On Work and Life

My wife had been nudging me for a while now to take some time off from work — and 3 weeks ago it finally happened. We went to Italy and I did zero work for a whole two weeks.

I asked her whether our two weeks of vacation felt vastly different to her, given that it was my first real vacation since we met in 2018.

Her answer: not really.

She said: "You basically do the same things you usually do. You basically read a lot and then sure, for the first half of the day you don't work and we can go to places and drive around with a scooter and explore, but even before, you always took the time out of your day to do things with me even during the week when you were working."

It somehow made me very happy to hear. It validated something: The vacation somehow didn't feel "extraordinary" to me. Not in a bad way. Yes, I enjoyed it very much and we got to see some new places, eat amazing food, swim in the Mediterranean, etc. — but it wasn't this big event that scratched some big itch.

It's one thing I've been trying to work towards and am still further working towards:

I don't like the idea of workweek and weekend. The idea that for 5 days of the week, you work all day and then maybe have dinner, watch a Netflix show, and go to bed. And then during the weekend, you do the fun stuff: meet friends, read books, explore new places, try new stuff.

So even during the "workweek", I try not to treat each day too much like a workday.

Maybe I have a coffee and read a book until 11am, 12pm and only then start working. Maybe I stop working at 3pm and go to a show or go to a new neighborhood to explore. Maybe I skip work on Tuesday because I wanna do a day trip with my wife. Maybe I work half the day on Project 33 and the other half on a side-project, like my app or book club.

It took me roughly 3 years to get the company to a point where this setup is working, but I always had this as a goal and was step-by-step making progress towards it.

There will always be emergencies where I'll have to jump-in and work long days and abandon side-projects and hobbies for some time, but life's too short and there are way too many things I'm interested in to only focus on one thing.