Happy New Year! Future Work/Life is my newsletter in which I explore ideas focused on the future of work and how to design legendary careers. To kick off 2023, I’m sharing an extract from new book Work/Life Flywheel, which is published in less than 2 weeks, on the 17th of January!
If you enjoy this, you might also want to check out my podcast conversation with career success coach Maya Grossman on this week’s podcast.
The Four-Way View
During the early days of Covid-19, like millions of other families around the world, our house was chaotic, to put it mildly. Forced to retreat to the security of a few rooms and, fortunately, in our case, a back garden, my wife and I did our best to shield the kids from the anxiety of neither knowing the seriousness of the virus' threat and how long this new idea of a lockdown would last. With three young kids at home all day, every day, and two of them needing home-schooling any illusion of work/life balance was shattered forever.
Fortunately, I'd just ordered a copy of Stew Friedman and Alyssa Westring's book, Parents Who Lead, which promised to provide a blueprint on using the lessons we learn in business and applying them to family life. Perfect for a business book nerd like me.
"What have I got to lose," I thought?
In a case of the right book at the right time, I discovered the framework they'd created to help people identify where they should be spending their time each day. The Four-Way View model emphasises why an integrated approach to our work/life is the only realistic way to manage its complexity. Using the Four-Way View, you start examining whether you spend your time on the things you really care about and, crucially, how that aligns with other significant people in your lives.
Let me share it with you.
The first step is to visualise how your life will look in the future if you're able to live by the values that you identified in the last chapter. The trick here is to literally imagine the things you'll be doing in as part of a happy, purposeful life?
In fifteen to twenty years, say, what do you do when you wake up in the morning? Get out of bed and exercise? Meditate for half an hour? (Metaphorically) read the newspaper cover-to-cover? Roll over, snooze the alarm and go back to sleep? Open the doors out onto the garden and jump in the pool for a swim?
What are you doing during the day? Are you still doing the job you love today? Are you spending your morning on a hobby and then working in various advisory roles every afternoon? Are you volunteering? Have you finally taken that yoga teaching course?
And how does the end of your day look? Are you congregating for a family meal? Working on a series of passion projects? Dialling into conference calls for the international business that you own? Or are you sitting quietly with a book?
It's easy to get stuck in the moment without taking the opportunity to step back and get some perspective. Visualising the future can be a valuable and positive reminder of why we're doing 'this' now (whatever 'this' is).
Back in the present, you need to look objectively at how you're spending your time, which is where the four dimensions of your work/life come in:
Yourself
Your career
Your family
Your community
Are you spending your time where you should be?
Here's an easy exercise you can do to determine how you'd spend your time in an ideal world and how you're doing right now:
Create a simple table, noting down the percentage of your waking hours that you'd like to dedicate to each of the four areas.
After spending fifteen to twenty minutes reviewing your calendar, create another table in which you add how much time you actually spend on each.
If you have a partner, ask them to do this separately before comparing notes.
What's the objective?
To assess whether you're meeting your time aspirations.
To discover which parts of your life are getting more or less attention than they deserve (don't worry, if you're like 99% of people, you won't be anywhere near your intended split).
To give you a starting point to begin designing your time differently.
To ensure you and your family are on the same page about your respective values.
This last part is essential because making big changes in your work/life is challenging, and you need the support of the people you care about.
For example, by using the techniques we’ve explored in this chapter and the previous one, I’ve identified my five non-negotiable values, which determine where I focus my energy:
Autonomy
Creativity
Curiosity
Growth
Humour
As well as giving you insight into how you spend your time, this exercise may also reveal why you're not as satisfied in your career as you'd like. If you're spending more time at work than you'd like and you're in a job you're not enjoying, it's a recipe for misery.
So, take action now and start planning your future work/life.