Taylor and I both work from home. Taylor is in sales, and spends a large amount of time on work calls during the day; I am a software engineer, and spend a large amount of time doing deep work (mostly pretty quiet).
It has been this way since the pandemic- Taylor’s company from Greensboro allowed her to work from home; since then, she has transitioned to a new company out of Philadelphia. My company doesn’t even have an office, but on paper, they are out of Texas.
Taylor’s setup is downstairs; I am upstairs. Taylor’s office is very clean and organized. Mine is not.
The great thing about this setup is how much it helps complement our other job: as parents. Often, the day will go something like this:
Taylor: “Do you have any meetings this afternoon?”
Luke: “Looks like my last meeting ends at 1”
Taylor: “Can you pick up the girls from dance at 3:45? I have a call until 4”
Luke: “Sure, thats fine.”
Boom! Ok, that isn’t very climactic, but compared with how challenging things were before, it just makes so many things so much easier. Then, If I need to, I can add an extra hour on before or after the workday to keep things balanced.
Also, it is just 1/2 mile walk to Rosie’s school, so walking to school with her in the mornings is often one of the highlights of the day.
Work Life Balance
Increasingly important has been the drive for work/life balance for me. Taylor often says I have an “Interest based attention span”, and I have a ton of interests. But if I go too far with one of those interests, other things seem to go off the rails. Let me explain.
Here are the key elements:
- Professional Life: Work
- Emotional Life: Time to be happy, be sad, and everything between
- Spiritual Life: Church, time for prayer
- Social Life: Time with friends, family
- Mental Life: Time to read, grow as a person
- Physical Life: Working out, getting the blood flowing.
Ok, that list doesn’t come from any doctor or a book. It’s 100% just Luke making this stuff up.
There are different seasons in life, but if there isnt a little bit of time to fill each of those proverbial “buckets”, I’m not my best self. So here are the ways each bucket gets filled:
For work, I wake up and do continuing ed in the mornings. This world of IT is still fascinating, and there are so many fun things to learn.
At home, I value laughter when we can. Also, the ability to laugh at oneself; this part I learned from Taylor, but allowing the kids to laugh and poke fun at how much I love to sneak some of the kids candy can make for special moments. Time being sad is also ok.
At Church, I am on the prayer team. We get a list of about 80-100 things to pray for each week, for people in the church. Also, I am teaching a class at our church right now as part of our Wednesday night “Connections” classes. Listening to worship music throughout the week totally fills this bucket too.
Taylor keeps us busy socially; marrying her was the smartest things I could have done in life. This bucket gets filled with weekend trips, date nights, and pickleball, which I am going to pick up a little more now that the weather is getting warm.
Mental life is a way to keep grinding the axe. This can be reading, or anything else that tickles my fancy. Taylor calls this the “things I obsess about”. It is the way I stay curious, maybe even a little weird. Listening to podcasts while doing yardwork is an example.
Physical life is just a way to take care of my body. Don’t eat junk food, exercise a few times a week, drink water, sleep good. During the work day, I may slip in a 30 minute run; or some quick yoga moves to stretch my body that tends to sit in a chair all day.
Not every week includes all of the elements, and sometimes there are tradeoffs: more exercise some months, more work some months, more social time some months. But I loosely try and tend to each area of life just as a normal rhythm, and without it, I start to feel restless.
Anyways, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.