Work Life Balance
Since I develop software for a living, I’m not fully on board with Richard Stallman‘s radical views regarding free software. However, in an interview with the author of the book “Making It Big In Software” (which is pathetically patronizing and patriarchical – so don’t buy it), Richard answers the question:
How do you achieve a work-life balance? How do you keep your software life from dominating everything?
with
Why would I want to do that? ….. This is not just a pastime and not just a job. It’s the most important thing I know any way to do. I’m proud of it, and when I achieve something, I am very satisfied. It should be the main focus of my life, and it is.
I’m on board with that. I go on week-long fishing, golfing, and Mardi Gras jaunts, but other than that, I love specifying, architecting, designing, writing, and testing software. I feel the same way about what I do as Richard does about his passion.
How about you? Is the line of demarcation between your work and your life blurry, or fine? Do you think it’s “bad” if someone doesn’t clearly distinguish between “work” and “life”?
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Tom Kelley of Ideo gives a lecture talking about fostering creativity and innovation. One of his segments is entitled “Do What You Love”:
I think that if you follow his thinking to the full extent, then you have successfully eliminated the line between “work” and “life”. (lucky you!)
His entire lecture can be found here:
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2097
I encourage you to view it. It’s worked for me, and we’re about to expose our entire design group to this as a way to kick-start our own internal processes in the future.
Great stuff fishypoo, and thanks. I love IDEO and Tom Kelley. The guy oozes enthusiasm; “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tom states that “It’s OK to be an artist, even when it raises the eyebrows on everyone around you”. That’s way easier said than done, especially in a conservative corpo environment.
Please, please, ya gotta report back sometime in the future on how your design group fares after the upcoming training.
another thing I’ve been contemplating is his concept of ‘who’s on the bus with you?’ (the dotted rectangle surrounding his diagram). THAT’s your corpocracy, and the clowns hovering outside the circles but inside the box are all your C-Level dudes and DIC-force DICtators. If that group is bogus, it rots the whole tomato, right??
(I keep wanting to add in some of your diagrams to our presentation, but I’m afraid I’ll piss off the clowns in the box).
Dude, you can use whatever graphics you’d like, however you’d like. I do suggest though, that you don’t use any of the ones with poop piles in them.
but those are the best ones.
(And I think just about all of them have your little steamie pile of offal somewhere.)