YOUR RICH LIFE

How to Always Have Work Life Balance

I have never wanted to be a workaholic. I never understood people going to jobs where
they would work hard, so they could work harder, like lawyers. You start working 70-80-
90 hours a week so that you can become a partner, so you can work even harder. It never
made any sense to me, and so I’ve been thinking about work-life balance for a long time.

I wanted to share some thoughts and some frameworks that I use, because we tend to be
workaholics. In fact, it’s almost a badge of honor. We talk about, “Oh, I was working 30 hours
in the last two days. It’s crazy. I can’t believe it.” Sometimes I even find myself lapsing into
this and I stop myself with, “That’s not something to be proud of. That actually means I did
something wrong. That means I didn’t set up systems and boundaries, because frankly the
world would go on if I’m not here. There’s got to be something more effective for me.”

And remember, when I look at where I want to be two years from now, five years from now,
ten years from now, do I want to be working harder or do I want to have systems set up, so
that I’m doing things I want to do? The things that add maximum value to the world and all
these things are still getting done without me.

So how do top performers find time to do it all and how do they actually find time to relax?
That’s the most amazing part of all. My top performer friends are also the ones who party
the hardest. How does that make any sense? They go to work. They’re working demanding
jobs. They’re traveling a lot, and yet they’re also available to go out, a lot of the time. What do
they know that so many other people don’t? People who are constantly overwhelmed, “Oh,
there’s no time to do anything.”

I once heard somebody say, “This is crazy. My boss is making me work 50 hours a week,”
and my friend and I were sitting in the coffee shop. We just looked at each other and smiled.
Fifty hours a week? You think that’s a lot? To her it was a lot, because her role models had
never been around her, to show her that there are people who work a lot more than fifty
hours a week.

It’s kind of like this research that Sun Microsystems did in the ‘90s. It’s funny. They were
talking about email and people were complaining about how many emails they get. But the
funny thing was they would complain that they got too much email whether they got 10 or
over a 100 per day. No matter what, it was always too much. My suggestion for that is to
surround themselves with people who are truly busy, even busier and to understand some
context, “Look, is that who I want to hang out with? Are these the kind of people I want to
be? Does this align with my values?”

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So getting back to the question, how do these top performers have time to do it all? How
do they manage? I want to suggest three things that I noticed. The first was to get financial
freedom. A lot of the people I know who have the time to do leisure activities, they have
found financial freedom. Now what this means is, they can still work at a nine to five
company. They may just earn an enviable salary. Other people have started their own
businesses. I teach tons of people how to do this with Earn1K. Other people have actually cut
their costs so low that they can afford to live on the money they have in the bank for years
and years and years, so they get financial freedom in whatever format works for them.

The second principle I noticed is that they give themselves boundaries. No working after 6:00
p.m. In fact I recently interviewed Gretchen Rubin, and she’s a bestselling author, big time,
and she was talking about how so many of us don’t give ourselves boundaries to stop work,
and almost nobody gives themselves boundaries to go to sleep. It’s funny. We set our alarm
every morning, but we never set an alarm at night to force ourselves to go to sleep, and get
that amazing feeling of seven or eight hours of sleep. Instead we just get whatever we can
take. Some days we sleep at 1:00 a.m., some days 10:30 p.m., and then we feel junky in the
morning. Getting pulled up out of bed by this alarm clock ringing us in our deep slumber,
and we wonder why can’t we focus? Why do I have to drink so much caffeine? Why am I so
groggy? What if we have gotten seven hours of sleep? In fact, that was our challenge for my
other students. She said, “I challenge you to get 14 days of seven hours a night of sleep.”

Can you imagine how you would feel after that? Her word was bliss. She said waking up
in the morning before an alarm clock by your own volition, its bliss. Alright, so that’s the
second step, set boundaries. No working after x p.m. No working on weekends. I’m replying
to x emails per day and that’s it. These are all things that initially make you say, “Hey wait a
minute. That might work for you if you run your own business, but what about me?” And the
fact is there are ways to get around it. If you say I’m only going to respond to emails between
this time and that time, you will get extremely good at it.

