A One-Pot Life
Last week, I mentioned this quote from Essentialism:
“Imagine a four burner stove…. One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. In order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”
A friend replied:
“My answer to cutting off burners.... Cut off 3 of the 4 and make a one pot meal—like chili! You can put all the ingredients in for a healthy, hot meal—you just have to be ok with only 1 course, a bowl, and a spoon.”
In other words: design the meal so that you don’t have to choose between the burners. This totally resonates with a framework that’s been in my mind, but I haven’t written it down until now.
While choice is the ultimate productivity hack, we can find loads of optimization opportunities when we proactively design to minimize the conflicts in our lives.
Some examples:
Strategy 1A: Making your job feel like play
The majority of work-life balance complaints I hear come in one of two flavors. The first is: “I like my job, but it demands more time and attention than my family would want me to give it.” That’s tough, but it ultimately resolves as a choice issue.
The second flavor is more nuanced: “The hour-to-hour reality of my job just isn’t that enjoyable, so I’m constantly aware of how much I’d rather be doing something else.” Hence, it’s not about the hours—it’s about the emotional drag.
If that’s the case, part of the solution is to shift our activities to those that we authentically enjoy. In a recent newsletter from James Clear (the author of Atomic Habits), he posed a really good question to help think about what this could be: “What are you working on when time fades away?”
Doing more of whatever the answer is might be the key to reducing our work-life conflicts.
Similarly, a business executive recently mentioned to me that he found more enjoyment from work by implementing the following strategy:
Mapping which people in his work life were energy boosters and which were energy drains
Spending more time with the former
Spending way less time with the latter
He didn’t change his work. He just made the work more rewarding.
Of course, that’s only a partial solution, but the goal is to mitigate the stress and emotional burden that comes from having an ongoing structural conflict between what we have to do and what we want to do.
Strategy 1B: Not consuming a lifestyle that requires unpleasant work
Back in the day, I hosted a dinner party in which we asked some older couples to explain how they approached their finances within the larger framework of their lives.
One of the men described his family’s strategy in a way that really stuck with me. To paraphrase what he said, “We always wanted to live in the cheapest house in the best public school district—because if we had to pay for private school, the kind of job I would need to afford it would be so demanding that I’d never get to see our kids.”
In other words, he proactively eliminated a structural conflict.
Strategy 2: Removing the “chore” from household chores
As an introvert, the hardest part of having kids is that there’s always someone talking to me. My kids have yet to figure out that they can do literally anything they want as long as they leave me alone.
Or put another way, there’s a conflict between my family’s needs and my personal needs.
But that’s precisely why I volunteer for household chores (a) that I don’t mind doing and (b) that provide a justification for having alone time.
“I’ll need 4 hours this weekend to do the taxes.”
“Sure, I’ll go to the grocery store to pick up milk.”
“I’ll be back in 10 minutes; I think the sidewalk needs to be shoveled.”
(Of course, some of this is just a placeholder until my kids are old enough to do the chores themselves. “Don’t talk to me until you’ve shoveled the sidewalk.”)
When I’ve occasionally surveyed others about how they organize their household, one thing that comes up is that many of us get lost in the constant stream of activity in our lives. We’re always doing stuff because there’s always something we have to do.
And because of that, we sometimes fail to design our approach in a way that makes what we have to do become (or feel like) what we want to do. We let it feel like a conflict when it doesn’t have to be.
Strategy 3: Manipulating your kids into liking your hobbies
I’ll just say it—my kids are into some lame stuff. They like to read these children’s books, even though the character and plot development in most of them is wanting. And whenever they demand “Watch me!”, it’s always the least impressive trick they’ve been practicing.
Hence, it would be an awesome two-fer to train them to like my hobbies and physical activities. That would enable me to one-pot my parent time and my personal time. Everyone wins!
Request: I’m looking for tips on how to do this successfully. The only thing I’ve come up with is to throw (soft) items at the kids to start developing their athletic skills and love of sports. Unfortunately, the toddler usually just lets the pillow hit him in the face and giggles.
Surely there are more strategies like this—and surely more serious ones!—but this is about reducing the temporal and emotional conflicts we have by making the various parts of our lives work better together.
The start of that line of thinking came from the first time I did the Life Design Assessment from Designing Your Life. The assessment prompts you to rate how you’re doing on Health, Work, Play, and Love. It raised this question in my mind: What activities would boost multiple dimensions at the same time?
LeBron James doing a workout with his kids comes to mind as the center of the Venn diagram.
So I guess the question is: How can we be like LeBron?