Earlier tonight I was in my driveway (King of the Hill style) washing our cars with my son and wife and remarked: “We’ve got some nice s*@#’”; It got me thinking about one thing I learned the hard way that I wish I knew ahead of time. So if I were to time travel and talk to the 21 year old self this is what I’d say:

“There is no such thing in life as work-life balance. Your work is your life, your life is your work and the more you try to split who you are on arbitrary hours of selfish focus on family, friends, job, etc the more you’ll fail at everything.”

I truly believe that. And it took a lot of out-of-office clarity to realize it.

Life is not worth living if it’s managed by an accountant on a spreadsheet. Think about it. I can’t imagine how hard my wife would kick me in the balls if I walked up to her and said: “I have 1 hour set aside for the intimate stuff. Let’s go, I have a hard stop at 11 to go do some yard work.”

I have been lucky to become very successful. Yes, it took a lot of hard work and dedication of a lot of people, but it could have failed as well. I’ve also been very lucky to marry a girl that loves me, to have a healthy kid, to hire some amazing people and fire/frustrate the right ones along the way too. But one regret I do have is that I think I would have had a lot more fun along the way if I didn’t do it all so hardcore.

So Hakuna Matata, thanks to all my friends and followers that read this blog, I’m working on something I think will be very helpful to many of you and tomorrow I start asking for input, so get your knowitall vitamins and start writing to vlad@vladville.com

Effective Jun 1st, I will be taking a 2 month leave of absence from my role at Own Web Now Corp. While I will live up to my commitments on the road and webcasts that have been scheduled, I will not be in the office and my mailbox will be managed by my team.

I will be returning during the third week of July (21-25).

For those of you that may be concerned that this is a health / personal issue, thank you for your concern but that is not the case. It’s a professional issue.

Professionally, I’m very confident in the team we have at Own Web Now that can move the business forward in my absence. It’s the primary reason I am able to take time off to focus on the projects that we need to take it to that next level. The changes we’ve made in the product and with our support are growing the business faster than expected and partners are happier with what we have on the market so everyone is happy at this point to be making more money with us. So what a better time to step aside a little and help pour some kerosene on this fire in the summer?

I’m back at work today, trying to implement all the things I had a chance to think up during my vacation and I’m facing a bit of a reoccurring problem in trying to improve my staff. Once upon a time we had a book club – everyone in the business side of the house (basically all of Orlando) was required to read a book and present information they learned from the book. This could be remarkably powerful, but people bitched and moaned – so we tied it to compensation and nobody read a book since.

So today, I made it mandatory.

Here is my problem: people that work for me aren’t idiots. They could fake skimming as reading very easily.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that they were profiled and hired based on their hidden ability to run a shady used car lot. It’s my backup plan in case this computer thing doesn’t work out, I’ll just sell my car collection But that’s besides the point.

How do you get people to actually read a book, and verify that it’s getting done?

The best idea I came up with is to get daily reports on what they read. Basically, read 30 pages today and sum up what you learned and how this could be implemented to help OWN. Problems: 1) They could just skim pages in advance and just paste bits and pieces of the summary on a daily basis. 2) Since everyone is reading the same book there can be a collaborative non-proliteration (ha!) agreement where one person reads only one piece and they submit variations of the summary and its implementation in their department/role 3) Business books are mostly common sense mixed in with case studies that tend to be summarized for you anyhow so it’s easy to BS.

So how do you teach old monkeys new skills?

Have you ever had one of those days when you just wished you could push the reboot button and start it all over again? Do you see yourself working harder and harder toward something with rapidly diminishing benefits and are at this point in it just to see it done and gone? More and more of us in IT are facing spending cuts, job cuts – this is all about what you can do not to let yourself down.

The RMT Concept

The Reverse Midas Touch is a popular concept at OWN.

“Everything you touch turns to shit.”

It happens to the best of us. Sometimes things just don’t go right. Maybe two servers you touched both went up in flames. Maybe your last two client followup calls resulted in them making you feel like a fool. You are afraid to touch another thing today.

There are multiple ways to deal with this:

a) Cloaking – Just stop working. Open up a web site and veg out. Keep the portal open in the other window so it looks like you’re working.

b) Teleportation – Leave the office “to visit a client” and spend the lunch at a bar.

c) Shields up – Reject all human contact, appear to be super busy while avoiding others.

I know people who have turned to alcohol, even drugs. I know folks that just go home, bar, IT conference, favorite client retreat and generally everything but the one thing they should be doing – work.

Multitasking Meets Score Padding

The reason most IT folks get depressed at work is rooted in the fact that we all multitask. When you are spinning 10 plates and two of them fall on the ground and break you feel bad. Then another. And another. It starts to feel like you are walking around crushed porcelain that is your workday because a few things didn’t go your way. You feel like a loser.

Successful people don’t think like this. Successful people are goal oriented and even though they multitask, they do so for the purpose of accomplishing more – faster. They also partition out their day, manage their calendar and time, track their commitments and deliverables. What happens when they start to feel the case of RMT coming on? They work on something else.

This concept of score padding is designed to make you feel better. If you are dealing with a remarkably difficult task that isn’t due today and you are starting to get down about it – work on something else that needs to be done. Knock out the easy stuff. You know that there are 50 things you need to do, you aren’t going to quit, go drinking, leave office or browse the web aimlessly for hours just because you can’t complete tasks 3/50 and 4/50, are you?

Surprisingly enough, most people do not practice making themselves happy by getting more stuff done, they let little things along the way depress them and keep them from accomplishing all their goals.

Work on different projects. Skip around. Get stuff done. Just don’t take your eyes off the ball or quit.