Life used to be so much simpler. I was born in 1962, and for the first 20 years of my life I had a very simple view of the balance of work and non-work. In the morning, men got up, dressed and prepared for work, and then drove to their office jobs. Women got up, dressed, and got the kids ready, and then worked around the house all day. At the end of the day, women got their kids from school (either by picking them up or getting them from the bus). They had a few hours with the kids while doing homework, making dinner, and finishing their housework. Men worked until about 5:00 or 5:30, then they drove home. Everybody had dinner together. Homework was completed, a TV show or two were watched, and then everyone got ready for bed. The next day was run on the same schedule.

That was it. Life was segmented into these neat packages of work, housework, school, afternoons, and evenings. Everybody in the family knew their role. They knew where they were supposed to be, what they were supposed to be doing, and when they were supposed to do it.

Ignore the fact that this wasn’t what it was like for everybody in the 1960’s and 1970’s, focus on the fact that this is the life that I knew. And honestly, it’s the only life that I really understood.

When I graduated college, I got a job with Texas Instruments in the Dallas area. I’m a tech-nerd, and my first job was as a database programmer and analyst for the tiny department in TI that supported the internal library system. At the time, the TI technical library was one of the largest and most advanced tech libraries in the world. Texas Instruments was populated by some of the best and brightest in a number of industries, including semiconductor design, missile guidance systems, and other highly focused areas. There was tons of research going on both inside and outside TI, and the libraries had a tough job keeping up with all the new material that was being created.

More importantly (for this story), TI had libraries at every one of the facilities, which was a huge benefit to the engineers and scientists. Some of them were small, barely more than a single office. Others rivaled the largest libraries at any university. This was the dawn of the computer age (well, a bit after the dawn, but the sun wasn’t very high over the horizon when I came onboard), so the concept of computerized searching systems, card catalogs, and documenting library holdings was still pretty new. So new that everybody seemed to have their own way of doing things.

Another huge benefit to TI was their internal mail system. If you needed to send something to anyone else at TI, you simply put it into a manila envelope, added their name and mailstop, and gave it to the mail courier. If I remember correctly, we had four or five internal mail pickups daily. I could request something from anyone in Texas Instruments and have it the next day. Many times I could request things and get them the same day. This was pre-Fedex. This was before next day deliveries were common. On several occasions I requested materials from a colleague in Houston or Austin and it was on my desk just after lunch. Frankly, it was magic. And the wheels of progress were able to turn faster because of this internal mail system.

With so many different facilities, and so many widespread libraries, it became apparent that our team was going to have to get all the librarians working in the same manner. We began work on an internal database that would catalog all the holdings that TI had. Books were fairly easy. Dewey and his decimal system had seen to that. Unfortunately, traditional books only made up a small portion of the Texas Instruments library holdings. There were technical white papers. There were diagrams. There were models. All items that didn’t lend themselves to easy classification, and certainly no two people documented their existence in the same way.

So for several months our team worked on trying to come up with a way to not only classify these documents and objects, but to develop a searchable database that could be used company-wide. Simultaneously, we had to develop a tracking system so the librarians could figure out where their precious holdings were when they left the library through the ingenious internal mail system. And they needed a system to nag people to return things. Engineers and scientists are great at gathering stuff together. Returning it certainly doesn’t fall within their areas of expertise!

As one of the lower folks on the totem pole, I stayed in the office and worked on design and implementation. The more experienced folks spent some time on the road, talking to librarians and other material custodians about how to make this work. All along I worked at my desk, nose to the grindstone pumping out code.

Then one day we were having a team meeting and I casually mentioned that this was the perfect job for me, since my Mom had been a librarian for as long as I could remember. She was also a bookkeeper on the side, so the classification, stowage, and tracking of “stuff” (whether books or money) were second nature to me.

If I’d been watching closely enough, I’m sure I would’ve seen the lights go on above my boss’ head. She had a way out of all the trips to the TI libraries where she had to talk to the weird library ladies and men. She could send me, I’d talk to them, and then could summarize what I found. More importantly, I could speak their language, which might help us bridge the gap that had developed when a couple of computer nerds went to talk to a couple of library nerds. The conversations involved more translation that understanding. The progress reports and visit notes had pretty much illustrated that, but no one had figured out a way to solve the problem.

