Hey, what’s up, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got this question about family and career growth versus family as if they’re in competition.
Sometimes it seems like they are.
This question comes from Luke and he says, “Hi John, I’m not sure if you’ve answered
this type of question already, but how did you manage to improve your skills and grow
your career while still finding time to spend with your family.
It’s beginning to feel like I have to choose one or the other.
I don’t want to look back and see I missed my kids growing up but I also want to move
further my career to provide for them.
Thanks.
Luke.”
This is a complicated question, Luke, and I’m not going to pretend like I always did
this right.
I think sometimes I was a little bit more too much in the work mode.
Some people would justify that and I could justify that in saying that I had this opportunity
where I created a bunch of PluralSight courses and I put my head down and I just worked like
a dog for a long time trying to—and it worked out, right?
I ended up getting a lot of benefit from that.
Now, I’m definitely in that place where you’re struggling is which is how do you
balance this out.
I’m not going to work like a dog anymore and make some of the sacrifices that I did
before.
I’m sort of feeling this out.
I’ve got a pretty good grasp on this, I think, at this point.
I want to give you some advice here.
First of all, cut out TV.
This is number one.
I’ve talked about this before.
I think I devoted a whole chapter to this in Soft Skills: A Software Developer’s Life
Manual, my book here about wasting your time and TV is.
Cut out TV if you want to balance this out.
I think the average person, US person, watches—I thought it was like 3 hours of television
a day.
If you are like family, skills and career and these are in battle but you also have
3 hours of TV, we can win this battle easy man, because we just put 1-1/2 to each of
them and we’re good, we don’t have a battle.
Now, if you’ve already cut out TV then it becomes a little bit more.
Then you’ve actually got something to think about.
If you haven’t cut out TV and a lot of the other extraneous crap first, then you don’t
even have a problem.
Your problem is that you’re lazy, honestly right, that’s the problem.
That’s the easy one to fix.
Just cut out TV, stop being lazy.
Devote your time.
If you really want something, if you really want both things, you’ve got to go for them.
There were definitely periods in my life where—I never was totally neglectful of my family,
but there were periods of my life where my life looked like this.
It looked like wake up at 6 AM in the morning and go and hit the gym, and then get home
and then go to work from 8 AM until 5 PM.
Go eat some dinner.
After that go and play with my daughter for an hour and a half, 2 hours until it’s bed
time.
Spend a little bit of time with my wife and then work the night until 2 AM every single
night and every single weekend.
That’s what my life looked like.
I was still spending some time with my family, maybe not as much as I should have.
I’ll be willing to admit that but this was during work mode.
That’s what I was sacrificing.
I was sacrificing all the other stuff in my life, the fun, the free time, the stuff for
me.
I was trying to minimize the sacrifice on the time with my family in balance to that.
That’s the thing, most people can make this choice.
Most people use family as an excuse for not getting ahead in their career.
Really what is is they don’t want to sacrifice stuff for them.
If your 2 most important things right now are your career and your family you’ve got
to make them number one and number 2 priority or equal priority and that’s where your
time is going to go.
If your time is going to other places that’s where your real true priority is.
Maybe you’re not all into this.
That’s how I would say to balance it out.
You could do a lot of things to optimize your time.
Again, I talk about in my book in Soft Skills: A Software Developer’s Life Manual.
I’ve got some blog articles too if you search on Simple Programmer and you search on time
management to manage your time better.
If you can be better at managing your time you’re going to have more of it.
In general there doesn’t have to be this battle here.
Just so you know where I’m coming from, I wouldn’t sacrifice—don’t destroy your
family and your life in order to get ahead in your career.
That’s not going to—you’re going to—some people do that, right?
Then they’re super successful and they have all this money and they have no one to share
it with and they’re sad.
It’s not worth the price.
Don’t do that.
Don’t spend 80 hours at the office and think that that makes sense.
That’s not going to make sense for your quality of life.
Most people don’t—that’s not the problem.
The problem is you’re going to have to sacrifice your own time if you want to have both of
these goals.
Anyway, hopefully that helps you.
If you’ve got a question for me, email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com.
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Take care.