Calibration of Life Work Balance. The planning system that I have been developing for 14 years
Do you ever feel like the year has been wasted? Are your colleagues flying to the top of the career ladder, are your acquaintances' businesses actively developing, are your friends traveling the world and buying another apartment? And are we in a rut, drowning in work tasks, barely having time for everyday routine, leaving no time for ourselves?
I think I've managed to create a system that really helps find that balance between work and personal life. No, let's put it this way: find a balance between personal life and work and finally get rid of the state of time pressure.
I have been involved in personal planning since 2010. During this time, a variety of methods have been incorporated into my planning system:
Getting Things Done – as a basis;
The Eisenhower Matrix and the “eat the frog” method as a way to do the main thing;
SWOT analysis – as a way to live a conscious life. Hahahaha, I know it sounds funny, but how is SWOT related to personal planning, read on.
In short, this is a collection of all my experience in planning over 14 years. The article turned out to be voluminous, so I will divide it into two parts at once – this is the first part. I really hope that it will find its reader, will help find that very balance and, most importantly, will help me achieve more.
Now a little about myself. Now I am developing an online bank for legal entities at Alfa-Bank, before that I launched a B2B ecosystem at Sberbank, before banks I worked at VK (ex Mail.ru Group) and Yandex, where I came up with and launched Yandex Disk. I recently launched my own telegram channelwhere I write about fintech, management, reflect on the topic of my eternal struggle between a hedonist and a healthy lifestyle – in short, about everything that interests me today, subscribe!
Work-life balance
People around me often complain about the lack of work-life balance. And I have a simple answer: There is no work-life balance because their “work memory” only contains work tasks.
At work, we are taught to plan: we make roadmaps for the year, set quarterly goals and break them down into two-week sprints. But we have no work-life balance because we don’t set ourselves goals outside of work: launch a blog or get the first 1,000 subscribers, learn English, lose 5 kg, buy a new snowboard.
How can there be balance if we don't really plan anything except work? It physically can't exist.
Corporate tools
There are many useful tools and processes from the corporate world that we as individuals do not use.
In the corporate world, we understand that a routine is very important: to come to work at the same time, because this is how the “working organism” is synchronized. All elements of this “organism” understand when they can count on each other, get used to it, and this is how the working rhythm is built.
A clear work rhythm allows synchronizing the work of different departments, processes, people and, of course, reduces stress. But in their personal lives, only a few people follow the regime and, for example, go to bed at the same time.
Our bodies need a steady rhythm to stabilize circadian rhythms, which regulate our sleep-wake cycles, and to optimize the production of hormones such as melatonin, which regulates sleep, and adrenaline, which provides the energy needed for physical activity and work. Disruption of circadian rhythms can lead to sleep problems, decreased energy, and poor overall health, just as disruption of work routines can reduce work efficiency and increase stress.
At work, any corporate employee knows perfectly well that it is necessary to plan: we make up annual roadmaps, make quarterly plans, decompose goals into tasks in sprints. In personal life, almost no one does this.
We, individuals, don’t need to invent anything – there are already practices in the corporate world that will help us in our personal lives.
Budgeting
The topic of finance is a bit out of this series, but it does a good job of describing the benefits of reusing work tools in your personal life. In the corporate world, you don't have to explain to anyone that you need to budget something – you have to allocate a budget and control it.
Very few of my friends are involved in the layout of a personal budget. Only a few know how to manage their capital. By the way, I have a cool table in Google Docs for this, which allows you to manage your monthly budget and track the dynamics of your capital during the year in a game form. I can prepare one for you if the article is interesting and gets 50 pluses (I know that's a lot, but making a public table is not easy). I will also do it without pluses, but sometime in the future.
I have large expense items. For example, family vacation, autumn gadget upgrade for the family, insurance, education, and so on. These things cannot be purchased suddenly together, as this is a significant financial burden that is difficult to cover from one monthly salary. To distribute the financial burden, a practice from work comes to the rescue: calendaring and budgeting. By planning such expenses in advance and saving little by little, you can avoid the need to take out loans.
Many people who use budgeting practices at work ignore them in their personal lives and therefore live “in the opposite direction” – in the minus. Many have several credit cards open, and they try to pay off expenses that they made sometime in the past. And due to the lack of a budget plan, something can go wrong, and often does – they have to pay interest. Budgeting allows you to live forward. By the way, I was like that myself 🙂 And one of my annual goals in the “Finance” section was to pay off my credit card debts.
Life without planning is like orienteering without a map. You run through the forest to a certain point, and without a map it is quite difficult to do. You can run there anyway, but with a map it is much easier. A map is a good tool that helps you understand where to run.
Or, when setting out on an open voyage, it is probably possible to sail somewhere without a map, but it is much easier to do this by using coordinates.
So an annual plan is good. You can do without it, but it's much clearer with it.
Diary – a plan for the year
I first encountered the diary during the Executive MBA LWB, where they study business management tools, corporate finance, management and entrepreneurship in general.
An additional branch of my MBA program was the LWB course — LifeWorkBalance. It included questions of general development, leadership and enjoying life. That's where they told me how to plan a year. And, as it turned out later, this was taught to us by Landa — a fairly well-known coach. And she gave us a Word file — a diary template.
It didn't appeal to me then. I was young, looking for success pills, wanted to study strategic management, ahahahaha. Today I have 20 years of work under my belt, and now I understand that I understand little about strategic management.
In short, I didn't accept stories like “how to lose weight” or “how to find a husband”. There were also everyday questions like “what upsets you”, “what makes you happy”, and in the end it all ended with a suggestion to think about what I would do differently. And the pictures there were appropriate: a guy in knee socks and trekking boots climbing a mountain – the most shutterstock.
And I thought, well, this is such crap!