Then I opened my mouth.

So how does this fit into Work Life IMbalance you ask? Pretty neatly, actually. You see, I was used to having an office job. I went to work at 8:00, had lunch at 11:30, and left work around 5:00. Some days I started a bit earlier. Lunch might flex a half an hour earlier or later. I might leave the office at a slightly different time, but you could have come pretty close to setting your watch by the fact that from 7:00 when I awoke until 5:30 or 6:00 when I got back home, I was “working”. And you could pretty much bet everything that you had that I would be working within about an 800 square foot area at Texas Instruments in Plano, TX.

That all changed with my admission that I could speak computerese and librarianese. The next day, I was sent on a quest to extract the knowledge from a librarian who seemed to know everything that TI held in their libraries, but had such an esoteric cataloging system that no one else could find anything. She was a genius, but her genius couldn’t be replicated.

So I hopped in my car at 10:00am on a Thursday and drove from Plano, TX to Lewisville, TX. The drive was about 20 miles and took about 20 minutes in those days. Maybe a little less, since no one in Texas ever drove below the speed limit, especially in those days. Wide open spaces call for wide open throttles, or something like that. I’m sure you can find the reference in a Texas-derived country song.

Anyway, back to the story. I was in my car driving the 20 miles to Lewisville at 10:00am. In my neat world of “go to work by 8:00 and work in your office” I had always envisioned that the roadways were clear at this hour. Seriously, who could be out on the roads two hours after work started if everybody was in their offices working. But there were all kinds of people out and about. And not just Mom’s headed to the grocery store with their pre-schoolers. There were trucks. There were businessmen. There were delivery folks. All sorts of people with all sorts of different vehicles.

Who were these people, and why weren’t they working? They were supposed to be in their offices doing what office people do. Answering phones, making copies, typing on typewriters and computers. Doing office stuff.

Seriously, this was the first time that it hit me that there were thousands of other jobs that didn’t involved working inside a boxed office from 8-to-5. Maybe I was a little slow on the uptake. More likely it was the fact that I was only aware of two kinds of jobs (office work and housework) because that’s what my parents did. I had never considered that teachers, principals, and custodians were working. It never dawned on me that the kid who took my order at McDonald’s was working. Those were a different thing. Not “work” in the same sense as office work.

But on that drive in 1985 I had an epiphany. Work could happen anywhere. Work could happen in different places within the same day. Heck, work could happen whenever. It may sound goofy, but after my meeting with the genius librarian (whom I got along with famously, so much so that I continued to get Christmas cards for 15 years until she passed away), I went back to my office with a new perspective on what work was. After my traditional day was done, I pondered the idea that had finally made it into my head: Work is a wherever, whenever thing.

Honestly, that was the day that this concept of Work Life IMbalance was born. It just took nearly 30 years to gestate before it could become this series of blog posts.

For three decades I’ve had this knowledge, and yet I’ve also harbored a significant prejudice that has nagged me. I was raised with the 8-to-5-go-to-work-in-an-office ethos. Working was done in an office. If you weren’t in an office, you weren’t do real work. It’s stupid, but that thought continued to linger, or some would say fester. I worked at Texas Instruments for exactly five years, taking early retirement (very early, considering I hadn’t even turned 27 yet), and following my wife on her journey to become a physician, first to Wichita, KS for residency and later to Hutchinson, KS where she founded her medical practice. During that time, I have run a series of technology-related businesses, sometimes from our home, sometimes from a traditional office. I’ve struggled with keeping normal business hours, trying to start my day around 8:00am and ending around 5:00pm. Over the years, I’ve become somewhat more flexible in where I’ll work, but that 8-to-5 block always has meant work time to me. Outside that block I felt guilty working, like I was stealing family time. Inside that block, if I did something that wasn’t directly related to work, I also felt guilty. Or maybe like I was cheating the work day of it’s rightful due.

