Thursday, January 27, 2011

Business life and personal life

Is there such a thing as a business and a personal life? I mean can you have one set of values in one life and another set of values in another life? How many hours do you spend at work every week. A week has 24x7 hours, so 168 hours. We all have to sleep so let's assume that is 7 hours a night, which means 49 hours per week. This leaves us on average with 119 hours per week. Now how much of this time do you use for your job? Let's go with some low and conservative numbers (at least for Managers and Key Contributors) and say it's around 9 hours a day, 5 times a week. That adds up to 45 hours. In addition to the job itself let's assume you have some light commute. Again let's estimate low and assume it's only 40min a day. That is ~ 3.5hours of commute per week. Then how often do you think about work when you're actually NOT at work. This includes things like thinking about a presentation you have to prepare, an email you have to follow up on, telling your partner about a challenge at work etc. I assume 1.5 hours every day. This ends up to be 10.5 hours per week. If we add all the job related hours we end up with 45h+3.5h+10.5h = 59 hours. So out of our 119 hours we spend 59 hours with our job and 60 hours on our personal life. Your Job is 50% of your waking hours! Every day, every week, every month and every year. This is your life. Make sure that your business and personal values are closely aligned otherwise you waste your life.