2021 Life/Work streams review with 6 years data points

It's that time of the year when I review my personal time keeping metrics showing how I've spent my time over the previous year. I've been doing this exercise diligently since 2015, when I created a framework for myself called "RAGE" Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations. Using ideas from software engineering and product management, I decided to map out my personal (life) and professional (work) streams across the many dimensions I was involved in (Muslim | Individual | Professional | Husband | Father | Friend | etc.). I focused on Time as the key metric to track, since time is one of the most important resource that should never be squandered. 

The idea is simple: if something is important to me, then I should be spending time in that area - but if I end up spending little or zero time on that thing, then that thing must have not been as important to me as I thought it was. 

Tracking time allows me to answer questions like: 

• Am I spending time in the areas that are important to me? 
• Which areas am I over indexing on that negatively impacts my other steams, robbing me of value?
• Am I giving each stream the necessary amount of attention?
• What decisions do I need to make when the data and anecdotes (feelings / instincts) don't match up?

Click here to check out my writings from previous years and here for an introduction to my RAGE framework for personal development tracking.

To read my 2020 review and reference my personal value system, click here.

2021 Re-starting Life & Work (again)

Driven by my personal planning through my RAGE model, 2021 was the year I hit reset. I uprooted my family and relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town in December 2020. Earlier in 2020, I'd resigned from my C-level position of a very stable and secure job - at first - to take a year long sabbatical to work out my next move. This sabbatical was short-lived due to the uncertainty of Covid-19, I felt it too risky not to secure another job in 2021. I knew one thing for sure: I was no longer interested in building video entertainment technology applications "make people watch TV" and wanted to branch out into something else either in Cloud or e-Commerce. Thankfully I landed the first job I decided to interview for in cloud computing with AWS, Cape Town. A big departure for me because I was going back to core engineering building software, something which I've not done to that level of technical detail since 2010! I was also going to start as a senior manager and not a GM/CTO. So essentially I'd walked away from a high influence, high referent and hierarchical power, entrenched credibility and track record - to starting professionally all over again, from a "big fish, small pond" to being a "tiny fish, large ocean" fella, with zero credibility. I value learning new knowledge, building new relationships and gaining new experiences as more important than positional titles. My wife and kids also left their lives behind which we'd nurtured for a decade since relocating to Johannesburg (from UK), relocating and disrupting their lives to Cape Town with me - they too, hitting reset leaving much loved friendships, community and family-support behind. 

So 2021 would bring a massive disruption to my personal, professional and family streams. Time will tell if this grand reset is working or not. So my personal time tracking data is now more important than before.

This post shares my time tracking data for 2021 compared to the previous 6-years for comparison. Resetting one's life personally and professionally is not an easy thing to do. I've learnt much about this experience that I hope to share in future posts. In terms of the key KPIs of time tracking, 2021 went as well as can be expected considering the unusual context & challenges of Covid-19. In this post I share only the data and limited insights. There's some soul-searching I've yet to do on making drastic changes to my personas, which at the time of this writing doesn't seem to be major...

With year one done, so far, so good...no major regrets although the data has shown I need to recalibrate some streams if I want to get back to previous levels of balance.

What did I spend my time on?

Since late 2015, I've tracked 21400+ data points of activities I'm engaged with on a daily basis, minute by minute, 365 days a year, tracking my personal/profession work-life balance metrics. I use Harvest app for time keeping tasks or "activities", use Excel and AWS QuickSight for analytics dashboards and Trello to capture my goals. For the period 2016-2021, I've tracked 18500 activities consuming 52000 hours of my capacity. Sleep is one activity that I see as a physical constraint, an unavoidable natural law accounts for more than a third of my time sink, followed by family-time, then professional work-time. If one were to gauge by these numbers alone, it looks like I've got a good work/life balance overall for six years and counting. Zooming in on 2021, shows ~4500 activities in ~8700 hours, accounting for an average of 12 activities per day, ~378 activities per month.

Note: Click on the images to enlarge for better viewing

Zooming out further and collapsing personas into top-level categories "Work vs Life", the picture shows I'm by no means a workaholic :-) Life >> Work. That's my value system, something that I coach all my direct reports as well. My data proves I live by those values :-)

Data doesn't lie, right? 

