For one-third of my career I commuted 4 hours a day to and from work. Many key life moments were missed in exchange for my coming and going. What about you and your career? Is it time for some hard choices and possible changes? When the sun sets on your career…what do you
want to see on the scales of life versus work? Sip your favorite drink and give this one some thought!
For one-third of my career I commuted 4 hours a day to and from work. Many key life moments were missed in exchange for my coming and going. What about you and your career? Is it time for some hard choices and possible changes? When the sun sets on your career…what do you
want to see on the scales of life versus work? Sip your favorite drink and give this one some thought!
It's an age old question, do we live to work or work to live? Stick around, and let's kick this around for a little bit. Our book about improving customer experiences is now in audiobook format on Amazon Audible and iTunes.
Speaker 2:Hmm.
Speaker 3:All right, Mr. Simple Biz Sky to show.
Speaker 1:Hello everybody. Jeff Mason, your host of Simple Biz 360 podcast. We are simple biz three sixty.com on the worldwide web, and you can find this show on YouTube, I gtv Gab tv and 28 audio platforms. All your favorites like Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart, Pandora, apple, you name it. So, uh, today we're gonna be talking about that, that whole, you know, argument of living to work versus working to live. And I'd like to just present three questions. I don't necessarily want to answer these three questions. I'm not trying to, I'm trying to ask them so that we can take a look introspectively and see things. So first is, is a healthy balance of work and life really necessary. Number two is a healthy balance of work and life really achievable as we climb our career success ladders. And then number three, what do our families say? I mean, have we ever really sat down and talked to'em about it? Now, you know, we've seen a lot of changes in the world globally since the pandemic. A lot of things have shifted and, uh, families, oddly enough, and strangely enough, have have in many ways been brought closer. A lot of the workforce has been brought into the home. So now we have an easier, I think in some cases, easier opportunities to blend life and work together and balance things a little better. Maybe be around for a few more soccer games and dance recitals and baseball games, hockey games, et cetera. But it really, you know, it really begs the question, uh, you know, can we inject this balance today in our individual work life? And, and what is the benefit of that? And if we can't, what is the cost of that? So I just, I did an exercise here. So mathematics, just to give you a little snippet of my life. For 11 years, I commuted from Central New Jersey to New York City for 11 years, and I spent four hours a day commuting. So if you take 240 business days in the average year, you multiply that by four hours, that by, uh, 11 years, and you're gonna come up with a little over 10,000 hours of commuting time, which by the way is 62 full weeks. Could you imagine that? 62 weeks now, uh, you, you know, you add on a 10 hour workday, and that's a lot of time away from the house. And literally for 11 years, I kid you not, I kissed my two girls as they were rubbing their eyes, waking up in the morning, and the next time, time I saw'em, I was kissing them as they were rubbing their eyes at the end of a day, a long day, and they were tired and on their way to bed. And it's, it's disheartening to look back on it now and say that, that, that that happened and that's how it was for 11 solid years. Now, here's the other weird part of this. If I had it to do over again, would I do the same thing or would I do it differently? I'd like to say from this vantage point that I do it differently, but that's not fair because I'm in this vantage point. If I rewind the clock to back then, you know, I don't know what I would've said. I probably would've done the same, made the same decision I made. So, you know, I just wanna encourage all of us, myself included, how can we inject more of this healthier balance into our workday so that we aren't those people that, um, you know, just simply live to work. We wanna be able to work, to live, don't we? I'll never forget walking the dog one day, years and years ago, decades ago, and I ran into one of my neighbors. I said, how you doing? It's something how we got on this subject. And he said, you know what my mom told me, and it's one of the best pieces of of advice I've ever been given. He said, my mom told me to never become what you do. And you know, I mean, we don't wanna get there, do we? So again, I just wanna throw this out, encourage you, invite you to think through things, um, and maybe there's a balance you can find. So we don't want to put anybody on needles and pins because we're gone so long and leaving our spouse to do all the parenting and, and so forth and so on. So we're gonna look back at the, a group called The Searchers, another Mersey Beat sound coming outta the British invasion. They actually named their band after the John Ford Classic called The Searchers, right? Uh, which was a cowboy flick with John Wayne. So here they are, 1964 needles and pins. We will see you in 168 hours.