Balancing between professional and personal life, managing to find time for learning something new, is very difficult. In any case, one of the directions suffers. This is exemplified by one of Buffer's employees Mick Mahadi. He still managed to find a way out of the vicious circle. About the experience, he told the publication Fast Company.
Over the last few months, I've been trying to strike a balance between my role as the Happiness Hero in Buffer Customer Service and the passion for learning engineering.
When I really have something interesting, I dedicate as much time and energy to it as possible. This attitude can seriously and negatively affect other areas of life - physical and mental energy, as well as work.
When I first began to get involved in engineering, all three of the components mentioned above were affected. I spent about 14-16 hours a day studying, 5-7 days a week. I almost completely burned out by the end of last year and I constantly felt growing tension in my relationships with friends and family.
The most unexpected surprise was that my productivity at the main job was the hardest hit. Every day I started with checking letters and felt exhausted. There were days when it was especially difficult to follow your usual pace of work. At the end of the day, I was disappointed, this had a negative effect on my hobby, not to mention work.
I got into a vicious circle, and decided to pause my personal development, concentrating on work. Fortunately, I managed to cope with this problem. And I'm happy to tell you how.
Use personal goals to promote
I do not think that I could live peacefully, completely abandoning my development in the field of engineering. I put too much work into it and was really passionate about it, but certain changes just became a necessity.
At that time, I was helping customers from Reply, one of Buffer's services - for a quick response to tweets and Facebook messages - and was struggling to increase the volume of answers - the metric we use to evaluate the performance of Heroes of Happiness. I was very concerned about this issue, because I realized that I did not achieve the required level of performance in my profession.
I stopped and began to think about why it happened that way. Soon I made the decision that I should devote time to raising my own level just as I did during the six-week bootcamp, mandatory for all Buffer employees. It was rather difficult to accomplish the task. For me it was a complete surprise that I still need to actively develop to become a professional in my business. In parallel, outside of working hours, I tried to get into engineering.
I set myself professional tasks, and I was sure that I could fulfill them. My goal was, for example, answers to 10 tickets for an hour for HelpScout and 10-12 tickets per hour for Reply. These were the goals that I had previously set for myself constantly, but for the last year I left them. When I started working on the Olark project, the platform we use to support live chat, I determined how many conversations I could participate in at the same time and outlined specific goals.
These tasks allowed me to establish my own level of productivity, which helped to feel that I had done some work for the allotted time.
Pay attention to the goals that I described above. All of them have a quantitative characteristic. I do not like to measure performance in specific quantities, but they are the most part of my work. Although this is not the most important aspect, because basically we are trying to improve metrics such as client's happiness and response time to his request.
Why did my personal goals help me?
The reason why I was able to return to personal development in the next few weeks was that I succeeded in my basic work. This gave me the energy not only to provide myself with growth within the basic professional role, but also to additionally engage in personal development.
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Now I finish my working day in the Inbox, proud of myself and what I have done in a day, and then enthusiastically develop in the direction of engineering. This time I managed to balance my time much better.
Achieving the set working goals gives me the opportunity to freely spend time on self-development, without experiencing a sense of guilt. I did not develop them in order to justify my personal development before my superiors or someone else, I formulated them for myself. Maintaining a balance is very difficult. Spending a lot of energy on self-development, you may face a decline in performance at the main job. Too ambitious goals affect your time, energy and motivation.
Understanding that my personal development does not affect performance, significantly increased my energy and enthusiasm. In addition, the fact that I can compare my own performance with the overall metrics of the whole team, allow me to be lenient towards myself if I do not achieve my goals.
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