It would be good if there was some warning signs prior to the actual demise. Gary Barber has compiled a list of signs you’re working too much that includes the following:

1. Your family and friends have got so used to not having you around, you feel like a stranger when you are around them.
2. Closing yourself off from your friends and associates, stopping all contact, ignoring emails, phone calls from them etc.
3. You have a spiralling compulsion to work longer and longer hours, trying to squeeze the last few minutes from the day.
4. Your level of caffeine and stimulates has increased to the point that it disrupts your sleep, what little that you are getting.
5. You are putting aside relaxation or regular exercise in favour of getting the job done, you feel compelled to finish the tasks at hand.
6. You are finding that you are getting really irate at mundane things. Like when you have to wait for anything, queuing at the checkout, in traffic or waiting for a late scheduled meeting.
7. General forgetfulness of anything that is not work related.
8. Missing family special events, such as partner’s work events, or children’s school or major sporting events in favour of work.
9. Long term sickness, like a cold or flu you just can’t shake.
10. You get to the point that you can’t tell what day it is. You avoid drawing the blinds as you don’t want to look at the beautiful day outside as it’s going to distract you.

I think that I’m probably a “yes” of 7/10 on the above. What’s your score?

Maria Murphy observed at Canberra IA Cocktail Hour the other night that she could tell when her colleagues got up in the morning, when they went to bed, and what they were working on - all through Twitter.

I laughed at the time, but it is true - we do send tweets to our friends to let them know when we start work, when we go home, when we start afterwork, and when we go to bed. Twitter is as good an indication as any of the number of hours we put into work. If these random tweets were collated and assessed they would easily serve as a timecard-equivalent.

I suspect, quietly, that we would be horrified at the result.

I’ll confess that I’m concerned I’m already way too dependent on technology and that perhaps I’m on a path that could ultimately make much of my life merely ‘virtual’. I can’t see myself saying when I’m about to die “boy, I sure wish I spent more time in front of those screens!”

Thinking about what you may regret when you’re about to die certainly puts things into perspective. I can see this as a key indicator of what is truly important to you (granted that what is important to you may not be important to me).

Could you write your Regrets List?
Could you look back at your life and write a list today of what you would regret if you were on your death bed? While it may sound morbid, none of us really know when we’re going to pass on - and given that it could happen at any time, if you are ever going to construct such a list, today is as good a day as any other.

What would you do with your list?
Interesting question.

The disclaimer: I could not pretend to be a qualified counsellor so I won’t try - if bringing up regrets is likely to reinforce negative self-perceptions to the stage where you may harm yourself, please seek the assistance of a qualified counsellor or other health professional. Self-awareness is important but it is more important to have the strength to get through the day - everything else depends on this. Do not harm yourself.

I treated it as a risk analysis exercise - this is what I did:

1. I Identified as many regrets as possible - I wrote a big long list. I wrote down everything that I could think of, then revisited it every so often.
2. I then divided the regrets into the things that could be changed and the things that could not.
3. I then categorised them by probability and impact. Probability is the likelihood of a thing occuring - in this case, regrets are mostly things that have happened (or not) in the past, but there is a chance of that same regret reoccuring, especially where a habit (like gossip) is concerned - so probability cannot be discounted. Impact is the effect that they had on those around me and myself.
4. I then worked on my risk mitigation strategy: for those regrets with a high impact and a medium to high probability, I turned them into a todo list. Some of these will be addressed by specific goal-setting/action plans, and I’d like to think that, in time, all of them can be resolved.

This does not only apply to work/life balance, but to every part of life. Working through this sort of thing helps to give life meaning. What do you think?

1.  You become easily annoyed at both fellow staff and customers. You find yourself having to hold back rude or offensive comments because you are becoming increasingly more agitated and annoyed. Even on a good day, all it takes is one off comment to make you realize just how miserable you are.

If you feel this way, it may be time for a career change.

1. You are unhappy at home when you come back from work. The weekends are great, but look out on weeknights. If you are constantly coming home tired, frustrated, annoyed, paranoid, or even upset, you may be in need of a career change.
2. You hate your coworkers, your boss, and your customers. If you absolutely loathe coming in to work because of your fellow employees or management, you may need a career change. Changing firms or place of employment is unlikely to yield any significant changes, as all business that are in related markets tend to have the same kind of feel to them.

He goes on to offer the following advice:

Do any of those points raise red flags? If so, perhaps now is the time to give some serious thought into your career and what your objectives are. If you decide that changing careers outright isn’t the answer, sit down with your boss(es) and see if you can work out some type of solution to your dilemma.

Your happiness should be number one, so work to achieve it.

