Things that you might be tempted into cutting out because they don't look like work but actually are:
- Participating in your professional community. Looking at you, HN.
- Going out for drinks with friends. Actually having friends.
- Spending time with loved ones. Actually having loved ones.
- Spinning your wheels for awhile when working in your business stops feeling productive and your subconscious is prodding you to look for strategy refinements by killing your enjoyment of the work. Yes, it's work finding out what's not moving the needle, and the way you do that work is to stop doing stuff, and the way you know to stop doing it is that you don't like doing it anymore.
- Spinning your wheels doing new stuff that you're not sure whether it will ever contribute to the bottom line or not. Eventually you'll have to make a decision, but if you're not sure yet, that time isn't now. Keep doing it until you know exactly why you're stopping.
Instead of saying "these things [friends, loved ones] actually are work, in the sense of sustaining your business productivity, and are therefore valuable", I would prefer to say "these things aren't part of work (in the business sense), but are nonetheless valuable". (Indeed, for many of us, more valuable; business is a means to other goals, not vice versa)
They are work because you have to invest time into them to get the rewards. You have to find the time, in order to find the time, you have to claw back on the time you spend working on/in your business. So it becomes 'work' even though it's not, really.
That's what generally happens to people as their flywheel gains momentum. It gets harder to tell where one's contribution to society ends and one's contribution to self begins.
I originally thought this post was going to be about coming home to loved ones after YC and gaining some perspective on work as only part of the game of life, and how even winning can leave you lonely. But maybe that is implied by telling people that writing blog posts that lots of people click an up arrow on is not the same as growing your company (or having someone to love you).
Having loved ones outside of work and understanding where work fits into your life overall is a whole different thing. Super important think about and understand, but out of the scope of what I was trying to say in this post.
It is related for two reasons: 1) Doing work that is not work is a sneaky way to edge out loved ones outside of work because time is finite and 2) Many people have now commented that something about work-life balance is what they expected from the title, but judgement about work is one of the ways you create work-life balance.
Thanks for the article. The most helpful part for me was the way you binned actions and then acknowledged that some can be tricky to quantify right away, because relationships are important, but sometimes it is hard to tell which ones. Networking for ego is not work, but team building is. I would summarize it as: if it doesn't go in your investor updates now or support something that would be in them in the future, it might not be work.
- Participating in your professional community. Looking at you, HN.
- Going out for drinks with friends. Actually having friends.
- Spending time with loved ones. Actually having loved ones.
- Spinning your wheels for awhile when working in your business stops feeling productive and your subconscious is prodding you to look for strategy refinements by killing your enjoyment of the work. Yes, it's work finding out what's not moving the needle, and the way you do that work is to stop doing stuff, and the way you know to stop doing it is that you don't like doing it anymore.
- Spinning your wheels doing new stuff that you're not sure whether it will ever contribute to the bottom line or not. Eventually you'll have to make a decision, but if you're not sure yet, that time isn't now. Keep doing it until you know exactly why you're stopping.