Why choose separate burners when you can build a big fire instead?

"I’ve said all along that life-work balance is overrated. If you’re not happy with your life, you should change it like plenty of other people have done. If your job sucks and you’re miserable, you should quit." From Chris Guillebeau's post The Four Burners Theory - Your Thoughts? If you're not reading Chris Guillebeau, you should be. You can find him at The Art of Non-Conformity and depending on where you live, you might even be able to meet him in person during his Unconventional Book Tour kicking off in September 2010.

Reviewing a bit, the Four Burners Theory says that our lives have four burners: family, friends, health and work. To keep life under control, it might be tempting to keep all the burners on but set them on low heat. The theory proposes that successful people sacrifice one burner and really successful people sacrifice two in order to burn hot somewhere else.

The Four Burners Theory doesn't jive with me, not right away at least.  Dividing life into separate burners implies having to control them all.  This feels too rigid for real life, like freedom is slipping away. Without freedom there is no play and without play, the flow of fresh air stops and the fire suffocates itself.

From this perspective, a really successful or even just successful life doesn't seem satisfying.  How can an unsatisfying life feel...balanced. Are you following me with this?

Another word for balance is equilibrium. It's something that can be re-established when there has been a shift.  Think about gymnasts or ice skaters.  There are inconsistent athletes, the ones that either hit their elements in perfect form all the way through or execute a disaster from start to finish.  They never fall in-between.  Then there are the ones that are much more consistent because when they bobble, they quickly recover their equilibrium.  They have an inner strength that allows flexibility and readjustment when the unexpected happens.

Here's how I think it works.  First, you have to know what you want out of your life.  It's not about what other people want out of theirs since the only person responsible for living your life is you.  An interesting way to find out what you want from life is to write your obituary.  I've had the opportunity to do this (which you can read about here) and I recommend going through the exercise.

Second, you have to decide how you're going to use your energy to get what you want.  As the Cheshire cat told Alice in Wonderland, "if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."  This is where strength comes in.  You have to be strong enough to say no, to stand up for what you want.  Some of your most important decisions are not about what you will do, but what you won't do.  If you're not willing to be that strong, is there any point in worrying about your life balance?

Third, you have to be willing to be out of equilibrium, to let balance shift from time to time.  Re-establishing equilibrium is often uncomfortable, but worth it because you get better at it the more it happens.  Think about our ice skater friends learning a brand new routine or skill.  Over the course of a career they will have to learn many routines.  They get past the falls, the uncertainty, and eventually they get through it.  You will, too.  Lance Armstrong reminds us that "If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on."  Do you dread the shifts or welcome them?  Do you put off making changes because you'd rather stay in an unsatisfied state of balance than experience the adjustment towards a new equilibrium?

Ultimately the life you feel you are living is where your emotions are present.  Achieving life balance is not about analysis, magic equations or helpful analogies.  You can divide up priorities in life, give them equal attention and be unsatisfied.  What's important is to be fully present wherever you are giving your attention.  If you're not distracted, you detect when your foot is slipping so you don't have to land on your bottom to realize you've lost your balance.

-Andrea

Do you think you're smart enough to do it wrong?

Do you ever worry about failure, about not doing it right?  The humans among us naturally worry about such things.  But what would happen if you tried something fully intending to fail?

Earlier this month I read a post on World's Strongest Librarian by Josh Hanagarne where he challenged his readers to a bad poetry contest.  Initially I thought it was simply interesting because unless you are a poet and you know it, anybody could jot down a couple of lines of awkward and unnatural prose.

Later that afternoon I thought the contest was brilliant.  Why?  Because we all have an understanding of what "bad" means.  Our vocabulary for describing what's wrong is stronger than the vocabulary we use to identify what's right.  We're well-trained at finding out why something doesn't work.  It is not unusual or far-fetched for us to know more about what we don't like than what we do.

So consider this: if you think you know what "bad poetry" looks like, try writing some.  Somewhere in your mental archives you have a list of rules that bad poetry violates.  You know what not to do.  So write some poetry where you don't do those things.  Just try it.

It's surprising how creative you have to be to write something that is intentionally bad and cringe-worthy. Even more surprising?  It's a little fun.  That's right.  Fun.  As in loosened up and relaxed and playful.

