Work-Life Balance

Transcript

2014-04-29 Quantified Self Toronto - Work-life balance - Laurie Dillon-Schalk

I will explain my three words, I am a twin so I’ve always had a control sample. And I’ve always been compared to something else. I’ve always had a source of data for myself and a source of data for my identical twin.

I am in advertising, which means I track all of my billable hours about and you will find this quite interesting is how I use that information to sort of chartered my own work-life balance, and then of course, the strategy and thinking around that.

I also learn by doing, which is why I put myself up on here.

So work-life balance, I went from one agency to another, same salary, lateral move, but I negotiated four days instead of five, so technically that actually (unclear 01:02), right.

And so what was important to me because I had two kids, too adorable children. It’s really important for me to understand the cost of what my time is. So if I’m going to give a day up, and potentially is easy because I moved with the same salary to the new place the cost wasn’t huge. But what is that the cost of going to the fifth day, so that was what I was examining.

I had about eight months of data at my new company that Alex and I work at, so new agency. And we have to report all of our billable hours. So I have a lot more data than I need, I have you know how I spend my time, the patterns through the week etc. but really, all I needed to know the bulk time compared to what I was being paid.

So I managed to export all my billable information to myself, which is interesting. Having been to SXSW and attended a lot of analytic conferences, most people come down to Excel, which is a stats program and found interesting because I’m always exporting to Excel.

So in Excel I sort of just tried it out, and my greatest visualization was my yellow highlighter. I can be a lot more sophisticated than that. But that was, I was only really presenting to myself. So then I had to analyze the insets.

So, to step back and sort of talk about what I do during the day, my day job is as a digital strategist. So I am constantly helping clients understand how to make sense of data or how to monetize their site or how to optimize their conversions and stuff like that.

So, Alex and I are sort of really in the throes of big data, which really is just such a name for structured stuff, and it’s really not quantitative, it’s really qualitative. But the point I’m trying to make or eventually get to is I find it interesting when you have a lot of data, and you have to really control yourself at how close you consider that it right. So I really needed to wait 6 to 8 months or else I was going to be too close to my data and I would see the patterns. So by pulling back, I could see the patterns.

So what did I learn? I learned that in the four days I was working 50 hours. I learned that I wasn’t being paid for 20 hours a week because four days a week is roughly 32 hours. I learned that I worked so hard on Monday to Thursday to protect my Friday, that there was sort of like – it was really imbalanced. So my work-life balance actually went reverse.

I also realized that when I spend time with my kids on the Friday, although I enjoy it’s also working basically right. So I substituted one form of work for another form of work. So I was working 50 hours a week and working like eight hours and that was really long hours and not getting paid for it, so it was cool.

Of course, when I re-negotiated my contract I transferred the same salary. I also negotiated that I was paid on the four-day and not on the five-day. It was a little small (contract? 04:46) that I did before accepting and because if you work for days a week (unclear 04:55).

So I moved to 5 and I also have this clause in my contract that says if it doesn’t work for me. I have a months notice to give them, and if it doesn’t work for the company they have a months notice to give to me. So, for it I figure that out before I signed the contract.

So I ended up going five days a week and I work five days a week now and I work less and paid for more. So there is you know how I use my data for little personal experiences for Quantified Self.