There is something in that for all of us. If you are not enjoying your work, it will show.

1. The first question: What is most important to me? What do I love to do? The answer is different to every person. For me, it’s simple: I love my wife and kids, I love writing, I love reading, and I love helping others. For others, it may be hiking or mountain biking or creating music or anything, really. Answer this question first.
2. The second question: what are the things going on in my life, the things I do every day and every week and month, and how are they related to what is important to me? If you are going out drinking with the guys, and it’s not really important to you, and it’s stopping you from doing what is important, that’s a candidate for simplifying. Examine all your commitments, and ask yourself if they are really important to you, if they give you great value for your time, and if they are related to what is truly important.
3. Possessions: The same questions can be asked of all the stuff you own — do you really love them? Are they truly essential? Another question you can ask, to clarify your thinking: If my house burned down, which few things would I want to replace? Get rid of all the rest. They leave clutter and stress and keep you from enjoying the stuff you really love.
4. Everything else: This same concept can be applied to anything else in your life — your work, the information you read every day, the television programs you watch, the people in your life. Know what’s essential, what you love, what’s important … and get rid of the rest.
5. What you’re left with: If you get rid of the extraneous stuff, the stuff that’s not related to what’s important to you, what do you have left? Just the important stuff. Just the stuff you really love to do. When you get rid of the other stuff, when you cut, let’s say, television and hours of Internet surfing and beer drinking from your life, don’t just cut it out — remember what’s important and what you love to do, and do that instead. For me, that means spending time with my family instead of working, that means writing or reading instead of watching TV, that means helping others instead of going to the mall (something I want to do more of).

It ends with this simple premise: identify what is important to you, and ditch the rest. I like it.

I’m a big fan of ebooks - I’ve designed them, worked with them, and it would be a rare day when I don’t read at least part of an ebook. While the e61 is cool, it is smaller than my laptop, and infinitely more portable:

I tend to use Mobipocket Creator or Plucker to create ebooks, as they allow a richer experience than either of Microsoft Reader or Palm Reader format. Mobipocket works best where there is a linear progression throughout the book - start at chapter 1 and go through to The End, one chapter at a time. Plucker is an offline website browser, which is why it copes better with the thousands of cross-references in Schedule for PDA (that I helped to prototype and design).

Something to think about for your next phone purchase - there are a range of options that usefully support ebooks.

Compare this to Tim Ferriss who is currently selling the concept of the four hour work week. He warns against going for your dream job as it can lead to a blurring of the work/life boundary. This is an interesting concept - don’t get too “into” your job or it may swallow you. Here is what Tim had to say about the concept of work/life balance:

I am a strong advocate of work-life separation as opposed to work-life balance. The concept of work-life “balance” is a dangerous one because “balance” is often mistaken to mean blending, where work and personal tasks are alternated in the same environments, or where one activity is expected to provide both work and life. The Blackberry is checked while you wait for dinner in a restaurant, the laptop is cracked while your spouse waits for you in bed, and the passion you loved so dearly for 10 years is now expected to pay the mortgage. This keeps your mind in the office 24/7 and destroys the few activities you cherished for the pure joy of experiencing them. This produces—at best—a state of constant low-grade overwhelm, even if actual workload is low.

I wish I didn’t have any personal experience of what he calls the state of constant low-grade overwhelm, but it describes my life to a T. I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon from a client office where I’m preparing for an interstate flight and a full-day meeting tomorrow. I’ve got some afterwork finished, more to go, and I observed this morning that my “todo” lists for work and blogging are growing at a faster rate than I can successfully undertake the work. The Ferriss solution is to outsource, and this is certainly possible with blogging in the form of guest blogging, and asking for a hand with afterwork. I’m not sure that it is sustainable as a long-term solution though - unless I am in a position to better outsource what is in front of me, or change things such that I can take advantage of $5.00 an hour white paper writers and the like.

What will the currently overworked do if the 20 hour work week ever happens? More to the point, how many of the 60 hour a week crowd will live to see that day?

In Japan, they even have a name for death by overwork - Karoshi.  My comment on Zern’s posting reads like this:

I wonder if we’ll end up revolting against work like our Japanese colleagues - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi says that lawsuits around people working themselves to death are on the rise. No-one should be encouraged to work themselves to death - and I contrast this to “being worked to death” because we mostly have a choice to not do this. Mostly. That said, there are organisations that expect people to perform above and beyond the call of duty every single day, which works when your work is your hobby, but is not sustainable.

Something that we all need to think about.

