Grinding My Way to Work-Life Balance

Nobody's Work-Life Balance Is the Same

Hey everyone, today’s post will be from a guest writer, Ryan Peterman. He was promoted from Junior to Staff in an amazing 3 years at Instagram. 

Today, he’ll be sharing his story about discovering his personal work-life balance. His unconventional perspective should give you something to think about for your own work-life balance.

For more from Ryan, I recommend you check out his free weekly newsletter and LinkedIn. From this point on, here’s Ryan:

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Maximizing my time has always been a big part of who I am. When I choose something to watch, I need to make sure that it won’t be a waste of my time. I read a ton of reviews and spoke to many people to make sure that investing my time into the series, Breaking Bad, was worth it (it was). 

I just got back from a trip to Honduras and was pleased with myself because I scheduled 12 SCUBA dives in a week to achieve several diving certifications. For some, packing their vacation schedule to the gills would be the opposite of what you should do on vacation. For me, this is my version of relaxation.

A few years ago, there was an unprecedented change in how we all worked. Due to the pandemic, we were all forced to stay at home indefinitely. I started to feel uneasy because I felt like I was forced to watch a show that I didn’t choose.

I realized that there was one place where I could still maximize my time. Work.

I figured spending even more time working from home was the best way to use my time. If I could get promoted during the pandemic, then I’d have something to show for all this free time I had. And of course, I could batch all my travel later when restrictions were lifted.  

So I decided to focus almost all my time on getting promoted because I wanted to make use of my time. 

What was unusual, was that even though I was working nearly all my waking hours, I still felt that I had achieved a work-life balance. What I’ve come to learn is that “work-life balance” is highly personal. It varies based on your circumstances and there’s no one-size-fits-all definition.

Enjoying the Work

Right before the pandemic, my tech lead came to my desk and asked me to open up Instagram. He recorded a video message and hit send. We both waited in silence for what felt like an eternity before it finally arrived. It was obvious we needed to change things because of how painfully slow it was. So we set a goal to cut the send latency of Instagram’s media messages in half. This goal was ambitious enough that we had to rethink a lot of assumptions in our pipeline. The goal was already intrinsically motivating to me, but also the work forced us to come up with many creative technical solutions that I enjoyed too.

I worked hard towards our team’s goal. Week after week we landed projects that cut down the latency of media messages. There were several projects I worked on that required me to lead a few engineers along the way. This was a natural opportunity for me to demonstrate Senior engineer behaviors. When we finally hit the goal I had both the impact and a track record of leadership of a Senior engineer. This was the basis of my promotion, which took 12 months from my previous promotion. 

Through this process, I realized I was able to do a ton of work and still feel balanced because I was excited about it and got fulfillment out of achieving my career goals. What excited me was:

• Impactful work - Imagining how much faster the app would be after our work was motivating.

• Novel technical challenges - Rethinking our messaging pipeline was a lot of fun because it required creative, novel solutions.

• Ambitious goals - Cutting the latency in half felt ambitious since it was so much bigger than other goals I’d seen in the space.

I got lucky to work on something I was excited about for multiple reasons. 

If you find yourself working on something you aren’t interested in, don’t settle. 

How do you find work that energizes you? It is different for everyone but the high level is that you need to try a breadth of things to see what you enjoy. It’s a personal journey–no one can find what you enjoy but you.

If you aren’t in love with your current project, try to save some of your time (~20% is a good rule of thumb) to explore new ideas that you’re interested in that can be impactful. The best way to set aside that time is to audit what you spend your time on and what the outcomes will be. Deprioritize the bottom 20% of work that has the lowest return on time investment.

If that doesn’t work there’s always the option to interview around, either to internal teams or to new companies. Interviewing is a ton of work, but no one said it’d be easy to find work you’re excited about.

Prioritizing Health

In the process of what others would call grinding for my promotion, there were some days when I’d stay up late into the night because I was excited to get something done. Although I enjoyed that work, I couldn’t ignore the effect it had on my body the next day.

I realized that even though I felt like I had a work-life balance, working all of my waking hours had a physical downside. While mentally I felt fine, being hunched over my computer all day wasn’t sustainable for my physical health. Late nights took days to recover from. Something had to change.

The biggest thing that got me back on track was establishing a healthy routine. My roommates and I bought some gym equipment during the pandemic and put it in our backyard. It became an unconscious part of my daily routine to go to the back and exercise right after waking up. Because of that, I hit my goal of 2 plates on the bench and was even more productive at work because I was healthier.

What I’ve come to learn is that finding work-life balance is a deeply personal journey. 

Many would say that my work grind wasn’t balanced at all, and they’d be right if it was for their life. For me, working on something I was excited about for many hours made me feel balanced rather than working less. This mentality later set me up for success in my Staff promotion because I found some more work I was also excited about that was even bigger in scope. 

This can change throughout your career as well. A few years after my Staff promotion, I hit my 5-year mark at Meta and received my month-long vacation called a “recharge”. At the same time, pandemic travel restrictions were finally lifted. I took the opportunity to take two months off and do all that batched travel I had planned, which included trips to Japan, Greece, Turkey, France and Germany. This gave me balance even though just a few years earlier I wouldn’t have felt the same. 

Best of luck in finding balance for yourself and I hope this article helped add some useful perspective for your own career planning.

Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman