Blend It All

There’s a thought that everyone should have a clear “work/life balance” — one part of your life is work, one is personal, and never the two shall cross. While that may be necessary for some of us, for most I think it can be a nice blending of the two.

I see three areas where a blending can be good: Your schedule, your contacts, and your notes.

Scheduled Variety

I read some about this in the great book Off Balance, but my business partner Ali exemplifies it best by following what she calls “scheduled variety” — intentionally letting work and personal schedules blend together a bit to get the best of both.

Rather than saying that “work is 9-5”, you might catch up on a few emails at 8, work may “start” at 9, then you have lunch with your spouse, work for three more hours, catch a 4:00 yoga class, and polish up a proposal before bed. Your company may or may not allow this, but it’s a great way to stay energized if you’re allowed to.

All of your contacts

For a while, I tried to keep a separate list of “personal” and “business” contacts. It’s easy enough to do, because most people have separate email accounts and contacts tend to go with those. However, I found that I was duplicating a lot of people on both lists, which made it harder to keep things accurate. Ultimately, I blended them into a single contacts list (that syncs to both accounts) and things are much easier.

Not only do I no longer have to figure out if someone is a “personal” or “business” contact, removing the duplicates made it much easier to keep their info accurate.

If your contacts are all in Google, something like Contacts+ can take care of it for you. If you have Outlook or other areas to connect, try PieSync.

One set of notes

While all of us have official internal work notes for company-wide things like client info, we also tend to have our own work notes — ideas we have, short to-do lists, and many other things. I find that people often try to separate those away from their “personal” notes, but I again vote for blending them.

I follow a lot of productivity groups online, and often see questions about how best to split up personal and business notes. This could be using Evernote, Notion, Roam Research or anything; the tool doesn’t really matter. People try to split them up and find that it’s messy, but they’re often missing the bigger point — those notes should be in one bucket.

In my case, I keep my notes in Roam Research and they’re my notes — the personal me, the business me, the spiritual me, etc. Anything about me goes in one place. There are a couple of clear advantages:

• Less meta work. You don’t have to think about which area something is for, you can just put it in your notes and move on.
• With many systems (like Roam), you may find things tie together in interesting ways. One of my favorite examples relates to some notes I took about the book Essentialism; I heard some great tips for improving my life, while at a business event at my church. I have no idea which bucket it would go into if I had tried to split that out. As a consequence, I’ve been able to use ideas from that talk (and book) in all three aspects of my life.

Blending might not work for everyone, and a big part of that will depend on your company and your role. If you can, though, try to blend it all and reap the benefits.