46 – Work-life Balance – high intensity jobs, how to get performance right vs the “other stuff”, including your own physical and mental health

Is work-life balance attainable or is it a “mythical creature”? What can one do to extract top professional performance while not endangering one’s personal life and hers/his/theirs physical and mental health? We will discuss how much is too much, the big axes of “life”, whether work-life balance is possible, differences between geographies and will, as always, share our own “hacks” and key “systems”.Navigation:Intro (01:34)How much is too much? (01:59)The big axis: family (21:35)The other axis: friends, hobbies, spirituality, etc (30:27)Is work-life balance possible? (39:05)Differences between geographies (56:24)Bring it all together (61:57)Conclusion (63:43) Our co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves PedroWelcome to Episode 46 of Tech DECIPHERED. In this episode, we will discuss the lifelong exercise of work-life balance and whether it is possible. We will discuss mental health, physical health, how much is too much, whether it's actually possible to attain work-life balance, and as always, we will share some of our own hacks and principles. Bertrand, how much is too much?Bertrand SchmittThat's the question. I'm a serious believer that it depends also of which stage are you in your life. Which period in your life are you? Are you still quite young with a lot of energy? Are you a single parent with kids? I think depending on the stage in life, you won't physically have the same time available to devote to work. That will have an impact on your ability to work and how much you can execute and that can put pressure, obviously, to your capacity to endure.Bertrand SchmittAt the same time, obviously, if you're in your 20s, you should probably have way more time to do a lot, to learn a lot, to try to achieve a lot. You might be able to endure it much more easily than if you were in your 40s, for instance.Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe we start with a disclaimer. Obviously, all opinions we're going to share today—we're not psychologists, we're not trained psychiatrists, we're not MDs—it's our views and based on experience we've had from managing people, our own lives, interacting with many different players at various different levels of seniority. Hopefully, it is not just anecdotal, but again, we are not trained physicians, MDs, et cetera, so take this obviously with a grain of salt.Nuno Goncalves PedroTo your point, I fully agree. There is a stage of life, and it's a bit more granular, I believe, than that. It might be that once you're joining a specific company, specific organisation at a specific time, you're going very aggressively to fit into the organisation, to understand how everything works, to balance yourself and how you interact with other people and learn a new set of skills. It might be two years in that your role and job might be a bit different if you're more in corporate life.Nuno Goncalves PedroIn startup life, as you know, it doesn't seem to go away, certainly in the first four or five years of the company. Venture capital is also an activity that classically, I think, if done properly, if done with love and with gusto and with passion, it's an activity that is very encompassing. I always make the joke, I don't suffer from ADHD, I enjoy every minute of it, which probably makes sense.Nuno Goncalves PedroI fully agree with you. How much is too much? How do you know? There's the obvious warning signs, and normally the obvious warning signs are actually not internal. We're very poor at taking our own internal signals; sleeping badly and a few other things that we'll come back in a second.Nuno Goncalves PedroPay attention to people around you, in particular people that you respect and that have your best interests at heart. It might be family members, might be friends, it might be colleagues, it might be your boss.Nuno Goncalves PedroIf you have a boss that is thoughtful about your time, listen to them. If they're saying, "It seems that you're not taking enough vacation. It seems like you're not really taking time during the week to do other things. It seems like you have no other hobbies. You seem a bit glum, or a little bit depressed, or a little bit sad," take it to heart. If someone has told you that, always remember they've probably been thinking about it for a long time. For them to tell you this, it's already served something that's been going on. Then meditate on it, think about it, and step a little bit back. The external warning signs for me would be the first way to start.Bertrand SchmittYes, that's a fair point. What you can see from outside typically could be sign of being tired. People can see you are tired, you are barely awake, or you are too stressed out and you might be lashing out at people as a result. There are a lot of signs that others can see that you might not see that are signs that something is going wrong.Nuno Goncalves PedroYes. Then to your point, Bertrand, there are some internal signals. If you're tired, you know you're tired. If you're sighing during the day in the middle of a meeting that should otherwise be hopefully fun… Maybe not all meetings are fun, we know that for a fact. But if you're sighing at the wrong moment of the day, maybe you should get more sleep. It might be a one-off, it might be it happened that week and you're on a business trip and you're just very tired. But take those signals to heart if they start happening very, very repeatedly.Nuno Goncalves PedroSleep deprivation is a big, big thing. Sleeping well, making sure that you align yourself with your own clocks. I know some magical human beings who can sleep 4-5 hours a day. I'm not that person. I need 7-8 hours. Every single time that I'm a long period of time sleeping below 7 hours, I notice it and I can withstand it. I could do a week of 4-5 hours, but immediately I know by the end of the week I'm really, really tired. I've really not been able to create the space for my brain to fully rest, et cetera.Nuno Goncalves PedroAlthough this will depend from person to person, take attention to your sleep. That's the beginning and end of almost everything. If you sleep poorly, we'll share some hacks later on. But maybe it's time to do a sleep study to think through how do you get better sleep, go to bed earlier, eliminate all these inputs from things around you. Again, we'll go back to hacks later. I don't want to dive too much into it right now, but there's definitely a lot of things around it. When we talked about being tired, not sleeping enough, you mentioned being snappy and aggressive.Bertrand SchmittMaybe on the sleeping part, I noticed clearly, at least these days, less than 6 hours in a row, it's definitely not good for me. I know that 7 hours, safe bet, but less than six, definitely danger zone.Bertrand SchmittI always point back people to a study from the US Navy a long time ago. Basically, they were trying to assess how pilots were effective and how much sleep they needed to be effective. In that study, there was a very clear line that 4 hours and a half of sleep was the absolute bare minimum for a human being to basically be able to do his activity in a proper way. I'm always highlighting that to people. Never go there. Never go there because you cannot sustain it and it's proven.Nuno Goncalves PedroWe've had all these experiences probably in college when we were doing all-nighters to study for stuff, et cetera. Your brain isn't quite as capable afterwards. I remember when I was at McKinsey, I think I was relatively beloved as a leader because of that, because I always made a point of making sure that people…Nuno Goncalves PedroWe work very hard, we work very long hours. But working 90-100-hour weeks, the whole banking thing, some of the top-end management consulting when projects are very short or engagements are very short, doesn't work. We all know this for a fact. Your brain isn't as capable. Halfway through the week, your brain isn't as capable the next day. Creating space for people to actually rest and do other things that are not work is vital. It's actually a characteristic of performance. Ninety to 100 hours generates worse performance.Bertrand SchmittYes, you can do so much with just only 80 hours a week.Nuno Goncalves PedroYou're joking, but some people think like that.Bertrand SchmittI'm joking. But I know I had period in my life where I had to be 80 to potentially 90 plus hours a week. I think it can be sustainable over a one month period if you really have no other choice. But my point would be that it better be worth it. I would say a lot of engagements from my perspective don't qualify. It has to be for more important reason, and I think at 80 should probably be the limit.Nuno Goncalves PedroMy extreme, this was back in my days at Deloitte Consulting, I think we pulled… There was one particular project where we were probably three to three months-and-a-half in hardcore 90-100 hours modes-Bertrand SchmittOh wow.Nuno Goncalves Pedro-and that was just very telling. It was telling to me. It was telling about the whole team. There were stupid mistakes happening all the time, issues in the modeling. The project, in the end, went extremely well and it turned into a project that was a little bit calmer after that. This ended up being a one-year project. But those first three to three-and-a-half months just illustrated to me how incompetent we may become once we really don't have sleep, rest, good food,...