I have a very poor work-life balance. How can I escape the grind?

Dear Tim,

Your note popped up on my screen last Monday around 23:40. I was about to shut the laptop — two fingers already on the lid — but I ended up reading the whole thing anyway (so much for a strict screen-curfew). The frustration, the exhaustion, the quiet “is this it?” — I remember that cocktail all too well.

A decade ago I could pull 70-hour weeks, fuelled by cheap espresso and whatever techno set YouTube decided to autoplay. Back then the sacrifice felt heroic; these days my back and my cardiologist disagree. Priorities migrate — slowly at first, then all at once — and somewhere along the way I realised I’d rather miss a product deadline than my kid’s bedtime. I’m still fond of deep work, just not the self-destructive variety.

You clearly care. That’s good. Just remember that visible overwork — the 2 a.m. commits, the Slack replies tagged “(sent via mobile)” — doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Teammates see the pattern and assume that’s the new baseline. One person’s hustle can quietly rewrite a whole team’s expectations, and not in a way HR will celebrate.

Hard work is necessary, but it’s never the whole equation. Luck, timing, the right champions — they all sit at the table too, whether we acknowledge them or not. So pinning your self-worth to hours logged is a losing game. (I learned this after shipping a side-project I was sure would change the world; it flopped, and the universe kept spinning.)

You floated the idea of quitting outright. Maybe. I’d nudge you to separate two things: building your own product twelve hours a day because you want to, versus staying twelve hours because someone else’s doomed migration keeps slipping. The first can feel like play; the second is textbook burnout material. I could be wrong, but most people I meet confuse the two.

The tech market does, in fact, offer roles where nobody expects weekend deploys. Think internal tooling teams, infra-heavy companies that treat uptime like oxygen, or plain old nine-to-five corporate gigs that value predictability over velocity. Yes, the comp might be 10-15% lower. In my experience, the difference evaporates once you factor in evenings that belong to you again.

Your body is already voting. I ignored mine for too long and paid for it: after roughly ten years of quasi-996 grind, my brain short-circuited. Spent three months unable to write a single line of code that wasn’t copy-paste from Stack Overflow. Not a fun chapter, but an effective teacher.

If spreadsheets don’t make the decision obvious, try a different metric: evenings with friends, mornings without alarms, hobbies that don’t involve screens. Put a notional salary on each. The math gets interesting fast.

End of the day — well, end of your day — companies will ship, merge, or pivot with or without us. Our real job is to stay functional long enough to enjoy the parts of life that won’t fit into Jira tickets.

Take care, Tim. You’re more than today’s sprint burndown.

With respect,
Vadim