth living, that make things special for you, that make your job what you want it to be, that make you happy with who you are? Prioritize those things, do those things. Figure out the things that aren’t doing that. Figure out the things that suck up your time and energy and resources, that aren’t worth those resources. That’s a lot of making balance, is figure out what matters and how you can allocate your resources to the things that matter, and not to the things that don’t matter. And if you do that, that is how you can have work/life balance.

Okay guys, I am now in my parking space, we all know what that means, it means it’s the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. I’ll see you guys next time.