But honestly, that’s stupid. My least creative and productive time is from about 2:00pm until around 4:00pm. Quite honestly, I’d be more productive taking a nap or folding laundry or doing anything mindless than trying to actually do anything that requires thought, energy, and creativity. It’s just not the high point of my day. On the flipside, around 11:00pm and until about 2:00am I have more energy, ideas, and creativity than I know what to do with. Same goes for 6:00am until about 10:00am. I’m ready to go, locked and loaded, full of vim and vigor. But those timeframes haven’t overlapped my concept of when it’s appropriate to work, so I’ve fought against them. I’ve tried to force myself to conform to the arbitrary timeframes that I thought were when you work. I’ve also tried to shut things off at 5:00pm, because that’s when you are supposed to stop working.

So after seven weeks of writing this series, I’ve finally come to the realize that:

1. I’m an idiot
2. It’s ok to work wherever is appropriate
3. It’s ok to work whenever is appropriate

The first realization doesn’t seem to surprise anybody. The only surprise seems to be that I was the last one to know and that it’s taken so long for me to figure this out.

Working wherever is appropriate has evolved over a span of time. It started when I would take work from the office home. It grew as I had a home office, went back to a traditional office environment, and finally settled back into a home office. I’ve learned to work in hotels, airports, in the car, or wherever I can get work done. It’s taken years, but I’ve gotten somewhat more comfortable with the fact that most of my work is knowledge work and I honestly only need a computer (or table or smartphone), sometimes an internet connection, and my brain (which I try very hard to keep with me every minute of every day). Working in different places has been something I’ve allowed myself to do. Up until very recently though, I wasn’t really accepting of the fact that I could work wherever just as effectively as I could in my office. My office that I had defined as a 200 sq ft space in a single building. I’ve realized that my idea of an office without walls is not only an idea, but a reality. I can work just about anywhere.

The biggest revelation, one that seriously just crystalized in my brain within the last 48 hours, is that I need to accept, or maybe embrace the fact that I can work whenever I want to . Or whenever I need to. The entire concept of a traditional office day simply doesn’t apply to me. Sure, there are some things that I need to work on when other people are working. But I work with folks from across the U.S. Heck, I’ve worked with people in Europe, Australia, Japan, India, and South America within the past year. Their 8-to-5 doesn’t line up with my 8-to-5, at least not on the clock. But the idea of working when my brain is ready to work is what should matter. My Dad always used to say, if you can’t work effectively then you’re not doing your best work. I used to think that meant that I had to force myself to get effective at that time. But maybe the real message was, take a break and come back to this when you’re ready to work on it. When you’re ready to focus and commit. Maybe my whole series on F.C.E.C. was really a subliminal message to myself that it was OK to not work at certain times when I wasn’t ready. Let the ideas marinate. Do something that’s appropriate to my energy level and interest at the moment. But when I’m ready to work, my brain is ready to engage and my creativity is at a higher point, go after it. Get the work done…don’t depend on the clock to tell me when to work, but rather let the ebb and flow of energy and ideas happen and then catch the high-tide of that combination and get to it.

It’s funny, but that makes me feel freer than I have in a really long time. In fact, in as long as I can remember. I started this post at 6:30 this morning. I worked on it for a while. I took some breaks to do mundane things (start some laundry, sweep the floor, wash some dishes, that sort of thing). The ideas just seemed to flow, and when they stopped…I simply stopped typing. I took a break. I stretched and let my body catch up with my brain. And while I was doing the mundane things, I let my brain catch up with my body. Odd how this seems to have worked almost magically.

So, I’m formally saying goodbye to the guilt I’ve had over not working in the 8-to-5. I’m honestly thinking about having a going-away party for my guilt. Maybe something with ice cream and cake. Oh, and hats and party favors. Maybe some streamers. Something big.

Seriously, this is a big deal to me. I’m going to work when it makes sense. I’m not talking about cutting back on my work, but rather doing work when the focus and commitment will get me somewhere. I’m not going harbor guilt about when I should be working. I’m going to concentrate on working when it’s going to get me the most productivity.

And that my friends is what I learned this past week!