Work Life Balance and SEO (and the magic of the online world)

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Wednesday, 04 May 2011 23:14

Published on Wednesday, 04 May 2011 23:14

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I know the moment I start to talk about the work/life thingy and how you should balance it all on the tip of a spoon while standing on a rubber ball you’re going to sigh and tell me about not taking my own medicine.

So let’s do the come clean on a confession streak. Monday to Friday are days of the week with 24 equal segments for doing work in (choose the ones which suit your needs or inclination). Saturday is a day of rest. Sunday…? (need we talk about Sunday)?

That’s how things work in the offline world where you pick eight segments in a day to work for someone else and then try to fill all the rest with the things you need/have/want to do. Filling the available segments becomes infinitely easier if you do not have any of the following:

• Kids
• An employer
• A wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend
• Pets (notice the plural)

Each of the above has the capacity to easily fill eight segments of each day on its own so the moment you subscribe to more than three you start running out of hours in the day.

It kind of makes sense so far, right? I mean looked at like this filling your day seems kinda easy and makes those who fuss about the whole work/life balance seem a little loony.

What’s that got to do with SEO you will ask? Plenty if you happen to A. Be working for yourself and B. Are passionate about the web and what it allows you to do.

This is where things get tricky. If you are working for yourself my guess is that you are doing something you like which means you are passionate about it anyway. If A and B coincide (and in my experience they usually do) then drawing segments and limiting what you want to do becomes infinitely harder.

Reigning in your passion when it is your life in the name of work/life balance begins to then look like a little bit like an exercise in masochism. I wrote a post a while back about work feeling more like play and I had 92 emails from people who felt that, that was them.

If you work online your ‘window’ is to a world where work, knowledge, experience and distractions are equally interchangeable and where your hobby can soon turn into work, where work feels like a hobby and where what distracts you one moment, the next becomes the bedrock of trivia and knowledge you use to build up some business, close a deal, forge a new contact or discover a new business opportunity.

In this world it becomes as hard to keep segments of the day separated for ‘work’ and ‘play’ as it is to keep different ‘workdays’ and ‘weekend’. When your ‘work’ and ‘play’ begin to all feel like ‘life’ then it any talk of a balance becomes a little irrelevant. What does become relevant, in this case, is whether you are having fun or not.

This is enjoyment in a different scale from the normal party fun. If you enjoy the work you do online and enjoy the challenges and you get to even feel good about the ‘bad’ days when things do not go quite according to plan (happens in every business) and you have to scramble to recover, then you are on the right track in terms of achieving what you want to.

If this describes you. If, indeed, you find yourself spending a ten-hour day glued to your screen and wishing you could do so for another ten hours just to get through half of your ‘To Do’ list then you are part of the new order of netizens for whom traditional ‘work’ like traditional ‘play’ do not really exist.

What counts instead is a sense of satisfaction in work achieved, goals attained, new targets set and a feeling that life is both different and more fulfilling.

Learn More About David

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