I am young
In the end, I gave up on it because I thought I didn't need it.
And then I had a course on strategic management, where we were told about SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). This method was introduced at Harvard in 1963 by Professor Kenneth Andrews and is used today to develop a strategy for the behavior of companies.
While working through the strengths and weaknesses of my company (I was running my own design studio XQ Design at the time), I suddenly realized that the questions from the “cringe file” and the SWOT analysis were the same in meaning. In one case, I was asked “what upsets me” or “where I was dissatisfied with myself,” and in the other, I was asked to name my weaknesses. In essence, these are the same questions, just asked in different language.
After that I decided to fill this diary. You can download the template of the original diary in my telegram channelIt has not lost its relevance and I highly recommend it to everyone.
Why fill out a diary and how?
The diary actually asks you fairly simple questions that help you understand what's important to you, what you're good at, and what you're striving for. For example, they ask you to describe key achievements in your life, or what moments you were happy about and what upset you.
Even if you are very modest and it seems that you have no achievements, you can simply write down what moments make you happy or sad and what it is connected with. This will be enough for a start.
Wheel of Life
After a series of questions, the diary smoothly leads to the “wheel of life”, where you need to think about your life priorities: family, friends, spiritual development, sports, health, work, career.
Not all elements of the wheel of life fell into my area of interest. Personally, I highlight several areas for myself: health, sports, networking, personal life and, of course, work.
Formulating important areas of life and assessing the situation in these areas is an important step towards balanced development in these areas. In fact, the life-work balance we discussed above can be visually displayed on this wheel.
By the way, when you formulate important areas in life, you can use them in the task tracker – for distribution within areas. We will talk about this in the second part of the article. Subscribe so you don't miss it.
Personal beliefs and guiding principles
The key thing about the journal is that through leading questions you formulate your personal beliefs and guiding principles, but I was inspired by this tool literally a few years ago. For the first 10 years I was formulating them, because they talk about it a lot: “formulate your mission, write an epitaph” and so on, and then in the journal they asked me to write personal beliefs.
But maybe I'm getting older or wiser? Both, of course, but I'm also growing up the career ladder, the tasks in front of me are constantly becoming more complex, the number of subordinates is growing. Now, for example, I'm responsible for a team of 1,000 people who are developing an online bank for legal entities at Alfa. The world around me is also changing, and along with this workload, the flow of incoming information is growing catastrophically. And I always want something. At some point, I was simply torn apart, I wanted to rely on something.
And the help came in a most unexpected way. In one interview, a well-known entrepreneur who once started in Luzhniki said: “without radical changes, the quality of life will not change.” It is clear that there was a context here, but this phrase was imprinted in my brain, and I suddenly realized that I also needed to change something radically.
I thought of this quote so often that I wanted to record it somewhere. During another iteration of filling out the journal, I realized that this was my personal conviction, and has remained so for several years now.
It was because of this conviction that I decided to start my own blog. I wanted to share my experience and I needed a radical solution, and suddenly I made a channel – without a normal name and content plan. Look at my first post, I just read this conviction in the morning and realized that something needed to change.
This same belief helped me decide to quit drinking alcohol, go to bed before 10 p.m., and hold meetings at work for 45 minutes instead of 60. In general, this belief has worked great for me so far and always helps me think and do something to radically change my life for the better.
This principle helped me quit drinking and smoking, reduce meetings from 60 to 45 minutes, and reassemble my team. And, interestingly, it helped me think throughout 2023 about what could be done differently, what needed to be changed and consolidated in order to live and work at a qualitatively new level.
Goals
The apotheosis of filling out a diary is formulating personal goals for the year. And here all the previous developments from the diary come into play. You record the areas of life that you want to work on. As I already said, for me it is health, sports, networking, personal life and, of course, work.
The easiest section to fill is the work section. The main thing is not to overthink it and take the main thing. I try not to take more than 5 goals in each section, but I still allocate 10 lines for work. I'm a workaholic 🙂
When I started working with a diary, I decomposed goals into quarterly, monthly and even weekly ones. Today, I have no need for weekly and monthly planning – too much noise. I leave the optimal number of benchmarks to keep them in focus.
I even thought about giving up quarterly goals, but I didn't dare. There still has to be a certain level of decomposition.
It turned out that I replaced such excessive detailing of plans with principles and beliefs with the allocation of time for thinking in the morning – my interpretation of the book “The Miracle Morning”, but more on that in the next article.
How to work with a diary regularly
I fill out this diary once a year and very rarely reread it – it’s quite voluminous. But in order to constantly check its contents, I make a one-page executive summary, which consists of guiding principles and annual goals.
This is a plain text format saved in notes. It opens in literally a second and all the content fits on one screen (though I have a 27-inch monitor))))
Afterword
It took me 4 months to fill out the diary for the first time. It's incredibly difficult to tell yourself the truth about certain things, and you still have to get to the bottom of this truth. That's why it took 4 months. Then, of course, it's faster, but it's still not fast every time.
In the first year, I got a dopamine headshot. I spent a long time answering questions, for the first time I formulated annual goals for myself, which seemed extremely ambitious to me, and at the end of the year, having assessed the result, I was simply stunned. Stunned by how much I managed to achieve.
It was my personal proof of work, and the diary became an annual habit.
I think it works very simply. By formulating and writing down a goal, you subconsciously strive to achieve it. Perhaps you don’t even notice it, but at any managerial or personal fork in the road, you choose the track to the intended goal.
The focus has shifted to beliefs and principles. As I've become more of a leader, my focus has shifted to the principles I use to guide my decisions.
I have many such practical observations and experiences, which I will share in the second part of the article – it will be about specific tools and methods that I use in daily planning. By the way, in my telegram channel I write more often on these and other topics, so subscribe!
