Work Life Balance

When you start a company, one topic that instantly becomes important is work / life balance. Startups are intoxicating creations- they have a way of demanding every second you give them, and then some.

At least part of the pull is this feeling like everything you do contributes directly to the bottom line of your company. I think another part is the lure of the next phone call or feature being "the big one". Just one more improvement and then [insert proof that your company has made it here].

I've read some great articles lately on work / life balance, but my favoritte so far is a series of two posts from serial Entrepreneur Steve Blank. The first part is titled "Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves" and talks about the lies Steve told himself during his first marriage:

• I’m only doing it for my family
• My spouse “understands”
• All I need is one startup to “hit” and then I can slow down or retire
• I’ll make it up by spending “quality time” with my wife/kids

None of these were true. I had thrown myself into a startup because work was an exciting technical challenge with a fixed set of end points and rewards. In contrast,relationships were messy, non deterministic (i.e. emotional rather than technical) and a lot harder to manage than a startup.

In a follow up post titled Epitaph for an Entrepreneur, Steve talks about his second marriage and the rules they instituted to help find a work life balance. Here are a few of my favorites:

• We would have a family dinner at home most nights of the week. Regardless of what I was doing I had to be home by 7pm.
• Put the kids to bed. Since I was already home for dinner it was fun to help give them their baths, read them stories and put them to bed. I never understood how important the continuity of time between dinner through bedtime was until my kids mentioned it as teenagers.
• Back to work after the kids were in bed. What my kids never saw is that as soon as they were in bed I was back on the computer and back at work for another 4 or 5 hours until the wee hours of the morning.
• Weekends were with and for my kids. There was always some adventure on the weekends.
• Long vacations. We would take at least a 3-week vacation every summer. The trips gave [my family] a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm.
• Never miss an event. As my kids got older there were class plays, soccer games, piano and dance performances, birthdays, etc. I never missed one if I was in town, sometimes even if it was in the middle of the day. (And I made sure I was in town for the major events.)
• Engage your spouse. I asked my wife to read and critique every major presentation and document I wrote. Everything she touched was much better for it. What my investors never knew is that they were getting two of us for the price of one.
• Have a Date-Night. We tried hard to set aside one evening a week when just the two of us went out to dinner and/or a movie.
• Travel only if it needed me. As an executive it was easy to think I had to get on a plane for every deal. But after I had kids I definitely thought long and hard before I would jump on a plane.

In the end we all must realize that we "work to live" not "live to work". Brad Feld recently said "We can choose a lot of things in our life, but one thing we can't choose is when the lights go out." When the lights do go out, the most thing important thing you have created is not going to be your company, it's the meaning in your own life and the lives of those around you. Companies and work are tools to bring about this greater meaning.

What are your work / life balance rules?