In the beginning.....

It was 2 years ago (I was not married then) when my married friends used to always complain about not having enough time to spend with their family due to the pressures at office. I was oblivious to all this and i considered it as an excuse for not attending the late evening parties that were held during that time. I used to mock them and make fun of them but little did i know that all that will come back to me when i get married.
I used to be a workaholic and i used to enjoy staying back in office and working in peace, alone, as i had no one to go back to (I was staying alone in Bangalore, family in Pune) so nothing better to do even if i reached home late. The pressures at work were not so great and i was able to manage things because there was nothing else to "balance". Those were the carefree days when i was open to everything my boss threw at me and i took it as a challenge to complete anything he gave me before time, even if it meant working those extra hours.
When i look back at those times i feel that life has taken a U turn and i am a completely different person altogether. I got married over a year ago and had the most difficult time of managing or should i say "balancing" both work and personal life. There were demands from both ends and i was torn between the devil and the deep sea. Actually i feel that there should be certification courses for managing the Work-Life Balance; it is so damn difficult to do it. You are confronted with 2 bosses - one at work and one at home, so there is no escape from both. The "paying boss" expects you to work in the same way as you were working earlier and keeps giving the same levels of workloads and the "spending boss" expects you to leave office in time even if your job is incomplete.
The biggest challenge for any newly married guy is to come in terms with answering to 2 bosses everyday of his life. Consider this, your boss gives you the most important assignment on the same day when you have promised to take your wife out for dinner or a movie and unluckily, you are the only person who can do this job. For this you will have to stay back or the job cannot be completed.Now which boss will you satisfy?? Dilemmas such as this are commonplace in the lives of all married men (i can now sympathize with them all) and lead to a lot of problems with their health. No wonder offices have "Health Check Up Camps" for monitoring the different diseases that an employee possesses and when these diseases reach a level where the employee is incapable of taking stress, he is quietly asked to go.

Who gains in this tug of war,you ask?? I do not know who gains, but i surely know who looses.

Effective management of Work-Life balance forms the most important aspect of survival in today's world. Another more important viewpoint that needs to be considered is of Time Management. A person who can manage time can manage his life; but a person who lets other people manage his time ruins his life.
I know of people who have absolutely no sense of time management and are the most miserable. They have a constant complain that there is not enough time to do anything. Their health is deteriorating or their life is in tatters, but they still cannot get to the root of the problem of managing their time effectively.

My advice is to begin with identifying and prioritizing events and relationships in your life. Once you know who is important, the job relatively becomes simpler. You tend to "create" time for them and even though it is nearly impossible to please everyone, you end up doing quite well. At home or at work, depending on your priority, jobs become much easier as you are more focused. I do not say that you will come out with flying colors from both the locations, but i do say that slowly your schedule of work, your priorities and your dedication will start getting accepted by everyone at both locations. You will feel that there is less pressure from both sides and there is breathing space that you always wanted. Yes, but this will cut your time that you wile away in front of your PCs chatting or posting messages in facebook or orkut, this you have to choose.

This post is an introduction of how one can manage life at both levels and not die early due to diseases caused by stresses and incapability of pleasing everyone. Over the days I will highlight how my life has changed over the past year by describing incidents relevant to the said topic. This blog is an attempt to help those poor creatures called married men who balance on a thin wire to survive the attrocities incurred upon by both their bosses.

Until next time...