Ross Hagan
Perspectives
Published in
3 min readJan 12, 2017

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4 Temptations On The Road to Work/Life Balance

*before you go any further, if you haven’t read Jason Fried’s Medium write up on The Calm Company you’re doing yourself a disservice. If I were you, I would start there, and hopefully you’ll make it back.

Tomorrow

That’s the day you’ll start doing all the smart things you read about: The rule of 3, batching, harnessing the mind-body loop, meditation, turning off your phone, working your side hustle, and all of the killer advice you can find here, here, or here.

The Idea of Tomorrow is the lie you’ll tell yourself today. And it’ll be the same tomorrow, until you take action today.

TV

Here’s a well-known fact: I love TV. And I especially love Netflix, Prime, and Hulu — binge streaming Stranger Things, Justified, Bosch, Bloodline, Daredevil, Breaking Bad, 24, and This Is Us. I rationalize my binging by claiming to be a storyteller, “I’m dialing in my craft. This will help me write a screenplay.”

An excess of idle time is poisonous.

It’s the easiest thing in the world, to get home from work, hang out with the family for a bit, and finish the day watching a few hours of TV. You promised yourself you would take two hours and knock out a side project or go to the gym. Instead you sit in front of the boob tube until it’s too late and… well, you saw the first temptation.

All By Myself

Lindsey and I have been married for seven years (going on 8, crazy), and for every day we’ve been together I can promise you neither of us has made a habit change without the support of the other. This means we’ve succeeded and failed as individuals on a number of occasions because we didn’t have buy-in from the other person.

For example: My fascination with meditation. For years I have wanted to start my day with 5 to 10 minutes of quiet mindfulness. I have a hunch (and a truckload of podcasts, articles, and quotes from books) that it would make a huge difference in my day. The problem is I’m not sure I’ve ever actually said to Lindsey how much I want to meditate and make it apart of my daily routine. This means if I get up at 4:50 to meditate before Hudson wakes up (10 months-old), she has every right in the world to wonder, what the hell? Choosing not to tell her what I’m hoping to achieve leads me needlessly on an island, and her in the dark.

Creep

If you went straight to Radiohead, I salute you. The Creep I’m talking about is time- and schedule- creep. If you’re constantly looking to build new habits into your days and weeks to create a healthy life balance, but you can’t keep meetings sharp, focus when it’s time to produce, or cut out distractions, you’re always going to be in a fist fight with time.

And time always wins.

By maximizing his intensity when he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working.

Rest. Work. Play. To do each well, you have to master time and mitigate creep.

There is nothing that will do more for your career or your family than harnessing Work/Life balance. Good luck.

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Hey, I’m Ross. My company is Good Words. We use story-based marketing for the benefit of B2C, B2B, and non-profit organizations.