Yet, the anecdotes or sometimes the way I'm feeling says something else. That's why I like to look at this data to reset and ground myself. When I'm feeling overworked, stressed or borderline unhappy or not motivated by the work, I look at the data, zoom out & appreciate the bigger picture. Although 2021 was a bit of a weird work-year, for 2022, I need to go back to "sprinting" - every quarter, take breaks. Take unpaid leave if I have to - as I know that even with leave days added, I still more than make up for a full work-year anyway.

How did I slice up my time last year?

Ignoring hard constraints of sleep and rest, my profession takes up a sizeable chunk of my life. For 2021, it was expected although going into 2022, I need to figure out:

• How do I pull back my work hours to be more sustainable?
• What experiments can I try to sleep less - can I get my sleep hours down to 6.5 hours a day?

How did I track across my Personas?

Considering I disrupted my life on all fronts, I am tracking well across most dimensions if we were to zoom out of 2021 looking at the bigger picture. It's when I dive deeper that signals attention on work and family stream. Good movements on Husband, Social (out of my comfort zone), Health streams - as result took a knock on Family time.

Deep dive on 2021 Work-Hours 

2021 saw a 100% increase in my working hours compared to 2020. I was maintaining a downward trend on working hours from 2017 as I became more comfortable with stabilizing my work in my previous role. 2016 was a time when I was consulting where I was in control of my hours and chose to work a 4-day workweek. Jump to 2021, it was a year of many changes...particularly the long work-hours and time-zone challenges of working with local Cape Town teams and being available for Seattle/US times. As with all job changes, it's expected to invest more time in the early years before finding the right balance.

The pictures below clearly shows the challenges. Working long hours impacts one physically, psychologically and emotionally. If one is not too careful, this can lead to increased stress and burnout. Amazon/AWS is intense like this but I believe a reasonable work life balance or harmony can be realised once I've mastered the key constructs. Working long hours has in fact reduced my family time with the kids, something I need to improve on in 2022. 

By the way, I'm hiring...if you're interested in working with the pioneer in cloud computing, drop me note on LinkedIn.

According to these guys I've worked more hours than the average for USA for 2021 being 1757 hours. I logged 2251 hours (excluding thinking about work during off-times).

Source: Clockify

I appreciate my profession and work I do. I'm sincerely grateful for being employed. There is no doubt in my sincerity to do my best work no matter where I go, even though I may not always have fun or enjoy everyday (as a professional, I have a responsibility to show up and do my best work, regardless). I also believe there's more to life than work. I focus on not letting my working hours impacting other more important streams like health, family & overall happiness. 

Consider the heatmap below - this indicates I need to recalibrate and tune my work hours down a notch:

Wait a minute, did work-hours in 2021 bite the biggest chunk from family time?

Roughly, yes - but only because 2020 was not my normal year. I was already on a downward trend anyway, with holidays and sabbatical creating more capacity to focus more on family. 2019 is a normal year, so 2019 v 2021 is comparable, although 2021 saw an increase in other personal streams reducing family time further. 

How did my Health & Well-being track?

On an increasing trend since 2016, but not where I'd like it to be. I had some medical issues in 2021. It is still not bad because the little habits I've maintained in 2021 delivered 3X more than 2020. I remain hopeful. Strava is my tool of choice when it comes to tracking my personal fitness activities. See the year in summary below. It's nothing to brag about. I'm no fitness guru, but I'll get there soon enough!

How many hours of sleep did I get?

For as long as I can remember I've anchored on to 8 hours of sleep per 24-hour cycle. I can go with 5 hours sleep for 3-4 days consecutive days until I start feeling the side effects of lack of sleep. I am going to experiment more in 2022 to bring this time down because I think it's possible. Lack of sleep can be countered by improving one's spiritual awareness. As I improve my own spiritual mindfulness, I'd like to reach that point where physical sleep becomes less of a constraint or obstacle. Some spiritual masters say "Why sleep in this life, when you have an eternity to sleep when you're dead"! Ha haa.

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