Hacking your Work Life
__
Balance to Take Over the World
Jennifer Wadella
Jennifer Wadella
@likeOMGitsFEDAY
- Lead Angular Dev @ Bitovi
- Nonprofit Founder/Director
- International Speaker
- Kombucha Brewer
This talk may contain strong language, harsh truths, and serious passion.
Work
Your trade - but mostly how you collect a paycheck.
- Job Execution
- Skill Upgrading
- Managing Others
- Meetings, responding to emails, training, paperwork
Life
Everything you do when you're not at work.
- Household Management
- Financial Planning
- Family
- Health
- Sleep
- Social Life
- Hobbies
- Relaxation
"Blank"
Your passion.
- Volunteering?
- Blogging?
- Public Speaking?
- Side Hustle?
- Managing a non-profit?
- Competitive sport?
- Open Source project/contribution?
Your Blank is NOT a hobby
My "blanks"
KC Women in Technology
Public Speaking
My work-life-blank plotted
Strategies
- Prioritizing
- Automating
- Balancing
- Finding Tools & Processes
- Recompensating
- Working Smarter, Not Harder
Strategy #1: Prioritize
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
|
Not Important
|
Quadrant of Necessity
|
Quadrant of Quality &
|
|
Not Important
|
Quadrant of Deception
|
Quadrant of Waste
|
Eat the Frog First
“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” - Mark Twain
What About Creative Workflow
Have a way to document creative thoughts as a placeholder
Unforseen Chaos
Murphy's Law
What can go wrong WILL go wrong
home catastrophe
Strategy #2: Automate
Like devops IRL
Autopay
Eliminate the need to remember dates for bills.
Autocommunicate
- Create canned responses - tutorial for Gmail
- Proof your work with Grammarly - Chrome/Safari extension
- Set reminders for on Slack notifications
- Create todos for yourself/team in Slack
- For everything else - IFTTT, Emailpet, & Zapier
Automarket Yo-self
- Spend the time to really craft a good bio and get a headshot you love.
- Build a personal website in Gatsby #shamelessplug
- Use social media tools to manage your content
- Set up Google Alerts for your name/company
Autodomesticate
- Look into cleaning services
- Tidy as you go - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
- Outsource lawncare projects
- Try a meal prep service - Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Marley Spoon
- Get the monotonous items (toilet paper, paper towels, garbage bags, dog food, cat litter) regularly shipped to you.
life effort before/after automating
life effort before/after automating
Spend your time and energy on implementing ideas & solving the big problems.
tl;dr - Find redundancies in your life and find ways to minimize them
You
Me
Everyone else
Strategy #3: Find Balance
Stress + Rest = Growth
Conscious CompetenceYou know what to do and how to do it,
Time for: Disciplined Effort |
Unconscious CompetenceYou know what to do and how to do it,
Time for: Skilled Application |
Conscious IncompetenceYou know what you need to do,
Time for: Learning |
Unconscious IncompetenceYou don't know what you don't know. Time for: Discovery |
Get Enough Sleep
- Recovery - this is when your immune system releases compounds called cytokine
- Aids in Hunger Management
- Memory - REM & slow wave sleep of sleep contribute to creative thinking, procedural memory, long-term memories, and memory processing
How to Get Enough Sleep
- Use a fitness tracker to monitor your sleep
- Avoid stimulants and lights before bed.
- For help falling asleep try audiobooks, apps, music, or white noise creators.
Know Your Productive Hours
The number of hours in a day isn't the issue ... it's how many of those hours you feel productive during.
A one hour workout is
4% of your day
no excuses.
Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
Prioritize Your Health
How you treat your body matters!
"There's good epidemiological data to suggest that active people are less depressed than inactive people. And people who were active and stopped tend to be more depressed than those who maintain or initiate an exercise program,"
- James Blumenthal, PhD, clinical psychologist at Duke University.
Learn to Say "No"
Remove Toxic Relationships
Do not set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. - a super wise person
Turn Off Push Notifications.
Get the f*ck off Social Media.
Give Yourself A Break
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
Identify & Minimize Stressors
Strategy #4: Use Tools & Processes
Hacking your work life __ balance IS a process.
Trello for everything.
Just kidding. Kind of.
But find a tool that works for you.
Calendar/Email Hacks
- If it exists, block it on your calendar.
- Physically block out work hours for yourself.
- Share calendars between family members
- Use reminders & todos, and email snooze features
- Calendly
- Want a response? Always conclude with a CTA and deadline
- Format your dates to be easy to remember - Day of week, date, time + timezone
- Make your emails easy to read - use lists, call out important info, line breaks are your friend.
Adulting Hacks
- Get into meal prepping
- Avoid busy times for doctors appointments, car repair, DMV
- Run errands when parents will be picking up their kids from school
- Use order ahead/pickup services when available
Get an Accountability Buddy
Friend with shared __ interests? Great!
If not, create your own accountability buddy in Slack - IFTTT recipe
Train your brain to go into
focus mode
- Use music - The New Playlist For More Productive Work: Video Game Soundtracks
- Fez - Sync (currently playing)
- Braid Soundtrack
- Remove distractions -
- Physcially write down the things distracting you
- Clear your office & your desktop
Strategy #5: Recompensate
rec·om·pen·sate
to pay or give compensation for; make restitution or requital for (damage, injury, or the like).
Step 1: Don't try to be a 10x developer
Get yoself a hobby
Have Guilty Pleasures
and don't feel guilty.
Plan Things You Look Forward To
Take Your Birthday OFF
🎂 🎂 🎂
Strategy #6: Work Smarter, Not Harder
Doing the work != recognition for doing the work
Remove the word "should" from your vocabulary
Understand that you are entitled to nothing.
Expect Failure
But don't get hung up on it. Failure is part of the process.
Learn from your mistakes
Make plans to take over the world
Recap: Strategies
- Prioritizing
- Automating
- Balancing
- Finding Tools
- Recompensating
- Working Smarter, Not Harder
Questions?
Slides available at: tehfedaykin.github.io/HackingYourWorkLife__Balance