Month: August 2025

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Work Life Integration

I’ve stopped thinking about how to balance work and life. In terms of work and life there is a transaction cost to what you want your life to look like. I think more of work life integration. Your work agreement with your employer can be viewed as a mix of compensation and incentives that help empower or detract from the life you want.

First principles:
The thought is that “I have problems to solve and people pay for my attention into solving those problems. Financial transaction enables other parts of my life.” Each job does this and in a free market, your compensation is commensurate with the difficulty of the problem you are solving. Some problems simply cost more time and energy.

Practical Outworking at Ground Level:
One example is teams that work on shift. I have a team like this. Part of the problem they’re solving is coverage of a service with a time bound function. So they don’t have the flexibility in the time they can be on or off work. To the point that we put hard boundaries around calling them outside of their shift hours. The other transaction mechanism is if they’re working overnight (11:30pm – 8:30am) that’s a harder problem to solve compared to someone working days(8:00am – 5:00pm). The overnight shift has a 10% stipend over their base salary. What each shift gets back out of the transaction is a very clear stop and start point to work. Some people want or need that in life for a myriad of reasons.

Transacting Back Incentives in Compensation:
That team is paid less than me and it’s a reasonable expectation given their job is limited in scope and clearly defined. I have a larger scope and I’m looking at problems with a longer reach and impact. I also, don’t generally get the same lines of off/on time. I work remotely from a laptop. So long as I do my job I have the ability to be mobile, I can work from where I want, and I can come and go as I please related to work. That IS a great benefit and that IS a double edged sword. If things are healthy I get to “leave on time”, if things aren’t healthy I get 10pm and 2am calls. My time back is part of my compensation, so i’m very incentivized to make things healthy.

Very practical schedule:
I hold to a schedule. It keeps me productive and consistent for my team. I usually end up starting a little before 8am, and working until around 6pm. Then I drop out and jump back online for another hour sometime that evening to wrap up a few things. (The time I get back on is reducing as the kids get older.) Because of my role with FaithTech I sometimes need to work from another city. So I leave early (depending on the city as early as 4:30am) and start work from a cafe somewhere in that city at 8am. I’ve worked from my travel trailer a few times and many times someone asked me to lunch or afternoon coffee or beer around 3pm. I’ve had the ability to say yes and have done so.

What about you? Like if you’ve nailed the work/life integration and comment to share how or ask for help.

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Engineer Your Path from the End First.

I took some time off this past week. What basically added up to a long weekend, but it was needed. Made me think about work/life balance. I hear many people talking about the freedom they want with work. I don’t really think that’s the point though.

If you’re expectation is that you can gain now, what you want your life to look like in the future without any understanding of the journey and cost required to get there, then you might have set yourself up for failure, disappointment, or both. I’ve become more and more convinced that money is simply a tool to allow for transaction back in terms of personal time use. If you don’t have a real need for more money, do what you want. Everyone else, is beholden to a rule of constraints.

If you’re just starting out from school at whatever level, don’t try to gain the job you want to have in 20 years and for which the requirement to add value in that position will be 20 years of setting your hands to a task. You either, don’t add enough value back to the business for that transaction to make sense on the other side or you’ll be overpaid and the first to be released during the bad days.

“Well, I’ll just start my own business.” is the other response I think I’m going to hear. I hope you do, also that’s not just sunshine and rainbows. If you’re starting that for the right reason, which is to truly solve a problem, then it’s still a 20 year journey to build a business.

Even if you get that dream job in your early 20’s, it’s not your dream job. Been there. Landed my dream job after a decade of work and was out 3 years later because it wasn’t that after all. Your life is more than work and work is a significant part of your life. Learn to enjoy the journey of that more than an end that you’ll never catch.

That does not mean, don’t think about what you want your life to look like in 20 years. Start with the end in mind and engineer your path accordingly.

Interested what the rest of you think. Like if you agree, comment if you differ in thought. Will post more about work/life integration and how that might work. In the meantime, here’s a pic of a sunset from this weekend.

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Identity, Calling, Assignment

Clarifying what you want in life and why you do the things you do is difficult. There’s a lot more to unpack on this subject about how you get there. For now, here’s some language i’ve found helpful to clarify this for others.

Everyone needs clarity around three things to make sense of their life and work.

Identity -> Who am I that doesn’t ever change.
-Example is that I am a father, I am a son, I am a brother, I am a friend, i am a husband to Jessica, I am loved and accepted regardless of what I do and don’t do.
-Depending on the person this might be an easy or difficult process to get to.

Calling -> Looking over my life, what has been the consistent function regardless of specific role?
-Example is that my calling is to “help organizations become healthy so that others can thrive.” Part of it is posted in my linked in headline. It’s not just a statement as much as a lense for making decisions on the next part.
-This can take significantly more time to work through. The statement above grew and was clarified over several years.

Assignment -> What is my role in this season where I apply my calling?
-Example is that I’m fulfilling my calling in The Purple Guys and NTiva by working with my Centralized Services team to help address operational issues that add balance back to our team. Because the team I work with has a pre-emptive function, this work also allows me to impact 100’s of other organizations by helping make our client environments healthier from a technical perspective.
-This is usually the place where people are the clearest about what they’re doing. The problem shows up when people lose their assignment. It’s difficult enough to navigate something like that if you know your calling and identity and usually people are so geared down on the assignment that they haven’t worked down to understand the foundation and navigate something like that well so they get thrown into a tailspin.

Would love to hear feedback on these thoughts and where others are at on this subject. Like if you agree. Comment with your calling statement if you have one.