Tim Ferriss wrote about this in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week, if you speak to any parent
they will also tell you the same thing. They’ll say I was never as productive, as when I first
had a child. Why? Because they have to be; and this is what top performers know.

The third thing they do to have leisure time, even if they have lots of hours to work is to put
their social calendar first. Now what do I mean by this? I don’t mean knock off work, so you
can go on a 25-month vacation. That might be catastrophic to your job. What I mean is that
they take it very seriously.

So my friend Tim Ferriss told me, I love this principle. He said, “By Tuesday night I want to
know what I’m doing by Saturday. If I don’t have it planned out by then, I stop what I’m doing
and Wednesday morning I’m planning it to make sure it’s already booked.” Otherwise, what
happens? You end up on a Saturday afternoon sitting around on your couch with nothing to
do. Now if that’s what you want, great. But a lot of us look back and we say, “Hey, there are
all these things in the city I live in. I hardly ever do any of them. I’m so tired.”

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Well, what if we put ourselves and our social calendar first? What if we set an alarm to go
sleep? What if we got those seven hours of sleep every night? What if we then scheduled
awesome things we want to see, cool people we want to hang out with, all these things we
want to accomplish and we did that early in the week for our weekend? We would be putting
our social calendar first.

We would be treating our social commitments as seriously as our work commitments. So

when it comes to taking a trip, seeing a destination we’ve always wanted to see, the truth is
for many people if we don’t plan it, it will not happen. So there’s never going to be the perfect
time. If you talk to parents they’ll also tell you, “Look, there’s never going to be the perfect
time to have a kid.” Everybody will say, “When you’re in your early 20’s, everybody has the
same phrase they use, ‘Oh I don’t know. I don’t know when I’ll have a kid. I don’t know when
the right time is.’”

And even when you’re partnered up, married, a lot of people still say I don’t know what
the right time is. I need to get more financially secure. I love talking to people who just got
married and people who are now parents, because their thinking has radically shifted in less
than two years. And one thing that early parents will tell you is, “Look, there’s never a perfect
time. When it happens, your life will adapt around it.” And that’s what I learned myself. When
I set social engagements, like for example, I went on a three week vacation to Southeast Asia.
I told my team, “Look, I’m going and I’m not checking in either. I’ll read my email once a week,
but you have to run things when I’m gone.” Guess what? Life went on. They adapted and
everything worked itself out.

Now I didn’t just pick up and leave tomorrow. I gave people ample notice. I worked to write
things beforehand, but once I set that time nobody could violate it. It was mine, and the same
thing is true if you’ve been wondering “Why do I work so hard? Why am I not doing all these
fun things I want to do? Why do I not read books anymore?” These are all things you can
protect by putting them on your calendar and not letting anyone violate them.

Here’s an action step for you and I’m going to be very generous with you today. What’s one
thing you’ve always wanted to do, but you haven’t been able to do it? It could be something
as simple as I want to read one book a week in a bathtub. Fine, that is totally fine. It could be
I want to take a trip to Malaysia for two weeks. Great, give yourself back permission to do
these things. If it’s the book, put it on your calendar. After 9:00 p.m., I’m not doing any more
email. I’m not watching any more TV. I’m going to do the one thing I’ve been wanting to do
for a long time. If it’s that trip to Malaysia, it’s not going to happen on its own, unless you are
proactive about putting it on the calendar. So say, “You know what? When would be a good
time to go? When I can get time off? When’s a good time weather-wise? When can I bring my
partner or my friend or whoever it is, with me?”

Get that logistics coordinated, put it on the calendar. Every year when I start off in January,
I talk to my friends and I say “Where do we want to go this year?” And we try to get it put
on the calendar as soon as possible, because if we don’t, life goes by. And this framework
is about not letting life go by. It’s about putting those things that are important to you as a
priority, so even if you’re busy, you’ll still be able to achieve the things you want to do.

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