Bringing Balance to the Force
For the new year, I wanted to share my thoughts around living a balanced life with the forces around me[1]. I’m using “force” as a generic term for a category of activity, as this is a personal version of the work-life balance mantra commonly heard in the workplace. But there are many flaws in that mantra; why should work come before life, and shouldn’t life encompass work anyway? Hence, force balance, a framework, with inspiration from Star Wars and Jim Collins[2], that answers two major questions, what is the force and how does one balance it?
The Force
A college professor once said “the secret to happiness in college consists of studying, socializing, and getting enough sleep. The problem is you can only pick two, so choose wisely.” In a similar vein, the force is made up of three major forces: Health, Social, and Contribution. The Health Force determines your physical and mental well-being: sleep, exercise, eating. The Social Force governs your relationships with people: making friends, being with family, going to parties, dating. And the Contribution Force pertains to your contributions to society that occur in or out of work, such as building things, art projects, volunteering, political activism, etc.
Bringing Balance to the Force
The first insight is that forces can be controlled through time. Health, Social, and Contribution are naturally opposing forces along the time dimension, so balance is achieved through time allocation and setting limits.
Secondly, each force is comprised of yin and yang activities that must be balanced internally as well. The yin and yang, can be thought of as common dichotomies that apply to most activities: active vs. passive, productive vs. consumptive, explore vs. exploit.
The Health Force has minimum balance built-in, and most cleanly maps to active vs. passive activities. You can only work so many all-nighters in a row, until your body forces you to sleep. Rest is imperative; at some point the body and mind need to recover and commit the actions to memory. The Social Force has more explore vs. exploit characteristics. Do you meet new people at a party and try to become friends, or stick with your tried and true friends? Do you travel back home to see family, or travel to visit a new city? The Contribution Force stresses the producer vs. consumer dichotomy. At work, are you reading email or coding, going to meetings or making decisions? Do you read, listen, and watch vs. write, say, or do?
In short, forces are time-constrained and must be balanced within and across each other. Lastly, balance does not mean equality, it is personally defined and varies over time.
Putting it to Practice
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I’ve divided my time equally between the three forces as a start[3]. For Health, the key for me is to hit my minimum target[4] of daily exercise and start a habit. On Social, I’m focusing more on family. Contribution is the trickiest, since I want to produce more, but this is hard - it’s just so much easier to consume. Even the decentralized internet, which connects billions of people, is ruled by the power law where most of its content generated by a tiny fraction of its users (Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People). So I’m going to start small and be productive after every five hours of consumption.
Wish me luck, and may the force be balanced.
[1] This is an extension to the Shape Debate 10 years later.
[2] Jim Collins tracks all his hours on a spreadsheet with a goal of having at least 1000 creative hours every year.
[3] Or I will buy more time myself.
[4] Setting a minimum or maximum amount of time can be just as effective as a ratio, and simpler to track.
