Work/Life Balance: Set It and Forget It! by Niall Campbell

Our first article focused on “work”— how you can cut away the fat and make work meaningful; the second focused on “life” and helped you orient yourself to the things you’d want to do if you stopped giving two hoots about what other people thought. Only once you have your head around these two considerations can you start to think about balancing them. In other words, don’t worry about the fulcrum until you know the weights that are going on either side of the seesaw.

On some level, writing about this topic feels like writing about unicorns or the Loch Ness monster—a fun jaunt into the discussion of something as fictional as it is elusive.

There are plenty of people who will give explicit instructions on how to calibrate your work and life to achieve their promise of nirvana. They’re giving you excellent directions to a mirage.

Work/life balance is impossible. I don’t mean that to be pessimistic—actually, I think of it as quite a freeing statement; it gives you permission to stop pointlessly striving for what ultimately is an infinite regress. You’ll never get around to doing all the things you want to do in both your professional and personal lives; the best you can hope to do is prioritise the things that are important to you and your family and keep moving toward those. That’s a life well lived, in my opinion.

How do you keep moving forward? How do you balance all the things you have to do, to create the space to do the things you want to do?

Automate the humdrum
An inordinate number of tasks you do every day are repetitive and brainless, but we still do them. They sap our energy and prevent us from really engaging in the things that give our lives meaning.

My good friend who runs a successful small business works an average of less than three hours a day.

One of his central philosophies is this, “If you’re going to do it more than once, automate it.” His religious observance of this doctrine is, in his opinion, what frees up his time and allows him to live a life of leisure while still making a nice profit.

If you take one thing away from this article, it should be that we’re surrounded by software programs, machines and computational devices that leave us in the dust in terms of competence in many areas.

There are lots of “digital slaves,” so make hay while the sun shines and put them to task!

Listed below are a few easy wins, which will allow you to dip your toes in the water of automating the humdrum.

Sleep
We prattle on about sleep hygiene to our patients, but often we don’t take our own advice. One of the low-hanging fruits is ridding your evenings of the type of blue light that’s is pumped out from the screens of your devices into the wee hours. The free app F.lux gradually removes the blue light from your screens, meaning that your brain shuts down more naturally at night.

Creativity
The world of freelance talent has been exponentially improved by the international connectivity of the modern internet, and this industry is mature enough that certain standards of professionalism are met by a great many service providers. Websites like Fiverr, 99 designs and Upwork offer competitive rates for a host of creative content provision.

At the very least, run some of your projects past a few freelancers. You might find that the eye-watering quote that your digital marketing company gave you (to, say, design a new logo or write some basic copy for a website) turns into a much smaller sum when you cut out the middleman.

Learning
Who has time to sit down and read a book these days—are you kidding? No matter, in my opinion.

Over the millennia, our prefrontal cortices primarily developed not through reading from a page but rather from making “ugh, ugh” Neolithic noises at each other around the campfires. From an evolutionary perspective, we’re still an aural species first and foremost, and that’s actually awesome. I’ve found that I can smash through a book on Audible while I cycle to work, or listen to a podcast lecture on marketing or psychology while I’m at the gym or cooking. I was sceptical about this at first, but I’m convinced that I retain and comprehend more this way than I ever did from reading, probably because I’m tapping into a deeper evolutionary skillset. Persevering with switching over to primarily consuming information through my ears and not my eyes, has opened up hours of the day where I can be learning while I’m doing other things.

Home automation
The gold standard of convenience used to be “at the touch of the button” In the future, it will be “at the sound of a diphthong.” Smart home devices with built-in microphones aren’t new, but they’re getting better and more affordable all the time.

Turning on alarms, presetting the lights to dim just so, playing music at the perfect volume, arming your home’s security, setting the temperature in each room—the list of what these little home hubs can do is staggering, and it just keeps getting bigger. In my opinion, the best one on the market right now is the Google Home hub.

Groceries
I despise going to the supermarket. If you enjoy it, good for you, but it seems like a time vampire to me. Having studied psychology, I also know how incredibly sophisticated the stores’ environmental manipulation is, and I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that some supermarkets essentially subconsciously outsmart almost every customer into making one or two additional purchases they didn’t intend on buying during every store visit.

So, make a cup of tea, sit down with your partner or whoever you share the shopping duties with, and make a generic weekly shopping list on one of the grocery chains online stores.

Email
Within your practice, you send the same email messages over and over again. Think how much time a good CRM system saves both you and your front desk. Are you doing this in your personal life and with your personal email?

Canned responses in Gmail is an awesome suite of add-ons that allows you to quickly create responses and messages to people in a way that will keep you at Inbox Zero.

The program Boomerang is also very handy for scheduling emails.

These two apps, when used in conjunction, can allow you to properly batch personal emails, and have them feel authentic and way less “spammy.” They’re also brainless to use, so there’s no up-skilling required. And remember: Nobody lies on his death bed and says, “I wish I’d spent more time in my inbox.”

So the take-home here is: Set it and forget it, and get on with finding what makes your work—and your life—meaningful.

Dr Niall Campbell, BDS MFDS Dip. Clin Hyp PG Dip Psych, qualified from Queens University dental school in Belfast. After working in private dental practice in Scotland, he moved to Perth, Western Australia, where he developed his interest in the treatment of anxious dental patients and hypnosis. Campbell also worked in a private psychotherapy and clinical hypnotherapy consulting firm, offering consulting services to businesses and individuals. He was also the host of the MENtality podcast, which interviewed thought leaders, entrepreneurs and mental health professionals to help destigmatise men’s mental health issues. Campbell holds a postgraduate degree in psychology from Monash University, and in recent years has worked as head of communications at private drug rehabilitation resort in Asia. He currently works in a clinical and consumer engagement role at Headspace in Australia.