Welcome to Design Like You Mean It! This is the first official volume. Thank you for joining me at the beginning of this journey. I’m excited to see where we go!
This week's thought is on work-life balance.
There is a lot of advice that gets thrown around about balancing your personal life vs your work life. If like me, you live in the US, you live in a hustle-based culture that prioritizes work and output over pretty much everything else. We aren't very good at finding balance. If you ascribe to the Enneagram the US is a 3 (full disclosure I’m also a 3 - which is probably why I’m decided to start publishing this newsletter). Of course, our hustle mentality can have all sorts of detrimental impacts on individual health and wellbeing (I wrote about my own struggles here). But, as important as our personal health is, I think there is actually a larger, more critical reason we should rethink our approach to work and life:
If your entire identity is built around your professional value and the place you work, you are much less likely to question the decisions you are making on a daily basis or the decisions that are being made around you.
An interesting thing happens inside a company as it grows. What starts as an outward, customer-focused endeavor becomes an inward, business-focused one, and a bubble forms around the team that insulates it from the outside world. I covered this in detail here. This isn't always bad, but it does set up a much higher likelihood of bad outcomes and negative externalities that end up being shouldered by customers and society at large. The evolution and impact of social media platforms is a prime example.
The deeper into the bubble you go, the harder it is for you to see and question decisions as they emerge. Companies, especially in tech, actively work to make themselves the central pillar of their employee's lives, and as such their identities. Large tech firms build campuses with amenities that mirror those offered on college campuses - partially as a carrot to attract talent, but also as a way to transition that talent from a life centered on their school, to a life centered on their job.
The more your life becomes intertwined with your job, the less you are willing to risk being a dissenting voice. When it's not just your salary that's at risk, but also your friends, your food, your workout routine, your social life and so on it becomes increasingly difficult to step out of the bubble and look objectively at what's happening. If you want more detail on how this can play out, you can check out this piece from last year on Facebook's culture.
We are so much more than the work we do. If we hope to drive better outcomes with the things we create (if we want to design like we mean it :)), getting out of the bubble is critical. Building an identity that balances personal and professional value is the foundation that makes us more likely to see outside perspectives and less likely to go all-in on the kool-aid.