Confessions of a Workaholic
What work-life balance means to a workaholic?
I took that photo when I rented a cottage and the view after a decent workday remotely last year in 2021. It took a short two decades to realize that being a workaholic is not necessarily the best thing.
One thing to make clear, being a workaholic myself over the years and writing this post does not mean that I encourage having a modern-day hustle culture in your company. IMO the modern-day version of hustle culture is toxic.
At different times in my professional life, I push my limits and work extra hours to get more things done. There was a period when I was working as a full-time technical lead on two platform projects concurrently. My timesheet was about 92-100 hours/week for 5–6 weeks. And as the CTO at one of the startups, I worked about 80+ hours a week for two years on average. It was all for reasons related to various professional advancements, self-fulfillment, or protecting my team's health reasons. And sometimes, when I did overtime, is because my team didn’t have to.
As an immigrant in Canada, one has to work twice as hard to get half as far. And sometimes, one can work ten times as hard and still hit a bamboo ceiling.
Work and professional life are essentially a marathon, not a sprint. Work-life balance…
