Nov 10
3
Here is a picture from a run yesterday morning. It was such a lovely day that I took my camera with me, which gave me two forms of escape from work, both physical excercise and a personal creative pursuit.
Out for a run on a perfect fall morning ...
In the hour I was out (including the stretching and warm-down after the run), I had a real break from the dozens of e-mails and tasks that were waiting for me in the business. Did any of those tasks get processed while I was running or taking pictures? Not at all, but I came back fresh and was much more productive than I would have been if I had stayed glued to my computer and phone.
When I got serious about finding work/life balance a few years ago, I began to think of these so-called “breaks” as important or nearly as important as some of the basic necessities of life. You say you are too busy to excercise or pursue the guitar or eat healthier or take up sailing, but are you too busy to eat? Are you too busy to sleep? What about drinking water? We do each of these things every day to stay alive, but we cut corners on the things that we can defer to another day and let the workload run our lives. You can choose to stop doing that today, or perhaps you will stop when you retire or die. But if you wait for one of those later transition points, think of all the wonderful moments you will miss along the way, like my hour in Victoria Park on a glorious autumn morning.
Over the past few years, I cannot begin to tell you how many of these precious moments I have experienced, roller blading around Stanley Park in Vancouver (again, just on one-hour breaks from work), windsurfing on Okanagan Lake (also one-hour breaks from work), or even just browsing a bookstore and finding some valuable little text. I try not to let more than a day go by without some kind of little “balance break”, no matter how small it is, and guess what? The work still gets done! In fact, I would argue that my productivity and work quality is far superior because of those breaks.
