On Balance
[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? Sometimes I'm amazed at how much balancing we do on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes on a minute by minute basis, you know, for example, every single weekday, I am constantly bouncing my work life with my home life, with my social life, with my family life.
[00:00:37] These four things, and I mean don't even get me started on my side hustle life. All of these things are in this like weird, messy, giant Venn Diagram that is constantly shifting and constantly changing. In a previous episode I talked about, you know, the four burner [00:01:00] theory where you can really only have two burners at high intensity on at the same time, and then the other two burners,
[00:01:08] those are the two parts of your life, need to be kind of on maintenance mode. And sometimes I find myself in this place where instead of saying, oh, you know, this quarter I will work really hard on my work and everything else will be on maintenance, it's rather, oh, today I will work really hard on my work life, and tomorrow it's going to be really intensely about family, and those burners are turning off and on so quickly that sometimes I cannot context switch fast enough.
[00:01:40] And even though physically I might be spending a lot of time with my family, my brain will still be at work or I'll be at work, but my brain is in family mode. It's not a lack of compartmentalizing, it's about when you have to context-switch between a lot [00:02:00] of things so many times, and you're not giving yourself enough downtime because you know every time you switch from one thing to another, and we know this from multitasking research, it takes time to transition from one task to another.
[00:02:17] And if you do it again and again, a little too quickly, it breeds exhaustion. Right? And I feel like, I don't know, maybe this is just THE season because I've talked to other people and they're finding that same thing happening to them. It just feels like there's a lot going on in the world in our work life and, and even in our family lives for some weird reason.
[00:02:43] And we're finding that, you know, we're just context switching so much and there's just so much to pay attention to and it makes it difficult to stick to your boundaries because we just feel like we can't do that. [00:03:00] And yet, objectively speaking, we all know that even if we can't completely stick to our regular boundaries, even if we're able to stick to them just a little bit, we will probably be a little bit better off.
[00:03:17] A very simple example, you know, is not working all the way through the weekend. I mean, not gonna lie, I've definitely done that and I will probably do it again. Sometimes it happens, it's a common problem. But I guess within that situation, we still need to find some balance, or at least we could. You know, there's two days in a regular weekend for most people, so maybe Sunday you say, oh, you definitely won't work.
[00:03:52] But Saturday? You allow yourself to do a little bit, right? There is no perfect rule. There's no perfect routine, [00:04:00] perfect system. Everything is constantly changing. And with that, our routine, our systems, our motivations, our energies, with all of that I think the best thing we can do is practice being able to adapt and adjust, but still find a way to stay true to our goals and what we want overall.
[00:04:19] Right? Even within the confines of our, of what is happening right now, the environment we find ourselves in, we have to learn to adapt, but still stay true to what we want long term, and that's a hard thing and I'm still learning how to do that. And I probably will for a while, but that's kind of what I've been thinking about today.
[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.