And that's where the beauty lies.  By trying to intentionally fail, you have to address your individual assumptions about what failure looks like.  Thinking a certain way is not at all the same as acting a certain way, and when you try to put your assumptions about failure into action, suddenly the assumptions don't feel so absolute.

What are some other examples where you claim to know what "bad" looks like, what defines failure?  Think about your resume, the proposal you've been meaning to write, the idea you've been wanting to pitch to your boss if you could only figure out how.

If you were going to do these things intending to do them wrong, what would that look like?  What are the criteria you came up with for making those judgements?  Now flip them around.  Congratulations, you are now your own how-to guru!

-Andrea

Well-Fed Friday (Kicking #FF up a notch)

728 words in this post brings me to 968 words.  Time for yoga!

What's a typical Friday like for you?  Antsy anticipation until you get to shut down the computer and start the weekend?  A little nagging pit of your to-do list in your stomach trying to call attention to what remains unfinished for the week?

First, a bit of personal backstory.  Then, what I'm doing different and why it matters more in the long run.

When I had a traditional desk job in a big company, Friday was my catch up day.  While most people raced through the day to be able to leave early, I locked myself in my office and stayed late, taking advantage of the quiet period in the afternoon when the phone stopped ringing, emails slowed to a trickle, and people stopped visiting my office. In that one day, I believed I would kick ass and make the harried rest of the week worthwhile.

I hit the easy items first, the ones that needed little nudges to keep them moving.  I sent reminders, left voice mail, scheduled meetings.  My burst in uninterrupted productivity meant my coworkers would start the next week even further behind.  Sure, I would suffer the consequences, but I reveled in my momentary feeling of accomplishment.

By lunch time,  I was tackling back burner projects.  It took time to equilibrate with each one, to figure out where I was and what action I planned to take.  I realized I forgot to follow up or I didn't hand off when I needed to.  At this point my day began to derail.  I had kept too much in my court and had become the bottleneck.  I was so far behind!  Anxiety and hopelessness infiltrated my early afternoon.

Then, without fail, the phone would ring around 2:30 pm.  It was the Friday Afternoon Crisis, the thing that would occupy the next several hours because someone needed a miracle delivered.  Desperate customers who need a product delivered Saturday, requiring time to expand and geography to shrink.  Senior managers needing urgent analysis for a presentation next week that they found out about two weeks ago.  Taking charge because no one knows what else to do and Coworker A is on vacation and Coworker B already left for the day and stopped answering his phone.

Miracle delivered or crisis postponed, the presence of my coworkers evaporated by 5:00 pm.  The cleaning crew and I had the building to ourselves.  The stacks of paper on my desk were useless now, the day was too far gone.  I filed it all away again, leaving a trail of sticky notes like bread crumbs for the following Friday.  My desk cleaned, I turned back to my computer for a few last emails.  6:30 pm.  7:00 pm.  7:30 pm.  Sometimes 8:00 pm.  My car was the last one in the parking lot as I headed into a weekend defeated and sapped of motivation.

The only ass that got kicked on those Fridays was mine.

Cut to the present.  I have noticed that even in a state of non-traditional employment, my expectations are not different.  I still look to Friday to deliver miracles I couldn't put together during the week.  My feelings of defeat have not changed because although my venue has changed, my behavior has not.

Last Friday, I decided I'm done with that old and busted behavior.  The new hotness is what I call Well-Fed Fridays.  There are logistics issues with inviting you all over and cooking you big meals to show appreciation.  So instead, I give you my attention on Well-Fed Friday. I'm giving my Fridays over to appreciating the contributions of others and making sure I tell them about it. Examples:

• Writing recommendations for people on LinkedIn
• Contributing to discussions on LinkedIn  
• Commenting on blogs & sharing them with other people
• Sending meaningful direct messages on Twitter
• Picking some Twitter followers and looking at their tweets, their blog if they have one, finding out what they are all about 

Last week I tried it out a little.  Feelings of defeat and depleted motivation were replaced with warmth and connectedness.   Can't wait to find out what a full day of this feels like!

-Andrea