Cheers, Andrew

What I am saying is this: that we should not allow ourselves to be worked to death without thinking it through. In most cases, where there is death by overwork, there is an element of choice involved. Society allows us the freedom to work ourselves into the ground. If we do this, and we don’t die, but cease to be productive, should we become pariahs, as we may be tempted to treat people now who suffer from smoking-related illnesses? If we burn out, are we bludgers?

And if we do actually die by Karoshi, have we in effect committed suicide? In simpler times, would our remains have been excluded from hallowed ground, or staked to prevent us rising as vampires? Should our survivors and witnesses receive trauma counselling to accept our demise and prevent them from following in our footsteps?

Is working ourselves to death for a noble cause the same as taking a bullet for a friend? Do we accept the price of the sacrifice and do it anyway, knowing the consequences?

I haven’t given it enough thought to be able to say that I have my own personal answers to any of these questions, let alone offer advice. That said - I do have one question for you: if you work 12+ hours per day, do you know why you are doing it?

Please think about it before it is too late.

I worked fairly steadily through Saturday on afterwork with occasional blogbreaks then I met Helen in town. After some shopping we went to Cream - good food. While I don’t resent the afterwork, it did take the day away from me. Yesterday (Sunday) I started playing with blog setup (I need to get the databases sorted out before it drives me nuts!) and did some housework in between riffing on the possibility of BarCampCanberra happening sometime soon - sure enough it was 2PM before I knew it without much of a break. I declared a mini-holiday, and Ringo the Jack Russell Terrier and I sat and ate rice crackers and watched Reservoir Dogs together. I sipped on some wine, he didn’t, but we both enjoyed it I think (I am not sure that his experience was any less than mine for not wondering why Harvey Keitel doesn’t light that first cigarette).

Anyhow, the point of this ramble is: some probloggers and life coaches recommend getting into a routine - allowing so much time for blogging and life activities per day - but I am not sure that I have that luxury. With a variable amount of afterwork, and Helen working every second weekend, the amount of discretionary time varies.

Anyone have a suggestion for what might help?

Darren Rowse gives some good advice for Prebloggers on how much work is involved in Problogging. Prebloggers are would-be Probloggers - people who are interested in finding out how to blog for a living. Darren’s readership must contain a lot of Prebloggers amongst the Probloggers that regularly comment on his posts.

I think that the point of Darren’s post is that Problogging is hard work. He lists the following as typical Prologger tasks:

• Posting Posts
• Researching Posts
• Moderating Spam Comments
• Dealing with Comment Trolls
• Responding to Comments
• Responding to Emails from Readers
• Following what others blogs in the niche write
• Following what mainstream media is writing on the niche
• Commenting on other blogs
• Administering Servers
• Renewing Domain Names
• Marketing/Branding the blog
• Chasing up spam blogs stealing content
• Promoting posts to other relevant bloggers
• Search Engine Optimization
• Blog Design
• Monitoring Blog Stats and Metrics
• Testing monetization strategies
• Administering payments, banking cheques, invoicing advertisers
• Networking with other bloggers via IM or email

There are a lot of Prebloggers that are doing a lot of this stuff (except for banking the cheques) already while holding down a full-time job. So here is the question that I need answered for myself: how do we, as Prebloggers, maintain the work/blog/life balance?

Indulge me for a little while and I’ll take you through a day in my life to provide background to the question. A typical day for me starts at around 5AM. I’m an early riser, and like to get stuff done while the rest of the world is quiet. I’ll spend until 6:30AM or so working on blog setup, blog postings, or ‘afterwork’ (take home work from my day job as a consultant). The afterwork workload varies - some days (and weekends) I do little else in my spare time, other days it might only take 15 minutes - some of it involves a lot of playing with the mediawiki wiki platform, which is a tale for another day. At 6:30 Helen and I start getting ready for work, so that we can be there by 8AM. Depending on what is happening and how I am feeling on the day (at the moment, getting over a cold, I might not be up to much after about 4PM) I’ll leave the client site and either head home or into the company office. There is usually at least one meeting in the company office requiring my presence a week, often two. If I am heading straight home I might get into a bit more work/blogging (up to an hour or so) before getting dinner ready. If I am think my emotional health requires it I will rest or play games on my Nintendo Wii. Helen gets home and we spend some time together discussing our respective days, we eat and watch a little TV or a movie. After that I’m back on the tools for an hour or two before retiring with a book. Some evenings we go out to eat (probably once a week) and maybe a big-screen movie.

In other words, I will spend four hours or more on an average day working on afterwork and blogging apart from client-time work (minimum 7.5 hours per weekday) and liesure time. Where is the balance? How do I find it? It is interesting enough that I’ll probably blog about just that - finding the Work/Blog/Life balance.