Folks,

Every day, we struggle to find balance. Whether that’s between your health and your eating habits, your personal time and your friends, or, very commonly, your work and your home life, balance is elusive.

For me, as a person who finds deep fulfillment in so many things, including my wife, my kids, my work, and learning, it’s particularly frustrating. Over time, I’ve come to have a way of thinking about it, strongly influenced by Clay Christensen, the renowned Harvard professor. Clay had a deep and meaningful impact on my life. As my immediate family died, one by one over the years, it became necessary for me to figure out what I valued and how I was going to play out the rest of my days. During that reflection, one article spoke to me particularly strongly, so I took the article and worked on it until I was at peace. The below is about 70% Clay and about 30% me. I have a tickler to read it once/quarter.

Perhaps it will help you find clarity, either through confirmation or reflection on how the experience of balance is different for you than me. Since others have taken this text for their own use, they’ve asked about how they can/cannot use it. Thus, I have decided to license this content under Apache 2 — Copyright — 2020 until further notice by Mark Porter.

Enjoy, and I’d love to hear more about how you find harmony in your life.

Mark

A Single Prioritized Backlog

By Clay Christensen, modified by Mark Porter

When people who have a high need for achievement have extra time or energy, they allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day and will keep doing so, pretty much independent of any particular daily effort you put into the relationship. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers — even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are professed to be their most powerful and enduring source of happiness. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness? How can I ensure that the investment I make in my children has a high correlation with the result I want out? The simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are the power tools which come from their position of power over the children. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point those parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do.

Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently. If you want your kids (or your team at work) to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school or during the building of a big project. You have to intentionally design them into the culture — and you have to think about this very early on or inertia will overcome any effort you can possibly muster late in the game. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works. Conversely, like children, employees shy away from things that were historically painful. Both of them are far more self-aware of their environment and its unspoken rules than autocratic managers (or parents) ever believe. While you must achieve the short-term tangible goals and needs of your family and your work in order to survive, true long term success in both realms only comes from an investment in cultural intangibles; values, models, leadership and commitment. Along with the realization that long term cultural goals are more important than short term tangible ones should come the awareness that this rule applies equally to your career and your family. So don’t fall into the trap of separating who you are at work and at home. Don’t strive for work-home division by time or effort or strike some kind of deal — that is destined to be short-lived and unsuccessful. There will be times that you need to focus on family, and times that you need to dig in at work — create a single list (a backlog) that is prioritized for your whole life and success. I.e. integrate your goals and priorities together between both environments just like you would balance two children with different homework challenges or two competing projects at work. Share this strategy with your family and your workplace and get buy-in from both — that both will get your energy when they need it most. Therein lies a path towards success.

Instead of doing two things poorly, do one thing well; your life.

Clay’s career started with writing the “Innovator’s Dilemma”, and then followed it up with “How Will You Measure Your Life”. Clay struggled with his health during the last years of his life and passed away in January of 2020.

For those slightly morbid but still looking-for-meaning among you, “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch is another interesting read. I found Randy’s particular lecture rather maudlin, but overall (with all the other lectures), it’s a pretty cool book. Randy died after giving his lecture in 2007 and writing the book in 2008.

The core argument is dynamically changing your mental model (inputs) to achieve the desired fluid outputs across your whole life rather than balancing/bargaining for either time or effort, both of which don’t work. In other words, just like in software development, regularly review all of the things that are most important to you and put them on a single backlog that not only accepts change but enthusiastically welcomes it. This is how to ride out life’s challenges and bumps and wring success from chaos.

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