The first quarter of 2015 is coming to an end today. Three months have sped by. I hope it's been a good quarter for you all. I was travelling last week and was standing in line at the Mumbai airport, waiting to board the aircraft. I saw a familiar person walk up to me and smile; we began to chat. I asked him where he was headed and found out that we were both going to Bangalore. I then asked him when he was returning and he said that he would probably return on Friday night. He said that this was typical of his week – he usually went out on a Monday and returned on a Friday. We boarded the flight and separated.
On Friday when I was returning (I had to go from Bangalore to Chennai) from Chennai and was boarding a flight at 6 pm, I hadn't had the time to pre-check in on the web. So I was doing it en route to the airport and saw that there were only 4 seats left on the flight, all of them middle seats. Well, I had no choice. I got onto the flight – it was choc-a-block, no vacant seats. Every one was returning home. It drove home this fact that typically, lot of people work like this – travel through the week and come back home on a Friday night or Saturday morning for the weekend with the family, then out again on Monday or Tuesday. Maybe Monday at the office to catch up with office work and take the first flight out on Tuesday.
The challenging part of a lifestyle like that is to keep balance. There's very little you can do to change that lifestyle if that's the way things have to be in your work, then that's the way it has to be. But how do you manage to keep balance in that kind of schedule?
Today's Economic Times center page has a huge article on Work-Life Balance, not an article by itself but it had various CEOs and MDs from different companies like KPMG and Bain & Company, MakeMyTrip, Accenture, Zivame.Com. It was entitled "Work Life Balance: The Big Trigger." It was about how they managed to have a kind of balance or work-life harmony, as they called it, taking into consideration the many commitments they had in the office space. It made for interesting reading on how different people who are at the CXO level, are able to find time to create balance. It made me think about you on this call. Your life may not be very dissimilar from what I've been talking about. I wondered whether it's a challenge for you. How do you stay balanced in the things that you do?
Tom Patterson wrote a book titled "Living the Life You Were Meant to Live" and I would highly recommend that you buy this book. In it, he says that there are 5 domains that must somehow be satisfied for you to have a sense of equilibrium in your life. These are:
1. Work.
2. Your personal life.
3. Family life
4. Community
5. Faith.
He says, "They may not all need the same kind of balance, but at some point, you need to be able to give more time to each, as and when the need arises, to be able to stay in balance. I keep thinking to myself: you may not be able to help your travel schedule, but you can certainly choose to stay connected. Staying connected is the key word. Somehow we must be able to keep the lines of communication open with the various people who are in our life, whether it be our personal, family, community or faith.
In the course of reading this article in the Economic Times, I liked what Rocha Kar, founder and CEO of Zivame.com said. "Use technology." I thought that was a wise word in today's world, because while technology can frustrate and tie you to work, it can also be liberating in so many different ways. It allows you to connect in to family and friends. We have a family Whatsapp, where there's chatter that goes on throughout the day. Our children are abroad and thought times zones are different, it helps us connect at different points. I may not be able to join in on some of the conversations but I catch up on it and then put in my bit. It keeps us so well connected. And technology offers that – using Whatsapp, Skype, the phone. We don't really need to say that we've only got so much time and I've got to spend it at home.
The late Dr. Kurien used to say, "Of our 24 hours, we spend 8 hours at work, 8 hours with family and 8 hours sleeping." I think in many ways, that doesn't work today considering the lifestyles that you all have in your travel. But I was doing the math on this and if you multiply that into a week, then you have 168 hours total. Breaking it down, you have 56 hours of sleep, 56 hours of family, 56 hours of work. That is manageable. You get a weekend in and that's 48 hours at home. But to be able to do something creatively to stay connected.
I found a wonderful website once that delivers Indian sweets in the US. I was so thrilled, I ordered 3 packets of sweets for my 3 children. They were so excited about it as they don't get to have the Indian sweets. Fresh Indian sweets in the mail! Little things like this, the Internet offers, technology offers, that in spite of busy schedules can allow us to connect with family.
Larissa MacFarquhar, talking about Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Professor, says, "Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours of work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it, you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families – only to find that by then, their families were gone."
Steven Covey says, "Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other."
There's not too much you can do with your work. You're kind of tied in in so many places. But there are ways that you can continue to have a balance in your life. But for that, you need to make the intent and say to yourself, "This is what I'm going to do," and be able to do it. Make sure that the lines of communication are always open.
I used to have a plaque in my office that said, "Whatever you have done, I will never judge you. I will always try to help." My intent was that people will be able to walk in and know that they could come and tell me anything. And it was a safe place. I think that's what we need to do as we look around and see the kind of lives we live, the rapid lifestyles, the things that we have to do to be able to find some kind of harmony and equilibrium.
As our Scriptures say, "What shall it profit a man or a woman if he or she should gain the whole world but lose his soul." There are important that we also need to be focusing on that are so important, even as important as the work that we do. My prayer for us is that we would find the right balance.
Can I pray with you? Almighty God, give to us wisdom and understanding that we may know how to balance our lives. Show us, Master, how to do that, to each one of these precious ones on this call. Through this day, allow us to find times to balance the things that are important for us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
• Tom Patterson, "Living The Life You Were Meant to Live." http://www.amazon.com/Living-Life-Were-Meant-Live/dp/0785271953
• Work-Life Balance: The Big Trigger," The Economic Times, 31 March 2015, page 10.
• Steven Covey quote: http://www.wow4u.com/quoteslifebalance/
• Larissa MacFarquhar quote: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/work-life-balance
• Richa Kar, Founder & CEO Zivame.com
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